I and others at this site have written much about recent human evolution, with a particular emphasis on papers that have used large-scale genotyping data on individuals from diverse populations to make inferences about regions of the genome that appear to be under natural selection. The sources of information used by these papers vary, and […]

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I’ve been blogging the HERC2/OCA2 story a fair amount. It seems this genomic region is the locus of main effect for variation of eye color in Europeans, in particular blue vs. non-blue eyes. But I also pointed out that this locus has also been connected to variation in skin color, and while that variation is […]

Via Andrew Gelman, check out the Social Explorer geographic interface for distributions of religious denominations and all the major census data parameters. One gripe, I do notice that their prices aren’t public. I assume that this is because they negotiate different price points for different subscribers, so it must be really spendy to justify the […]

The story about HERC2 & OCA2 is getting a lot of press; that is, the genetics behind how people have blue eyes. But see this in ScienceNow: There are still large questions, though. Why did blue eyes persist? Scientists say it is difficult to see how eye color would have an environmental advantage, as skin […]