In Table S48, on page 135 of the supplement to the big Neandertal paper in Science, fourth line from the bottom, the text says ‘San closer to Han+French than to Yoruba (!)” – but that is a typo. I trust you all see the implications.

With the detection of Neanderthal admixture in Eurasians (Green et al), evidence for two admixture events in an upcoming paper from Jeffrey Long’s group (probably Neanderthals and erectus), and analysis from Jeffrey Wall and Vincent Plagnol suggesting that some African populations (Pygmies and Bushmen) admixed with other archaic populations, it seems that we are on […]

So says David Reich, and he was hardly alone. Why? It was always likely, in fact almost inevitable. I can’t think of a human expansion where there wasn’t some admixture with the locals. I’m serious: why? I’ve certainly heard arguments to that effect, but they were all silly. Intersterility was quite unlikely, if you look […]

David Reich says “There are populations that have lived in the same town and same village for thousands of years without exchanging genes.” Sounds familiar. If this was indeed the case, and if fitness payoffs differed significantly between castes – then there has almost certainly been genetic adaptation. Those whose ancestors lived a particular kind […]

I ran into an interesting comment on the net the other day.. “for some, it is hard to determine what productive and ethical use society can make of genetic knowledge that certain individuals are predisposed to higher than average intelligence” Perhaps others can think of some productive and ethical uses. Any suggestions? Some people may […]

Someone has suggested that the cover of our new book (the 10,000 year explosion) symbolizes the splitting of the human race into different species. I will award a metaphorical cigar to the first person who figures out what it _really_ means. (Daddy’s Skeleton Army is the alternate title suggested by my son Ben) Labels: 10000 […]

In yesterday’s New York Times article, David Goldstein makes sense: he says “We’ve looked for common variants in schizophrenia and get almost nothing. This means natural selection has done a really good job of purging them away, and we’re left with rare variants, a constant flow of them, as the principal driver of the disease.” […]

There was an interesting paper in BMC Genetics back in in February: “Analysis of genetic variation in Ashkenazi Jews by high density SNP genotyping. ” They ran 500K Affy chips on 100 Ashkenazi women and on 60 CEPH-derived HapMap (CEU) individuals. They hoped to find greater levels of linkage disequilibrium and lower haplotype complexity among […]

It’s hard to have a recessive lethal hang around for a long time without some kind of heterozygote advantage: selection reduces its frequency. If the population is even moderately large, more than a few thousand, changes in allele frequency over time are very predictable: deterministic. That also means that one can calculate past frequencies, as […]

John and I have an article out now on Neanderthal introgression: Dynamics of Adaptive Introgression from Archaic to Modern Humans. It’s in Paleoanthropology The major point is that Neanderthals and modern humans were probably interfertile and most likely interbred – and that we would then have picked up most favorable Neanderthal alleles. Which may have […]

A few years ago, I was thinking about Out-of-Africa, and it occurred to me that we probably picked up a lot of favorable alleles from Neanderthals, the logic being that such alleles would have probability 2s per copy (Haldane) of reaching high frequency (maybe even going to fixation). The chances of acquisition of a neutral […]

A lot of people seem to have the idea that significant human biological evolution stopped when we became behaviorally modern. I’m wondering just how they got that idea. Can anyone give me some examples of influential instances of this claim? Influential papers, texts, popular books, bubble gum wrappers, etc etc

I need an estimate of the fraction of selected variants that involve an amino acid change, as opposed to noncoding changes in promoters and enhancers and such. Something for mammals would do. Can anyone find one?

There’s an interesting article (by Eric Wang, Bob Moyzis and company, using HapMap data) coming out in the next day or so in PNAS. It’s covered by Science: http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2005/1220/2 Seems that they’ve found some 1800 human genes currently undergoing selective sweeps: most are regional. The gene functions ae highly concentrated in host-pathogen interactions, reproduction, DNA […]

Genes such as G6PD, ASPM, and hemochromatosis are known to be undergoing strong positive selection in humans. You see a high-frequency variant with next-to-no variety and lots of linkage disequilibrium. If you had to guess, what fraction of human genes would you expect to be currently experiencing such strong positive selection?

” “There’s just no correlation,” said Duke’s Wray, calling education and other environmental factors more important for intelligence than DNA anyway.” Rikurzhen: Source

There is a new BRCA1 haplotype with a geographical distribution reminiscent of that seen in microcephalin and ASPM: the new variant is about 30k years old and considerably more common outside of sub-Saharan Africa (~55%) than inside (~20%) . BRCA1 has also been evolving unusually rapidly in the hominid lineage (like ASPM and microcephalin). It […]