I have a hard time understanding how anyone that understands evolution and understands human behavior can think that actual libertarianism is the best way to build a society. It is simple minded to think that there is a simple answer for every problem (government for the Communist, free markets for the Libertarian). It is obviously the case that some problems require government solutions and some problems require market solutions. This is obvious and the reason for it is because of human nature. If you are seriously a Libertarian you need to do yourself a favor and go live in Africa for a while. You will see Libertarianism at work. Most people pay no taxes. Governments provide no services. People are truly free to do whatever they want. It's like heaven. You will particularly love the market solution to crime. Every wealthy home owner has to hire their own live in security force to protect the house around the clock. Ever walk past a man with an AK-47 slung over his shoulder on your way to morning coffee? The market solution to road construction is a real winner too. In many areas the only road maintenance is performed by children who fill Land Rover-sized potholes with stones and then set up a small road block to slow cars to beg for a few shillings. Meanwhile the road is so cratered you have to pick your way through it like a minefield and the single filled in pothole is little help in your quest to drive over 30 kph without busting a tire or leaf spring. The market solution to the court system? If you are a businessman and someone fails to pay you for your services what do you do? Why, you hire someone to threaten the debtor at gunpoint, or you kill that person as a warning to others, or that person kills you to avoid the debt and to warn other creditors. It's great! Obviously, governments are more efficient and better providers of many things (mass transit, roads, security, healthcare, education, etc.). Obviously markets are also efficient providers of many things (clothing, food, housing, entertainment, etc.). Most people want to live comfortably. We can argue about the best way to create a society where most people live comfortably. But with as much data as we have demonstrating it, we ought to all agree that it is going to be a mixed system (much like we have) with both government and private solutions. Libertarianism and Marxist extremism have both been discredited. They both fail for exactly the same reason. Human nature.

@Jason - there is a difference between anarchy and libertarianism. There are not many libertarians who do not support some form of security and justice provided by the state. Anyhow, the problem with Africa is not one of libertarianism.

@Jason1 and Joseph, You are correct that Libertarianism is different from anarchy. Very little of Africa has anarchy (perhaps only the DRC?). There is rule of law, it's just that the law is most commonly enforced privately and not publicly and market forces dictate its success or failure (usually the latter). It is undeniable that the market fails to provide adequate roads, safe transportation, healthcare, education, security, etc (things you take for granted living in a country that has largely socialized these problems). Regardless, the real point is that the market solution to many problems is often worse than the public solution from society's perspective. The reason for this is our evolved nature. This really shouldn't be controversial. In fact you both say "well sure, nobody wants a libertarian solution to police and courts". I take this as a tacit acknowledgement that some mixed system is preferable. Libertarianism, like socialism, is an ideology often times divorced from biology. Both are good when they work and bad when they don't. So let's be sensible and abandon the idea that there is a single answer for every problem. The more interesting thing is identifying which approach is best given the situation. I think the answer will lie in the relationship between self interest and societal interest. I think when self interest aligns with societal interest a market approach will be best. When self interest conflicts with societal interest, a socialist approach will probably be better.

Joseph, I am most assuredly not confusing Libertarians with anarchists. There most certainly is rule of law in Africa. There definitely are societal rules that people follow. Disputes most certainly are settled by third parties, it just so happens that the third party that is appealed to is often the most powerful private person in the area and not the state. It obviously works like shit from society's perspective, so nobody (including hardcore libertarians) advocates it. The African countries themselves don't want it, but they are too weak to do anything about it. I have to laugh that you are at the same time defending Libertarianism and incapable of imagining how these things can work without the State. Europeans often feel the same way about healthcare and well fare. They can't even imagine a market solution to healthcare or well fare. When you experience the market solution, they seem to have a point... So what is so special about those few things you listed that should be left to the state? Why is everything else the state does necessarily bad? Please explain why our biology dictates that court systems, police and national defense alone must be performed by the state, while everything else must be performed by free markets. An anecdote that you might enjoy: I was once working in Kenya collecting fossils. By Kenyan law all fossils are owned by the state and you must have a permit to collect them. Of course, in practice, there is no entity to enforce such rules. While out surveying one day, an enterprising young man decided that he was going to corner the market on Anthracothere teeth and sell me ones he had found. He brought me a beautiful partial mandible wrapped up in an old sock and offered to sell them to me. We explained the "law" to him and showed our permit and told him that he was obliged to give us the teeth. Of course he laughed and went on his way with the teeth. Now, there was no chance in hell we could ever give him a schilling for his teeth, because if we did every man in the area would be out digging up every scrap of bone they could find. However, we did want the teeth. We tried the district officer (actual government) who told us there was nothing he could do. So, instead, we went to the local big man, who, as far as I can tell, is just an old guy with a lot of goats. We had to explain the situation to him and why we needed the teeth, etc. He said he would find the young man and see that our teeth were returned, but asked if we could give him a small tribute for his time. I think we gave him 2,000 KS (about $20) and the next day the young guy stopped by the survey area with his anthracothere teeth and begrudgingly gave them to us. Justice served. The big man sided with us (and 2,000 KS). It didn't always work that way though. In another instance with a case of stolen boots the big man did not side with us. I guess you win some you lose some.

"Multiregional origin of modern humans has always been appealing. Instead of total replacement theory like out of Africa, constant gene flow with local adaptation actually is more reasonable." It may be more reasonable but it doesn't appear to be what happened. Multiregional evolution has always been about regional continuity. There is no regional continuity with this pattern of admixture. Europeans are surprisingly not particularly closely related to Neandertals.

Greg, Well, we know for certain that MC1R evolved convergently in Neandertals and Europeans. However, the European version isnt clearly selected. It might rather be the absence of purifying selection driving the loss of function.

Greg, Your still thinking about this in a "multiregional" context. Ironically, the one thing this pattern of admixture is not is multiregional. Remember that Oceanic peoples share as much Neandertal ancestry as Europeans. There is no regional continuity. Consequently you shouldn't really expect locally adaptive alleles to introgress. And for what its worth, none of the locally adaptive genes that we know about introgressed from Neandertals. Europeans and Neandertals both had light skin for example, but modern Europeans went the long way around and evolved it independently. Why didnt it introgress? Well, because the admixture did not happen in Europe where light skin would have been advantageous! Microcephalin was thought to be the best candidate (erroneously in my opinion) but it did not introgress from Neandertals. MAPT either.

"The apparent skeletal continuity in Europe is predominantly with early Upper Paleolithic Europeans, not later populations." So then these early Upper Paleolithic folks were completely replaced or at least contributed no genes to later Europeans (at least not the fraction of the genome containing the Neandertal admixture)? Where is the continuity in that scenario? I can't see any reasonable scenario that looks like regional continuity in Europe. As you point out, East Asia is more suspect. "given the evidence of substantial mtDNA replacement in Europe since the Mesolithic, I think it is a reasonable hypothesis." I think it a reasonable hypothesis too (but I note the irony of you basing it on mtDNA). "After the last week, I think that an attitude of less certainty might be in order…" I fully agree.

They started with a bias against finding admixture because that's what all the previous data suggested they would find. I agree that without knowing anything else, I would find lack of interbreeding surprising between two closely related humans that came into contact. But we've got lots of other data, including lots of Neandertal DNA sequence and there was no evidence for interbreeding. Of course the expectation was not to find admixture.

*I'm an author on this study 
 
This study is not the first report describing a GWAS using samples from patients enrolled in a clinical trials. GSK used a much more limited set of samples to identify the HLA locus associated with abacavir hypersensitivity reaction, (although I think the samples were culled from patients across a number of studies). 
 
What I think is much more striking is that size of this effect and the failure of the numerous candidate gene studies to ever target this gene. 
 
This paper (I hope) will open the door to many more genome-wide studies which will help identify genetic factors contributing to therapeutic response to pharmacotherapy. 
 
WRT the warfarin PGx story, it is unfortunate that the utility of the CYP and VKORC1 assays has not infiltrated medical practice more effectively, but pharmacoeconomic studies have failed to show an overwhelming benefit to patients. This, coupled with glaring lack of education about the value of these tests in the primary care setting, and the comfort of MDs on the front line with titrating dose based on INRs (and the lack of easily accessible and fast test results coupled with clear dosing guidelines) combines to make warfarin PGx not ready for prime time. 
 
Given the reality that chronically HCV infected patients wait on average 1 year after diagnosis before initiating therapy (due to the noxious nature of the 48 week regimen and the uncertainty related to response), I very much hope that this predictive test becomes a tool patients and caregivers will use to guide therapeutic decision-making.

I'm not so sure that Google has invented anything since PageRank. They tend to buy start-ups that invent interesting things instead. 
 
It's much easier to invent something outside of a corporate immune system.

yes, of course. duh. thanks for setting me straight, p-ter.

Unless I'm crazy, polygamy ought to make the Ne inferred from X chromosomes smaller, not greater. Polygamy increases variance in male reproductive success but shouldn't effect the variance in female RS. High variance in male RS means many X chromosomes in males will be dead ends. This should decrease the Ne of the male fraction of the X (1/3 of the 3/4), thus making the Ne of the X less than 3/4 that of the autosomes. What am I missing?

Kosmo, 
 
Yes, what the researchers thought was Mungo's mtDNA is actually nuclear DNA that we all have. 
 
It is not Mungo's mtDNA that was inserted into the nucleus, it was the Mungo's pretty distant ancestor, an ancestor that we all share.

I think the claim that the multiregional/OOA hypotheses are rarely tested is a bit disingenuous. Most or all of the genetic predictions of the OOA can be accommodated by multiregionalism, however the reverse is not true. I don't think there is any data incompatible with at least the weak form of the OOA yet found. This, of course, means that there isn't data incompatible with multiregionalism. Multiregionalism has not been falsified.  
 
This doesn't, however, imply that the two hypotheses are equally likely given what we know. 
 
We have spent a lot of time looking for data that could contradict OOA and exclusively support multiregionalism. We just don't seem to find any.

The lake Mungo sequence is a numt, or nuclear insertion of mitochondrial DNA. These are extremely common and can make obtaining genuine mtDNA sequences difficult with PCR-based methods. 
 
The particular numt that the Mungo study sequenced is fixed in modern humans as far as anyone knows. The mitochondrial lineage that was the source of the insertion predates modern mtDNA diversity but postdates the chimp/human split. Thus, when considered as an mtDNA homologue it makes Mungo appear outside modern diversity. However, since the sequence is paralogous the comparison is not valid.

"A reasonable answer is that CF alleles, being 'loss of function' alleles, were certainly present when the selective pressure due to the combined effect of lactose intolerance and dairy milk started, whereas lactose-tolerance, a sophisticated phenotypic modification (a single gene onthogenetically regulated in all mammals to express itself only during weaning had to be 'convinced' to continue to work through post-weaning life), was not so easily available or even absent in the exposed populations." 
 
Lactase persistence is so sophisticated that it has evolved repeatedly in pastoralist populations around the world. Four times in Africa! Are the authors unaware of Tishkoff et al. 2007?  
 
My bet is that there is no advantage to the CF allele and that the gene was brought to relatively high frequency by the demographic effects of population and geographic expansion into Europe in the wavefront/surfing process described by Excoffier et al (MBE 2005). Selection can be painfully slow removing deleterious recessives.

From the paper: "Therefore, these data conclusively disprove the 'European-restricted' high mutation rate hypothesis, thus proving, by exclusion, that the high CF gene frequency is due to a CF/+ heterozygous advantage." 
 
This is quite a leap! Heterozygote advantage is the only possible hypothesis left?! ....were the reviewers and editor asleep at the switch?

Within anthropology I would guess biological anthropologists are outnumbered by cultural anthropologists probably 5 to 1. However, I think the biological anthropologists overwhelmingly outproduce social anthropologists in terms of research output. 
 
I often feel like anthropology has been hijacked by the radical social anthropologists, and it really hurts the reputation of the field.

I think you are a little hard on anthropologists writ large, Razib. After all, it is anthropologists that are responsible for much of what we know of human genetic and phenotypic diversity. You should specify "social anthropologist" in your critique.