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. The apparent skeletal continuity in Europe is predominantly with early Upper Paleolithic Europeans, not later populations. We don't know whether Upper Paleolithic Europeans had more Neandertal than later people, but given the evidence of substantial mtDNA replacement in Europe since the Mesolithic, I think it is a reasonable hypothesis. As to East Asia, we don't yet know how much contribution the recent populations may have had from the prior inhabitants. Yet. After the last week, I think that an attitude of less certainty might be in order...

Of course they're not finding new selected alleles; they're seeing the effect of linkage with selected alleles which probably have not been identified. It may help you to try running some numbers. Your example -- 55% in Japan, 50% in China -- leads to an Fst of 0.002, which is of course quite a bit less than the mean Fst we see between Japan and China. To get a substantial increase over the mean Fst (which is around 0.02-0.04 within continents), you would need allele frequencies that differ like more than 0.5 and 0.7 or so. Keeping those numbers in mind, you can see that it actually takes a fairly substantial shift in frequencies in a low-recombination block to make two nearby populations look more divergent for that particular genomic region compared to the mean. The most plausible way to get that kind of shift in low-frequency regions is hitchhiking. It's a little unfortunate that they don't report the genic/nongenic comparison for the HapMap comparisons, but that will be easy enough to check.

probably a weighted average of all these effects, and the weights are unclear. I agree, although background selection in particular is very weak given human recombination rates and gene density, so that would take a lot more selection (across deleterious variants), while hitchhiking would take relatively few instances of positive selection. Selection on standing variants may be a factor, although (a) they are rare relative to to new mutations, because the human population formerly was very small, and (b) if they're old enough, they shouldn't be tightly linked to particular allelic variants, even where recombination is low. I'll do updated numbers on both these factors and post them, because it's important to get those weights.

The observation (again, I think) in this paper is that the former are more common in regions of low recombination compared to the latter. Which is exactly what you'd expect if there were a lot of new selected alleles at frequencies less than 20 percent that had pulled common variants along with them, over a longer region in areas of lower recombination. This is key to the literature on "draft". The usual observation is that variation is correlated with recombination rate, because of the effect of hitchhiking on common linked neutral alleles.

We covered this in my graduate seminar this week. so maybe I'll write something about it. I think in the end it falls apart on the differential equation level: the rate of introduction of bifaces is fairly high (that's why we've found them in China and Korea, now), and they persisted at least long enough for us to have found them. So if they were locally useful they had the chance to spread, but they didn't. That argues for an ecological reason, that they just weren't useful in the East. Oh, and there are those Flores hominids, making tools for hundreds of thousands of years in a tiny population, and Java periodically cut off from SE Asia. Toolmaking seems like it wasn't very easy to lose.

Good question, I don't think anybody has a very good idea. It's probably a mistake to think of Levallois (or blades) as cases of unique invention. They are recurrently popping up, even in Lower Paleolithic contexts. If you thought about tools with a genetic analogy, the appearance of these techniques is not "mutation-limited" -- that is, populations didn't have to wait around for somebody to invent them. The question is, if there's some optimum, why don't people make the same tools everywhere? And you've got four possible answers: (1) Different optima; different ecological contexts or raw material availability require different tools. (2) Transmission is too hard to keep going in these populations. (3) Path-dependence: slightly different starting points may lead to very different technical developments. (4) Relative neutrality: It just doesn't matter very much which tools you use. Path-dependence is probably the most common explanation for why Levallois is rare in China -- the idea being that you don't develop prepared cores easily if you aren't starting from a large cutting tool tradition. What isn't easily explained is why sites after 50,000 years ago should be susceptible to this same path-dependence -- particularly since they should derive some or most of their ancestry from Africa/West Asia. Personally, I keep coming back to ecology. For two traditions relatively late in the record and possibly synchronous (although I hesitate to assume this until a better chronology emerges), I tend to go with Binford -- they're probably doing different things.

put it into a class similar to ALH 84001 Ha! You need a tag for that class.

John Relethford has a short discussion of the admixture fraction in his book, Reflections of Our Past, pp. 214-218. Most of this can be accessed on Google Books (search in book for "Parra"). The admixture fraction varies a lot regionally in the U.S. and there is an urban/rural difference. Also a big paternal/maternal difference -- so much that a switch from classical markers to whole-genome (including X) might have depressed the admixture fraction a bit. 

[N]omad elites invariably invaded civilized states despite the likelihood that the average nomad was likely more affluent than the average peasant;  
 
That's a nice point -- another take on the "original affluent society" angle.

Speaking as a citizen of the dairy state, Dean is the last company I'd blame for a retail price slump, because Dean-brand milk is routinely 8 cents or so more than the other major brands. I suspect they make up the difference on other milk-derived products -- Dean-brand creams and cheeses retail for less than most competitors.

One of the problems with "rate" is that different people think of "fast" in very different ways, as the post points out.  
 
It occurs to me that Darwin wrote from a world that was still debating the idea of spontaneous generation. Change in one generation (your part "b" of gradualism) was regularly observed in "sports" of domesticated varieties, with a pretty big range of delta. From one point of view, the problem is explaining why species don't change on human-perceived timescales. Essentialism is one theoretical explanation; Darwin provided another, much harder-to-explain alternative.

If globalization is here to the stay, then the global religions are here to stay. 
 
Nice phrase. I wonder if the same principle extends to particular niches -- churches of the downtrodden, for instance, or whether they may be to some extent less stable. One feature of the long-lived global religions is that the tend not to make earthly promises they can't keep.

Clearly it's the new X-Prize competition.

I'm skeptical of the chocolate example. Just because in this case the free chocolates were (subjectively reported as) low quality, it doesn't follow that pricing schemes are rational on the mean or even the variance of taste in the target market. Expensive chocolates in real life cost more because of small production runs and high-cost ingredients, neither of which necessarily increase taste but which may (for many consumers) contribute to an irrational belief in their intrinsic quality.  
 
Organic produce is another obvious example: it costs more and requires a rather elaborate belief system to get people to choose it in a store above better-looking non-organic produce.  
 
Likewise, we have the example of wines, where blind taste tests often show cheap wines to score better than expensive ones. The expensive wines have high perceived quality only after people know how much they cost. 
 
Should we be surprised if a large set of consumers realize that the emperor has no clothes?

I wonder how you would distinguish this from the hypothesis that technological developments have gotten harder over time.  
 
Besides that, technology has been path-dependent. For example, the semiconductor industry has had thirty years of finding incremental ways to manufacture smaller circuits. Plausibly, the same research effort could have been applied to some fundamentally different trajectory, which would look more pathbreaking in retrospect, but would never have made economic sense at any step.

I saw a poster a couple of years ago that showed that 3 or 4 OXTR regulatory alleles look like balanced polymorphisms, with different frequencies in different places. I haven't seen it come out in print yet.

Let's just hope that when it happens, it will turn out that hedge funds and investment banks won't have exposed themselves to all of this silliness, and that we won't be plunged into another multi-year recession. 
 
Seems to me the most immediate economic effect of college education is to keep bright 18-24-year-olds out of the labor market, thereby raising wages for the rest of the pool. If these kids defect from college matriculation in large numbers, it should be bad for wages and employment for everyone else, but good for productivity.

Seems to me that if you think that the causal alleles are new, you'd want to spend your money doing the same SNP panel on siblings. You'd be betting that you can bootstrap pedigree information to find rare haplotypes linked to your phenotypic variation.  
 
You could spend the same money resequencing, in which case you'll be betting that the rare causal alleles aren't linked to rare haplotypes you could find with a SNP panel.  
 
I'm assuming you'll be springing for the resequencing once you find gene candidates anyway.

[T]he fact that Cochran et al. profess absolutely zero interest in doing a trivial (intellectually, though admittedly not logistically) test of their hypothesis baffles me. 
 
I'm from a field of science where the logistical issues pretty much determine what you are free to do empirical work on. If you can't touch the right fossil, you're up shite creek. In my case, all I need is the money to travel and stay where the specimens are housed, and permissions. Yet this is far from trivial; it is extraordinarily time-consuming to apply for grant funding.  
 
In this instance, you have the money involved in testing carrier status, the testing (at $XX/hour for your assistant and $YY for participants) and IRB approval for the whole thing. You'll need a facility to carry out your plan, and some relatively long-term relationship with the test population.  
 
Heck, it might be cheaper to dig up some Jewish skeletons from the year 400 AD and test them directly for carrier status.

Cool.  
 
While it's not orthogonal to "popularity", you may want to consider that different periods of music are performed by different kinds of musical groups -- full vs. chamber orchestra, for example -- which may have different rates of recording music for reasons besides sales prospects. Opera stands out as a genre where there may be few recordings relative to sales, due to the costs of mounting a production.