103 posts · 77,667 views
Razib Khan has an academic background in the biological sciences and has worked in software. He is an Unz Foundation Junior Fellow and lives in the western United States.
Gene Expression
103 posts
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- November 22, 2010
- 03:29 AM
- 567 views
The flux of genes on the South Seas
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
Huli Wigman from the Southern Highlands, Painting of Tahitian Women on the Beach by Paul Gauguin
Many demographic models utilized in genetics are rather simple. Yet the expansion and retreat of various demes in post-Ice Age Europe seems to be far more complex than had previously been assumed, though I suspect part of the rationale for [...]... Read more »
Wollstein A, Lao O, Becker C, Brauer S, Trent RJ, Nürnberg P, Stoneking M, & Kayser M. (2010) Demographic History of Oceania Inferred from Genome-wide Data. Current biology : CB. PMID: 21074440
- November 17, 2010
- 01:17 PM
- 560 views
Icelanders descended from Native Americans?
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
That is the question, and tentatively answered in the affirmative according to a new paper in The American Journal of Physical Anthropology. A new subclade of mtDNA haplogroup C1 found in icelanders: Evidence of pre-columbian contact?:
Although most mtDNA lineages observed in contemporary Icelanders can be traced to neighboring populations in the British Isles and Scandinavia, [...]... Read more »
Ebenesersdóttir SS, Sigurðsson A, Sánchez-Quinto F, Lalueza-Fox C, Stefánsson K, & Helgason A. (2010) A new subclade of mtDNA haplogroup C1 found in icelanders: Evidence of pre-columbian contact?. American journal of physical anthropology. PMID: 21069749
- November 17, 2010
- 05:50 AM
- 636 views
Homozygosity runs in the family (or not)
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
The number 1 gets a lot more press than -1, and the concept of heterozygosity gets more attention than homozygosity. Concretely the difference between the latter two is rather straightforward. In diploid organisms the genes come in duplicates. If the alleles are the same, then they’re homozygous. If they’re different, then they’re heterozygous. Sex chromosomes [...]... Read more »
Mirna Kirin, Ruth McQuillan, Christopher S. Franklin, Harry Campbell, Paul M. McKeigue, & James F. Wilson. (2010) Genomic Runs of Homozygosity Record Population History and Consanguinity. PLoS ONE. info:/10.1371/journal.pone.0013996
- November 9, 2010
- 07:54 PM
- 557 views
European man of many faces: Cain vs. Abel
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
When it comes to the synthesis of genetics and history we live an age of no definitive answers. L. L. Cavalli-Sforza’s Great Human Diasporas would come in for a major rewrite at this point. One of the areas which has been roiled the most within the past ten years has been the origin and propagation [...]... Read more »
Wolfgang Haak, Oleg Balanovsky, Juan J. Sanchez, Sergey Koshel, Valery Zaporozhchenko, Christina J. Adler, Clio S. I. Der Sarkissian, Guido Brandt, Carolin Schwarz, Nicole Nicklisch.... (2010) Ancient DNA from European Early Neolithic Farmers Reveals Their Near Eastern Affinities. PLoS Biology. info:/10.1371/journal.pbio.1000536
- October 28, 2010
- 05:43 AM
- 613 views
Sons of the conquerers: the story of India?
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
The past ten years has obviously been very active in the area of human genomics, but in the domain of South Asian genetic relationships in a world wide context it has seen veritable revolutions and counter-revolutions. The final outlines are still to be determined. In the mid-1990s the conventional wisdom was that South Asians were [...]... Read more »
Gyaneshwer Chaubey, Mait Metspalu, Ying Choi, Reedik Mägi, Irene Gallego Romero, Pedro Soares, Mannis van Oven, Doron M. Behar, Siiri Rootsi, Georgi Hudjashov.... (2010) Population Genetic Structure in Indian Austroasiatic speakers: The Role of Landscape Barriers and Sex-specific Admixture. Mol Biol Evol. info:/10.1093/molbev/msq288
- October 25, 2010
- 06:36 AM
- 550 views
Body odor, Asians, and earwax
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
When I was in college I would sometimes have late night conversations with the guys in my dorm, and the discussion would random-walk in very strange directions. During one of these quasi-salons a friend whose parents were from Korea expressed some surprise and disgust at the idea of wet earwax. It turns out he had [...]... Read more »
Ohashi J, Naka I, & Tsuchiya N. (2010) The impact of natural selection on an ABCC11 SNP determining earwax type. Molecular biology and evolution. PMID: 20937735
- October 20, 2010
- 05:29 AM
- 753 views
Genetic watersheds on the Great Himalayas
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
One of the great geological landmarks on earth are the Himalayas. Not only are the Himalayas of importance in the domain of physical geography, but they are important in human geography as well. Just as South Asians and non-South Asians agree that the valley of the Indus and its tributaries bound the west of the [...]... Read more »
Shilpi Aggarwal, Sapna Negi, Pankaj Jha, Prashant K. Singh, Tsering Stobdan, M. A. Qadar Pasha, Saurabh Ghosh, Anurag Agrawal, Indian Genome Variation Consortium, Bhavana Prasher.... (2010) EGLN1 involvement in high-altitude adaptation revealed through genetic analysis of extreme constitution types defined in Ayurveda . PNAS. info:/10.1073/pnas.1006108107
- October 19, 2010
- 05:39 AM
- 592 views
Did cavemen eat bread?
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
Food is a fraught topic. In How Pleasure Works Paul Bloom alludes to the thesis that while conservatives fixate on sexual purity, liberals fixate on culinary purity. For example, is it organic? What is the sourcing? Is it “authentic”? Obviously one can take issue with this characterization, especially its general class inflection (large swaths of [...]... Read more »
Anna Revedin, Biancamaria Aranguren, Roberto Becattini, Laura Longo, Emanuele Marconi, Marta Mariotti Lippi, Natalia Skakun, Andrey Sinitsyn, Elena Spiridonova, & Jiří Svoboda. (2010) Thirty thousand-year-old evidence of plant food processing. PNAS. info:/10.1073/pnas.1006993107
- October 18, 2010
- 05:03 AM
- 765 views
Sex with thee and the last woman
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
A quintessentially sexy topic in biology is the origin of sex. Not only are biologists interested in it, but so is the public. Of Matt Ridley’s older books it is predictable that The Red Queen has the highest rank on Amazon. We humans have a fixation on sex, both in our public norms and our [...]... Read more »
Becks L, & Agrawal AF. (2010) Higher rates of sex evolve in spatially heterogeneous environments. Nature. PMID: 20944628
- October 15, 2010
- 04:11 AM
- 636 views
The rise and crash of civilizations
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
One of the questions of interest in the study of the evolution of culture is whether there is a direction in history in terms of complexity. As I have noted before in the pre-modern era many felt that the direction of history was of decline. That is, the ancients were wise and subtle beyond compare [...]... Read more »
Currie, Thomas E., Greenhill, Simon J., Gray, Russell D., Hasegawa, Toshikazu, & Mace, Ruth. (2010) Rise and fall of political complexity in island South-East Asia and the Pacific. Nature. info:/10.1038/nature09461
- October 4, 2010
- 06:55 PM
- 591 views
The adaptive space of complexity
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
Evolution means many things to many people. On the one hand some scholars focus on time scales of “billions and billions,” and can ruminate upon the radical variation in body plans across the tree of life. Others put the spotlight on the change in gene frequencies on the scale of years, of Ph.D. programs. While [...]... Read more »
Wang Z, Liao BY, & Zhang J. (2010) Genomic patterns of pleiotropy and the evolution of complexity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. PMID: 20876104
- September 27, 2010
- 08:03 PM
- 707 views
American family values: where even the dull can dream!
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
One of the issues when talking about the effect of environment and genes on behavioral and social outcomes is that the entanglements are so complicated. People of various political and ideological commitments tend to see the complications as problems for the other side, and yet are often supremely confident of the likely efficacy of their [...]... Read more »
Johnson W, Deary IJ, Silventoinen K, Tynelius P, & Rasmussen F. (2010) Family background buys an education in Minnesota but not in Sweden. Psychological science : a journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 21(9), 1266-73. PMID: 20679521
- September 27, 2010
- 03:35 AM
- 504 views
Story of X
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
A month ago I pointed to a short communication in Nature Genetics which highlighted differences in the patterns of variation between the X chromosome and the autosome. I thought it would be of interest to revisit this, because it’s a relatively short piece with precise and crisp results which we can ruminate upon.
Sometimes there is [...]... Read more »
Hammer MF, Woerner AE, Mendez FL, Watkins JC, Cox MP, & Wall JD. (2010) The ratio of human X chromosome to autosome diversity is positively correlated with genetic distance from genes. Nature genetics. PMID: 20802480
- September 24, 2010
- 03:09 AM
- 409 views
The city that kills you makes you strong!
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
Over the past day I’ve seen reports in the media of a new paper which claims that long-term urbanization in a region is strongly correlated with genetic variants for disease resistance. I managed to find the paper on Evolution’s website as an accepted manuscript, ANCIENT URBANISATION PREDICTS GENETIC RESISTANCE TO TUBERCULOSIS:
A link between urban living [...]... Read more »
Barnes, I., Duda, A., Pybus, O., & Thomas, M. G. (2010) ANCIENT URBANISATION PREDICTS GENETIC RESISTANCE TO TUBERCULOSI. Evolution. info:/10.1111/j.1558-5646.2010.01132.x
- September 23, 2010
- 08:05 PM
- 639 views
Simple rules for inclusive fitness
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
With the recent huge furor over the utility of kin selection I’ve been keeping a closer eye on the literature on inclusive fitness. The reason W. D. Hamilton’s original papers in The Journal of Theoretical Biology are highly cited is not some conspiracy, rather, they’re a powerful framework in which one can understand the evolution [...]... Read more »
Clune J, Goldsby HJ, Ofria C, & Pennock RT. (2010) Selective pressures for accurate altruism targeting: evidence from digital evolution for difficult-to-test aspects of inclusive fitness theory. Proceedings. Biological sciences / The Royal Society. PMID: 20843843
- September 19, 2010
- 06:14 PM
- 586 views
Gypsies on a genetic island
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
If you live in the States one of the things you hear a lot about Europe in regards to its relationship to its ethno-religious minorities are the problems with Muslims. This is probably an Americo-centric perspective shaped by 9/11, when many of the hijackers had turned out to have spent time in Germany. Additionally, [...]... Read more »
Gusmão A, Valente C, Gomes V, Alves C, Amorim A, Prata MJ, & Gusmão L. (2010) A genetic historical sketch of European Gypsies: The perspective from autosomal markers. American journal of physical anthropology, 141(4), 507-14. PMID: 19918999
- September 17, 2010
- 03:27 PM
- 580 views
Of Iran, Turan, and Turks
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
There’s a new paper out in The European Journal of Human Genetics which is of great interest because it surveys the genetic and linguistic affinities of two dozen ethno-linguistic groups from the three Central Asian nations of Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. This is what the Greeks referred to as Transoxiana, and the Persians as [...]... Read more »
Martínez-Cruz B, Vitalis R, Ségurel L, Austerlitz F, Georges M, Théry S, Quintana-Murci L, Hegay T, Aldashev A, Nasyrova F.... (2010) In the heartland of Eurasia: the multilocus genetic landscape of Central Asian populations. European journal of human genetics : EJHG. PMID: 20823912
- September 16, 2010
- 06:15 AM
- 607 views
A fly’s life: adventures in experimental evolution
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
Natural selection happens. It was hypothesized in copious detail by Charles Darwin, and has been confirmed in the laboratory, through observation, and also by inference via the methods of modern genomics. But science is more than broad brushes. We need to drill-down to a more fine-grained level to understand the dynamics with precision and detail, [...]... Read more »
Burke, Molly K., Dunham, Joseph P., Shahrestani, Parvin, Thornton, Kevin R., Rose, Michael R., & Long, Anthony D. (2010) Genome-wide analysis of a long-term evolution experiment with Drosophila. Nature. info:/10.1038/nature09352
- September 14, 2010
- 07:13 AM
- 385 views
The silver age of altitude adaptation
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
With all the justified concern about “missing heritability”, the age of human genomics hasn’t been a total bust. As I have observed before in 2005’s excellent book Mutants the evolutionary geneticist Armand M. Leroi asserted that we really didn’t have a good understanding of normal variation of human pigmentation. At the time I think it [...]... Read more »
Bigham A, Bauchet M, Pinto D, Mao X, & Akey JM. (2010) Identifying Signatures of Natural Selection in Tibetan and Andean Populations Using Dense Genome Scan Data. PLoS Genetics. info:/
- September 10, 2010
- 06:45 AM
- 829 views
Leaping to a bigger brain
by Razib Khan in Gene Expression
Years ago an evolutionary biologist mentioned to me almost offhand that with the emergence of genomics and the necessity to master computational techniques a lot of the labor hours which may have gone into a more thorough understanding of specific organisms had gone by the wayside. He believed that his Ph.D. advisor was going to [...]... Read more »
Weisbecker V, & Goswami A. (2010) Brain size, life history, and metabolism at the marsupial/placental dichotomy. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. PMID: 20823252
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