PLOS Genetics has a nice review titled The Jewels of Our Genome: The Search for the Genomic Changes Underlying the Evolutionarily Unique Capacities of the Human Brain. It is short and pithy and hits the major points (e.g., SNPs vs. duplications vs. gene expression), so I see no reason to offer any commentary or review of an an already satisfactory commentary and review. If you want original research articles in this area, go here. Some of the material is even open access now.
Update: John Hawks has more.
- Log in to post comments
More like this
Kai Wang is a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Applied Genomics, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and an author on numerous genome-wide association studies. He left this lengthy comment as a response to my recent post on this comment by McClellan and King in Cell, and I felt it warranted…
Earlier studies have indicated that a gene called FOXP2, possibly involved in brain development, is extremely conserved in vertebrates, except for two notable mutations in humans. This finding suggested that this gene may in some way be involved in the evolution of language, and was thus dubbed by…
Richard Sturm in Human Molecular Genetics has a really good review of the current state of pigmentation genetics, with a human centric focus:
The genetic basis underlying normal variation in the pigmentary traits of skin, hair and eye colour has been the subject of intense research directed at…
Update II: Follow up post. You really should read Greg and John Hawks, seeing as how they have a paper in the pipeline on this topic which is stepping off from where Lahn et. al. left off.
Update: Greg and John Hawks have much more must read stuff!
Read about it here. Here is the paper, Evidence…