razib | March 23, 2007One issue that has cropped up in the comments a few times here is a conflation between quantitative & population genetics. Though people seem to think they're interchangeable terms, they're distinct fields. That's why population genetics text books have chapters devoted specifically to quantitative genetics, and showing how the latter can be bridged with the former.
Roughly, population genetics is a "bottom up" field which deals with the dynamics of allele frequencies under the influence of evolutionary forces such as mutation, drift, selection and migration. In some ways it can be…
razib | March 22, 2007I really don't know what to think of this. Did you catch Zach Braff debating CATO's Will Wilkinson? Either Scrubs isn't doing so well, or Robert Wright is so big that semi-intellectual actors want to get aboard with bloggingheads.tv.
razib | March 21, 2007I figured I would just note this, another skin color study:
...We previously reported significant associations of two coding region polymorphisms with hair, skin, and eye color in Caucasians. Here we characterize the promoter region of MATP [SLC45A2] identifying two new transcription start sites and a novel duplication...A total of 700 individuals from five different population groups (529 Caucasians, 38 Asians, 46 African Americans, 47 Australian Aborigines, and 40 Spanish Basques) were genotyped for known promoter polymorphisms...Allele frequencies of all three polymorphisms were…
razib | March 19, 2007A few days ago I began a survey of Martin Nowak's treatment of modern game theory in his book Evolutionary Dynamics. Today I'm going to hit the Prisoner's Dilemma. Roughly, this scenario is one where two individuals are isolated, and if they both keep their mouths shut (cooperate) they get off, but, if one rats the other out while the other keeps silent, the silent partner is screwed while the snitch gets off. If both of them rat the other out they get a prison sentence, but a lighter one than if they had kept silent while the other ratted them out. In other words: ratting the other person…
razib | March 18, 2007If there is one thing that casts a pall over the rise of genomic technology and its applications, it is the eugenics movement. This article highlights a new exhibit which surveys the historical development of this movement. Of course we all know about the abominations of the Nazi regime, but eugenics was a mainstream movement at one point. Consider:
For over 40 years, young socially marginalised working class women in Sweden faced the danger of forced sterilisation. This was carried out under laws intended to purify the Swedish race, prevent the mentally ill from reproducing and stamp out…
razib | March 16, 2007Dienekes has a nice post up on the follies and failures of historical population genetics. As he notes, part of the problem is that people really want to find x instead of !x, and with a statistical science that is really, really, bad.
razib | March 15, 2007As I've said before I've been reading Martin Nowak's Evolutionary Dynamics. Nowak is a mathematical biologist, and a lot of his research program deals with game theory, so it isn't a surprise that several chapters in this book address exclusively game theoretic concepts. In the first chapter to tackle game theory head on Nowak covers a lot of ground, starting with the basics of frequency dependent strategies and pushing all the the way to some heavy theoretical ecology in regards to predatory-prey models. I'm going to pass over the more complex aspects of the chapter (e.g., Rock-Paper-…
razib | March 14, 2007Over at GNXP Classic Ikwa points to some papers from the PLOS One project, which facilitates public feedback in the peer review process. Ikwa has a full list of papers, but I'll list the ones that he highlighted as of particular interest:
Melanesian mtDNA Complexity
Meta-Analysis in Genome-Wide Association Datasets: Strategies and Application in Parkinson Disease
Expression Signature Predicts Human Breast Cancer Prognosis
Catechol-O-Methyltransferase Gene Polymorphism Modifies the Effect of Coffee Intake on Incidence of Acute Coronary Events
Transcriptional Changes Common to Human Cocaine,…
razib | March 14, 2007From PLOS Genetics Identification of the Imprinted KLF14 Transcription Factor Undergoing Human-Specific Accelerated Evolution:
Imprinted genes are expressed in a parent-of-origin manner and are located in clusters throughout the genome...By sequence analysis of numerous species, we place the timing of this event after the divergence of Marsupialia, yet prior to the divergence of the Xenarthra superclade. We identify a large number of sequence variants in KLF14 and, using several measures of diversity, we determine that there is greater variability in the human-lineage with a significantly…
razib | March 13, 2007A few weeks ago I purchased what I have since referred to as a "coffee table book for nerds," Martin Novak's Evolutionary Dynamics: Exploring the Equations of Life, a richly illustrated hardcover which is eminently browsable. In keeping with the focus of Nowak's own researches the chapters in this work are heavy on game theory, and light on population & quantitative genetics. This is fine by me, I'm interested in boning up on game theory beyond hawk & dove ESSes. But there is some evolutionary genetic material, though offering his more cutting edge spin.
In the second chapter there…
razib | March 12, 2007I have not, I think, made a secret of the fact that I am a "Neville Chamberlain atheist," at least when set against the jeremiads of P.Z. Myers or Larry Moran. Part of this is due my personal laissez faire orientation when it comes to to falsities in the minds of others. So long as the falsehoods do not impinge upon my own life I am inclined to let them stand if a full frontal attack would necessitate the spending of time better allocated to other pursuits. Of course, religion is not a trivial thing, its manifestation has significant import for our world. But my own attitude has been…
razib | March 7, 2007To all the physical anthropologists out there, what kind of elf is this? I thought their kind were all gone!
razib | March 6, 2007Is the technorati link tracking widget worth it for the slower load times? Yay or nay?
razib | March 6, 2007Nick Wade has a new article which draws upon the two new books about the genetics of the British Isles, Saxons, Vikings, and Celts, by Bryan Sykes, and The Origin of the British, by Stephen Oppenheimer. The gist is that the British peoples are genetically very similar, and predominantly the descendents of post-Ice Age settlers who swept up along the Atlantic seaboard from the "Iberian refugia".1 To a first approximation this story is about right, the various studies seem to be converging upon the finding that most Britons and Irish are closer to each other than they are to continental…
razib | March 6, 2007The current Mendel's Garden just went up over at "sperm competition" Matt's place.
razib | March 5, 2007A new meme about "10 weird things about me" has started on ScienceBlogs, so I'll bite....
1) I love shrimp more than any other food.
2) I love to hate goat cheese more than any other food.
3) I liked Car Voltron more than Lion Voltron.
4) I had difficulties with gendered pronouns until 2nd grade, and still occasionally make errors. This is possibly the result of the fact that I did not speak much English before the age of 5, and the language that I did speak lacks gendered pronouns (word of advice, do not refer to 6 year old girls as "he," they don't appreciate it).
5) I've read various…