John Hawks on introgression

The whole post is worth reading, but the money shot:

The central point of the paper is exceedingly simple. Haldane demostrated in 1927 that the fixation probability of a single copy of a new adaptive allele is 2s. This means that if archaic humans had any alleles that would have been adaptive for modern humans, it would take only a very small amount of interbreeding for modern humans to pick up these alleles, with a near-100 percent likelihood.

Greg Cochran has more. Obviously this work builds upon the Lahn introgression paper. Instead of crude species typologies the data is now pointing to a more complex set of relations between gene lineages.

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Aha, so there's a forthcoming article on specific loci! Guess my question in the comments at the GNXP post will have to wait a little longer to be answered...

Builds upon, but not originally inspired by. Thoughts about that 2s effect were worked out in 2001: germ of the idea, in 1998, maybe earlier. Save your email.

That's two posts in a row with the phrase "money shot." Where are you picking up this lingo?

By Mustafa Mond, FCD (not verified) on 19 Dec 2006 #permalink