Genetics:
Personal genomics bubble bursting? permlink
Category: Economics
Changes in the world of personal genomics. Dan MacArthur has the details on 23andMe changing up its offerings, perhaps signalling that the money gush is long over. And deCode is finally dead. Of course, just because the .com bubble burst...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 3:54 AM • 0 Comments •
What if fitness & migration were random? permlink
Category: Genetics
There are many ways one can model population genetic dynamics. A simple avenue is to imagine a deme, a group of breeding individuals, subject to a few major parameters which are modulating genetic variation. Mutation, migration, random drift and selection....
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Posted by Razib Khan at 5:50 AM • 2 Comments •
Levels of selection & the full Price Equation permlink
Category: Evolution
In the post below on the Price Equation I stayed true to George Price's original notation in his 1970 paper where he introduced his formalism. But here is a more conventional form, the "Full Price Equation," which introduces a second...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 4:34 PM • 2 Comments •
The Price Equation permlink
Category: Evolution
In the comments below I referred to the "Price Equation." Here is what William D. Hamilton had to say about George Price's formalism in Narrow Roads of Gene Land: A manuscript did eventually come from him but what I found...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 9:18 AM • 1 Comments •
Unitary mindfulness in collective action permlink
Category: Genetics
In reviewing a paper which sketches out the boundary conditions under which group-level natural selection would result in the emergence of altruism as a genetically encoded trait, I stated: ... I would look to cultural group selection, because there are...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 8:39 AM • 6 Comments •
What does not kill the group, makes it stronger! permlink
Category: Genetics
I recently finished reading The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, a new book by Nicholas Wade, a science writer for The New York Times. Before giving it the "full treatment" I thought it behooved me to...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 8:34 AM • 10 Comments •
The grandmothers effect, paternal or maternal matters (?) permlink
Category: Anthroplogy
I've discussed menopause as an adaptation and the grandmother effect before. I was also pleased to see the responses of Larry Moran's readers when he presented his standard anti-adaptationist line of argument. I don't want to retread familiar ground here,...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 6:02 AM • 2 Comments •
Hutterites are like Icelanders permlink
Category: Genetics
The Spittoon points to a new paper, Drawing the history of the Hutterite population on a genetic landscape: inference from Y-chromosome and mtDNA genotypes, which I've been meaning to look at more closely. Unlike some attempts to use genetics to...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 5:15 AM • 4 Comments •
Svante Paabo believes modern humans & Neandertals interbred permlink
Category: Genetics
Neanderthals 'had sex' with modern man: Professor Svante Paabo, director of genetics at the renowned Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig, will shortly publish his analysis of the entire Neanderthal genome, using DNA retrieved from fossils. He aims...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 5:25 PM • 11 Comments •
Inferring deep history in genes permlink
Category: Genetics
When Mendelism reemerged in the early 20th century to become what we term genetics no doubt the early practitioners of the nascent field would have been surprised to see where it went. The centrality of of DNA as the substrate...
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Posted by Razib Khan at 3:48 AM • 6 Comments •