Finally Nick Wade is wading in on the Neandertal genomics story. Wade is a top level reporter, so when he covers a story I am pretty sure he is getting "inside" information that allows him to frame his piece appropriately. So when he says, "Researchers also hope to resolve such questions as whether the Neanderthals spoke, their hair and skin color...." Well, that is definite confirmation of the obvious fact that FOXP2 and MC1R are in the sights. One thing, Wade refers to "founding population." Remember to be careful of terms like this...long term effective population can be tricky, and it often gets confounded by metapopulation dynamics.
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I'm so glad I didn't blog about the arsenic bacterial. The paper's basic methods were probably flawed, and NASA won't defend themselves.
Two more meaty reviews of his li'l book of racism: One by Agustin Fuentes, an anthropologist who debated Wade, and the other by
Last year, New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade wrote a few articles in which he referred to genome sequencing as "decoding".
I have a review of Nick Wade's Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors coming out in the May/June issue of Science & Spirit magazine.