Dienekes comments on the paper which showed genetic substructure among a set of Sardinian villages:
The take-home lesson is that wherever gene flow is impeded, no matter how geographically close, population differentiation can be recovered with dense autosomal genotype data.
Really fine-scale ancestry analysis is now possible; I suspect that a combination of geography, religion, social class, language, and ethnic identification will be found to be predictive of a person's broad genetic makeup and vice versa. But, to discover these correlations, a large-scale collection of genotypic data is required.
The potential exploration of population structure mapping onto non-geographic variables is definitely going to be interesting.
More like this
In 1862, the British philosopher Herbert Spencer used the phrase "survival of the fittest" to describe Darwin's concept of natural selection.
FuturePundit points me to new work on a genetic mutation which might predispose one to Season Affective Disorder,
The locus MAOA pops up every year or so in a study which attempts to correlate variation in these region with behavior. In particular, anti-social or pathological behavior.
There are 20 new articles in PLoS ONE today.