How the lives of mothers matter to offspring survival in wild primates
A new research paper by Matthew Zipple and coworkers looks at the impact of maternal mortality on offspring survival across seven species of wild primates: “...
All posts tagged with demography
Link: History of The Population Bomb
Charles C. Mann has written a historical account of Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb as a part of Smithsonian magazine’s retrospective on the year 1968: “T...
Notable: A mass grave and hunter-gatherer warfare in California
Notable paper: Eerkens J et al. 2016. Isotopic and genetic analyses of a mass grave in central California: Implications for precontact hunter-gatherer warfar...
Death in deep history
I’ve kept a post by Kristina Killgrove sitting on my desktop for a long time. Although the post is specifically about a particular highly-reported study on a...
Lifetime interactions of male hunter-gatherers
Human hunter-gatherers, despite living in small groups of 20-50 individuals, make social contacts with up to a thousand other individuals in across their lif...
Our future shrinking population
Jeff Wise in Slate has an essay about “World population may actually start declining, not exploding”.
Mailbag: The Eemian: what gives?
I wandered into your site after searching for Eemian and human evolution.
Longitudinal sampling
This is cool, from Big Think: “563 - Pop by Lat and Pop by Long”.
From genes to numbers: effective population sizes in human evolution
Demography is the engine of evolution. Changes in allele frequencies require differential births and deaths of the individuals who carry the alleles. Under n...
Agriculture, population expansion and mtDNA variation
Earlier this spring, I wrote about a paper by Brenna Henn and colleagues that presented new data on SNP variation in recent African hunter-gatherer populatio...
Passing on your fertility to your kids
From the NY Times earlier this spring, a profile of a New York woman with an exceptional legacy:
Misinformation about brain evolution
Due to Jerry Coyne, I encountered an interview in the Guardian with Colin Blakemore: “Colin Blakemore: How the human brain got bigger by accident and not thr...
The other story about the mammoth DNA
I got to writing about a story a couple of years ago, and then stalled out. That happens every so often – remember, most of my research-related entries are m...
SNPs and culture history
Razib lists a taxonomy of culture-gene historical scenarios. Real worked examples for several of these would be worthwhile.
An insertion into deep history
A couple of weeks ago I noted a new article by Chad Huff and colleagues in PNAS. It wasn’t available yet when I wrote, but I’ve had the chance to study it no...
High Pleistocene human effective population size
Nicholas Wade is reporting on an upcoming paper by Chad Huff and Lynn Jorde: “Genome Study Provides a Census of Early Humans”.
Double the bottlenecks
Amos and Hoffman (2009) describe a study of microsatellite (STR) data taken from 53 populations – the HGDP dataset. They suggest that the worldwide diversity...
Norman Borlaug
Yesterday, Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug died. This AP story reviews his life and accomplishments. Without question, Borlau...
Learning, population size, and "modern human behavior"
I’m a big booster of the idea that human demographic expansion helped drive our recent evolution. So you might expect me to like the new paper by Adam Powell...
Warfare, catastrophes, six of one, half dozen of the other
I’m reading through the paper by Samuel Bowles, “Did warfare among ancestral hunter-gatherers affect the evolution of human social behaviors?” I’ve done some...
Maybe it's just that pink is a tropical color and blue a polar one?
Dienekes points me to a paper with a straightforward title: “Humans at tropical latitudes produce more females”.
Plumbing for bottlenecks
My series on mutual information and tests of selection (which began with "Information theory: a short introduction") is at a branching point. One of the crit...
mtDNA selection in Iceland?
Leave it to me to have readers unwilling to ignore selection in recent populations! Here’s an e-mail:
Quote: Selection, stochasticity
Reading through P. A. P. Moran’s book, The Statistical Processes of Evolutionary Theory, I found this passage (p. 12):
Surfing and recent selection
Genetic Future and Gene Expression have commented today on the relative roles of selection and demography in shaping the genetic differences between populati...
Cultural impedance, demographic growth, effective population size
This is a complicated story with many interlocking parts. Telling the whole story may well take me fifty posts. There’s a lot of new science hiding in here w...
Human evolution stopping? Wrong, wrong, wrong.
I’m usually pretty measured when I respond to dumb ideas about evolution reported in the press. After all, scientists are often misquoted, or misunderstood b...
Handling exponential growth in demographic models
Exponential growth is a feature of current human populations, and was may represent how the human population behaved during some episodes of its demographic ...
Acceleration's discontents
The June Scientific American (no link available) has an article on page 32 about the “therapeutic value of blogging.” That’s some relief, after the stories a...
This magic moment
Today, the projected population of the Earth (available here) passed 6,666,666,666.
Were ancient Africans divided into small, isolated bands?
Last week when I wrote about the study of African mtDNA variation by Behar and colleagues, I focused on the issue of population size. To me, that must be th...
Wobst’s population model
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