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: “...
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: “...
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 paper: Eerkens J et al. 2016. Isotopic and genetic analyses of a mass grave in central California: Implications for precontact hunter-gatherer warfar...
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...
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...
Jeff Wise in Slate has an essay about “World population may actually start declining, not exploding”.
I wandered into your site after searching for Eemian and human evolution.
This is cool, from Big Think: “563 - Pop by Lat and Pop by Long”.
Demography is the engine of evolution. Changes in allele frequencies require differential births and deaths of the individuals who carry the alleles. Under n...
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...
From the NY Times earlier this spring, a profile of a New York woman with an exceptional legacy:
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...
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...
Razib lists a taxonomy of culture-gene historical scenarios. Real worked examples for several of these would be worthwhile.
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...
Nicholas Wade is reporting on an upcoming paper by Chad Huff and Lynn Jorde: “Genome Study Provides a Census of Early Humans”.
Amos and Hoffman (2009) describe a study of microsatellite (STR) data taken from 53 populations – the HGDP dataset. They suggest that the worldwide diversity...
Yesterday, Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning agricultural scientist Norman Borlaug died. This AP story reviews his life and accomplishments. Without question, Borlau...
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...
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...
Dienekes points me to a paper with a straightforward title: “Humans at tropical latitudes produce more females”.
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...
Leave it to me to have readers unwilling to ignore selection in recent populations! Here’s an e-mail:
Reading through P. A. P. Moran’s book, The Statistical Processes of Evolutionary Theory, I found this passage (p. 12):
Genetic Future and Gene Expression have commented today on the relative roles of selection and demography in shaping the genetic differences between populati...
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...
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...
Exponential growth is a feature of current human populations, and was may represent how the human population behaved during some episodes of its demographic ...
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...
Today, the projected population of the Earth (available here) passed 6,666,666,666.
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...
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