Vestigial traits under the microscope
Australian paleoanthropologist Darren Curnoe has been blogging at The Conversation, with some interesting posts. This week, he has written on the topic of ve...
Australian paleoanthropologist Darren Curnoe has been blogging at The Conversation, with some interesting posts. This week, he has written on the topic of ve...
A founder effect is caused by genetic drift in a small number of initial founders of a new population.
A founder effect is caused by genetic drift in a small number of initial founders of a new population.
If everyone in a population lived a long life, mated, and reproduced absolutely equally (two offspring per person), then the population size would never chan...
If everyone in a population lived a long life, mated, and reproduced absolutely equally (two offspring per person), then the population size would never chan...
My graduate student Marc Kissel and I are putting on a poster today at the AAPA meetings. Marc has prepared a nice PDF of the poster and we’re putting it her...
Larry Moran writes, “Are you a descendant of Charlemagne?”
A new paper by Jukka Palo and colleagues investigates the population history of Finland:
François Balloux (2009) has a polemic in the online access area of Heredity presenting references about mtDNA selection, and arguing that the use of this sin...
I was trying to find out more about recent research predicting a relative convergence of racial features in future generations (but I don't know anything abo...
I ran across an interview between Anna Plutinski and population geneticist Warren Ewens.
Last winter I noted the contradiction between two papers that each attempted to explain variation on the X chromosome compared to the autosomes. They had com...
Happily, though, the study isn’t about our method for finding recent selection!
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...
This is the third in a series on information theory and tests for recent selection. The first post, “Information theory: a short ...
Leave it to me to have readers unwilling to ignore selection in recent populations! Here’s an e-mail:
How powerful has genetic drift been in recent human evolution? That’s the question I raised the other day with reference to the claim that a heart disease ri...
Are these people crazy?
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...
Toni Pollin and colleagues (2008) report one of the simplest medical research studies you’ll ever see:
Larry Moran tells an interesting personal story about long-distance gene flow among Roman-era elites in Europe (What does Marcus Antonius tell us about evolu...
The first thing to come up in my lectures is genetic drift. Pretty much everyone who lectures about drift needs a figure showing the results of simple Monte ...
I have an excellent e-mail question about last week’s Neandertal mtDNA paper, which has provoked a lot of commentary.
DavidB at Gene Expression continues his wonderful series on Sewall Wright with a detailed post on the population genetics of migration.
Exponential growth is a feature of current human populations, and was may represent how the human population behaved during some episodes of its demographic ...
OK, I'm clearly going to have to cut out the beer if I'm going to do anything about stories like this one:
OK, I'm clearly going to have to cut out the beer if I'm going to do anything about stories like this one:
Last year around this time, I noted that I happened to be reading Sewall Wright during a TV episode that mentioned Sewall Wright. It's not so unusual for me...
Last year around this time, I noted that I happened to be reading Sewall Wright during a TV episode that mentioned Sewall Wright. It's not so unusual for me...
I'm just looking through the January/February 2008 Evolutionary Anthropology, which is all about modern human origins in Africa. The special issue resulted ...
I'm just looking through the January/February 2008 Evolutionary Anthropology, which is all about modern human origins in Africa. The special issue resulted ...
RPM at Evolgen has a post raising a concern I've been seeing a lot the last week or two:
RPM at Evolgen has a post raising a concern I've been seeing a lot the last week or two:
Razib has been working over genetic drift real good (concerning effective population size and population history, and founder effects). It deserves it.
Razib has been working over genetic drift real good (concerning effective population size and population history, and founder effects). It deserves it.
Following up on yesterday's post on annoying misconceptions, I noticed Razib had posted his own candidate:
Following up on yesterday's post on annoying misconceptions, I noticed Razib had posted his own candidate:
Ackermann and Cheverud (2004) consider the pattern of selection necessary to change a nonrobust australopithecine cranium (i.e. Sts 5) into a robust austral...
Ackermann and Cheverud (2004) consider the pattern of selection necessary to change a nonrobust australopithecine cranium (i.e. Sts 5) into a robust austral...