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...
All posts tagged with genetic drift
Founder effect
A founder effect is caused by genetic drift in a small number of initial founders of a new population.
Founder effect
A founder effect is caused by genetic drift in a small number of initial founders of a new population.
Genetic drift
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...
Genetic drift
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...
Selection versus drift in Neandertal evolution
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...
Genealogy and genetics
Larry Moran writes, “Are you a descendant of Charlemagne?”
The Finnish line
A new paper by Jukka Palo and colleagues investigates the population history of Finland:
"The worm in the fruit of the mitochondrial DNA tree"
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...
Mailbag: Statistics and future evolution
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...
An (old) interview with Warren Ewens
I ran across an interview between Anna Plutinski and population geneticist Warren Ewens.
More on the X variation conundrum
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...
"Hundreds of natural selection studies could be wrong"
Happily, though, the study isn’t about our method for finding recent selection!
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...
When genetic drift reduces entropy
This is the third in a series on information theory and tests for recent selection. The first post, “Information theory: a short ...
mtDNA selection in Iceland?
Leave it to me to have readers unwilling to ignore selection in recent populations! Here’s an e-mail:
Genetic drift eliminated rare mtDNA haplotypes from Iceland
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...
Could genetic drift really break your heart?
Are these people crazy?
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...
The Amish heart-protecting triglyceride-busting null mutation
Toni Pollin and colleagues (2008) report one of the simplest medical research studies you’ll ever see:
Genetic differentiation within Europe
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...
Some genetic drift graphs with Mathematica
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 ...
Sample sizes and the "Neandertal haplogroup"
I have an excellent e-mail question about last week’s Neandertal mtDNA paper, which has provoked a lot of commentary.
Sewall Wright and migration
DavidB at Gene Expression continues his wonderful series on Sewall Wright with a detailed post on the population genetics of migration.
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 ...
The (non-)neutral Neandertals
OK, I'm clearly going to have to cut out the beer if I'm going to do anything about stories like this one:
The (non-)neutral Neandertals
OK, I'm clearly going to have to cut out the beer if I'm going to do anything about stories like this one:
Sewall Wright and the factors of evolution
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...
Sewall Wright and the factors of evolution
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...
The "dark matter" of modern human origins
I'm just looking through the January/February 2008 Evolutionary Anthropology, which is all about modern human origins in Africa. The special issue resulted ...
The "dark matter" of modern human origins
I'm just looking through the January/February 2008 Evolutionary Anthropology, which is all about modern human origins in Africa. The special issue resulted ...
Why accelerated adaptive evolution is faster evolution
RPM at Evolgen has a post raising a concern I've been seeing a lot the last week or two:
Why accelerated adaptive evolution is faster evolution
RPM at Evolgen has a post raising a concern I've been seeing a lot the last week or two:
"The catechism about genetic drift"
Razib has been working over genetic drift real good (concerning effective population size and population history, and founder effects). It deserves it.
"The catechism about genetic drift"
Razib has been working over genetic drift real good (concerning effective population size and population history, and founder effects). It deserves it.
Drifting away from selection
Following up on yesterday's post on annoying misconceptions, I noticed Razib had posted his own candidate:
Drifting away from selection
Following up on yesterday's post on annoying misconceptions, I noticed Razib had posted his own candidate:
Selection and drift in early Homo
Ackermann and Cheverud (2004) consider the pattern of selection necessary to change a nonrobust australopithecine cranium (i.e. Sts 5) into a robust austral...
Selection and drift in early Homo
Ackermann and Cheverud (2004) consider the pattern of selection necessary to change a nonrobust australopithecine cranium (i.e. Sts 5) into a robust austral...