Is Dryopithecus an ancient gorilla?
I pass along with little comment this New Scientist article in which David Begun is claiming that the fossil ape Dryopithecus may actually be an extinct memb...
All posts tagged with mutation rate
A longer timescale for human evolution
During the last few years, the best estimates of the human single nucleotide mutation rate have been cut in half. Until recently, estimates of mutation rate ...
Will a Jurassic placental mammal make the molecular clock make sense?
A new paper in Nature by Zhe-Xi Luo and colleagues Luo:Jurassic:2011 reports the discovery of a 160-million-year-old early mammal, Juramaia, which they attri...
More on the mutation rate
I’ve received several questions over the last few weeks about human genome-wide mutation rates. Some people are noticing heterogeneity in mutation rate estim...
Mailbag: Mutations and perfect people
A friend of mine and I were discussing evolution, my friend is a Christian and told me that the human mutation rate is 1 in ten billion cell duplications, an...
What is the human mutation rate?
Last spring I wrote about a study that used whole-genome comparisons between parents and offspring to estimate the rate of per-genome mutation in humans (“A ...
mtDNA, purifying selection and "distorted" genealogies
I’m going to pass along this paper without much comment, it’s by Jon Seger and colleagues and it came out earlier this year in Genetics Seger:2010:
A low human mutation rate may throw everything out of whack
Last week, a paper looking for the genetic causes of Miller syndrome reported the whole genomes of four members of a single family: two siblings with the dis...
Ancient penguin mtDNA and substitution rates
Here’s an example of a really incomprehensible press release:
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...