Chicken ancient DNA and natural selection during medieval times
Three years ago, Liisa Loog and coworkers published a fascinating paper quantifying natural selection from ancient DNA data in chickens: “Inferring Allele Fr...
All posts tagged with natural selection
The developmental obstetrical dilemma
Alik Huseynov and colleagues have a data-rich paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences examining age-related changes in the human pelvis:...
Notable: Selection on the human chin
Notable paper: Pampush, James D. (2015) Selection played a role in the evolution of the human chin. Journal of Human Evolution (in press) doi:10.1016/j.jhev...
Rapid adaptation to captivity in salmon
I just want to note this study by Mark Christie and colleagues Christie:salmon:2011 because it is such a clear demonstration of powerful selection working on...
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...
Libidinous Neandertal men and the women who loved them
I keep seeing people, who really ought to know better, saying that the new Neandertal genome results show that the gene flow must have been Neandertal men ma...
Mailbag: Holding on to ancient DNA
Hi, It is often claimed that ancient genes that were once very adaptable are discarded over time by drift, bottle necks etc. What if an ancient trait wer...
An (old) interview with Warren Ewens
I ran across an interview between Anna Plutinski and population geneticist Warren Ewens.
Dude, it's called "relaxed selection"
This is a doofy story running on MSNBC without an author byline: “Shrinking of Scottish sheep tied to warming”. Why do I say “doofy”? Take a look at the way ...
Quote: Elliott Sober on the force of selection
Elliott Sober’s book, The Nature of Selection, discusses the philosophical underpinnings of evolutionary explanation in relation to other sciences. I turn to...
Mitochondrial DNA selection review
I was reading through an excellent review of the recent literature about mtDNA and selection, from Damian Dowling and colleagues (2008). The review focuses o...
A new study of genetic introgression and human ancestry
Fed up on hobbit news? Well, I’m going to do my best this week to scoop the science journalists, covering stories in paleoanthropology that ought to get some...
"Hundreds of natural selection studies could be wrong"
Happily, though, the study isn’t about our method for finding recent selection!
African origins and phenotypic variance
I just read the new paper by Philipp Gunz and colleagues, titled, “Early modern human diversity suggests subdivided population structure and a complex out-of...
mtDNA selection in Iceland?
Leave it to me to have readers unwilling to ignore selection in recent populations! Here’s an e-mail:
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):
Quote: "A noble edifice"
Darwin, in The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication, volume 2, pp. 248-249.
The unbearable hotness of Neandertals
According to the Telegraph (UK), Neandertals became extinct because their mitochondria leaked excess heat:
Information theory and mutual information between genetic loci
This is the second in a series on information theory and tests for recent selection. The first entry, "Information theory: a short introduction" reviewed the...
Positive selection and the tip of the iceberg
Razib points to a new paper by Johansson and Gyllensten, in which they develop a comparison of FST and haplotype block length as a test of positive selection...
Evo-devo and HACNS1
Science has a very important paper in the current issue about the evolution of a gene enhancer in hominids, expressed in forelimb development and concentrate...
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.
Life history and disease in Tasmanian devils
The keywords to the article include, “carnivorous marsupial” and “precocious breeding.” What better teaser could you possibly hope for?
Zimmer "flounders"
Carl Zimmer puts in a nice entry on the new flounder evolution paper, covering the history of the question including the debate between Darwin and Mivart abo...
Weed species (part 1)
This is the first in a series of essays titled, "Practical Evolution." Here are links to the whole series and the series introduction. I've decided to break ...
FOXP2 is really recent, it really did introgress (if it's not contamination)
That's the thrust of a technical comment by Graham Coop and colleagues, now online in Molecular Biology and Evolution. The letter refers to the extraction o...
Evolution of the monkeyflowers
Spring has finally come to us here in the North, and it's time to start thinking about planting. So, when I went to a seminar yesterday by John Willis, it w...
Why have variants influencing recombination rate been selected in non-Africans?
A complicated story is tangled through this paper by Augustine Kong and colleagues, and I don't see where it may end. But here's the abstract:
Bees R Us
The PNAS Early Edition this week includes a paper by bee genome researchers Amro Zayed and Charles Whitfield. After a short review of honeybee phylogeny, th...
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:
Tracking back to acceleranistas
I've had a very busy couple of days, and haven't been maintaining my reading-and-linking as much as I had hoped. So I wanted to take a few minutes to do a q...
Why human evolution accelerated
n. b. This is a story about my work on recent human evolution, describing some of the main results and how the work came about. The story refers to my paper ...
Acceleration rarely-asked questions
Usually an FAQ starts with the easiest-to-answer questions. Those are, after all, the ones that are asked frequently!
Human evolution has accelerated
The embargo has now ended on the second, and far more important paper that I mentioned the other day. It is a product of work I've been doing with Bob Moyzi...
Natural selection 101. Episode 1: The miracle of compound interest
--Originally posted August 24, 2007.
Treat selection equally
Massimo Pigliucci gives a combative review of Michael Lynch's new book, The Origins of Genome Architecture. A short passage lauding the books first 12 chapt...
Quote: Selection is "widely ignored"
From p. xviii-xix of the preface of Selection, by Graham Bell (Chapman and Hall, New York, 1997):
Looking for the balances
A nice paper from last August by K. L. Bubb and colleagues went looking for new balanced polymorphisms in the human genome. They didn't find any.
Everybody wins but the short-legged anoles
This quick article by Jonathan Losos and colleagues is entirely unsurprising, but good to read:
Choose altruism
Reading Yann Klementidis today, I caught a reference to a paper by Traulsen and Nowak in PNAS, titled "Evolution of cooperation by multilevel selection." Th...
Has the dam broken on mtDNA selection?
The current Science has a paper by Eric Bazin and colleagues comparing mtDNA diversity with population size, history and ecology of 3000 animal species.
Drifting away from selection
Following up on yesterday's post on annoying misconceptions, I noticed Razib had posted his own candidate:
Variation in NAT1 and NAT2
There's a new paper in AJHG by Patin and colleagues, which is just chock full of interesting stuff. The genes studied are NAT1 and NAT2, called "N-acetyltra...
At least 10 percent of human genes under recent selection
It's hard to beat the abstract of this paper by Eric Wang and colleagues (2006):
The coming adventure of SCML1
This is interesting:
Genome-wide selection in humans
I spent like a half-hour looking for this paper this morning, which I didn't take notes on when it came out. I don't know if Nature is blocking Google Schol...
More on selection outside Africa
I have a feeling I'll have many occasions to use that headline.
Looking for local selection via STR diversity
This is one of those old papers I run across sometimes doing research:
The problem with HapMap: a parable of potholes
I've been sifting through some HapMap-related stuff. It's a tremendous resource for looking at human variation, but it also presents some tremendous problem...
Drift, selection, and history
Now that we're in an age where natural selection on functional genes is recognized to have occurred in historic time, stories like last week's paper on the ...
As far as cladistics can take mtDNA analysis
In the early access online edition of Genetics, there is a new paper by Toomas Kivisild and (many) colleagues, titled "The role of selection in the evolutio...
Mitochondrial DNA and "performance enhancement"
One of the articles by Douglas Wallace referenced in the previous post covering mtDNA selection is subtitled "On the road to therapeutics and performance en...
Mitochondrial DNA adaptations in living human populations
I had read this paper by Ruiz-Pesini et al. (2004) before, but the particular combination of factors it suggests came together for me in a new way recently:...
How much sex selection is there?
I discuss biotechnology and society in my genetics course, and today I wandered across this working paper discussing sex control of offspring, including sel...
Selection on synonymous mutations
Here's an interesting thought:
Kreitman on human mtDNA selection
This is an old paper that I ran across today, a review of tests of selection with application to humans. Martin Kreitman is well known as a specialist in th...
Evaluating selection and demography in human evolution
Williamson et al. (2005) present a new mathematical method for deriving information about population size change and selection from the allele frequency spe...
Diet and mtDNA selection
Lowell and Shulman (2005) report on the possible links between the metabolic defects underlying type 2 diabetes and mitochondrial dysfunction. These links g...
The probability of parallel evolution
Orr (2005) considers the likelihood of the same mutants being fixed in two populations as a function of parallel selection, compared to drift. The model use...
How much selection does it take?
I was involved in a discussion this weekend that I think reveals much about the current state of evolutionary genomics. The forum was the "Neanderthals Rev...