razib
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From here: "Cronin et al. (1991) then discovered that mtDNA of brown bears is paraphyletic with respect to polar bears. That is, the mtDNA of brown bears of the Alexander Archipelago in southeastern Alaska is more closely related to the mtDNA of polar bears than it is to the mtDNA of other brown…
More Neandertal news, as promised!
John Hawks is getting so much traffic that his site is getting bogged down. Anyway, he posts on the two studies that came out on Neandertal genomic sequencing. No big news, Neandertals are very different, and there isn't a great deal of evidence for mixing…
This comment made me aware that I should probably be more precise about how I view the "new model," which I will provisionally label "Ecotype Persistence" (EP), as being different from Multi-regionalism in the old school. Consider two variables:
Full genome content
Phenotypically salient…
The Out of Africa Replacement Model
The Multi-regional Model
The Introgression Model?
I have a question mark in the last case because this idea that we can have a simple to illustrate and verbally elegant "model" that we promulgate across the land might have to go. Parsimony to the back…
The Lord Our God is One! Check out my results from the Belief-O-Matic below....
1. Unitarian Universalism (100%)
2. Secular Humanism (98%)
3. Mainline to Liberal Christian Protestants (88%)
4. Liberal Quakers (84%)
5. Nontheist (75%)
6. Theravada Buddhism (68%)
7. Bah�'� Faith (65%)
8. Neo-…
My next post on Gillespie's chapter in Evolutionary Genetics: Concepts & Case Studies is going to cover "genetic draft." I don't know when I'll get to it, so I'll point to Robert Skipper's post on the topic from six months ago. Yes, selection is proximately stochastic. Like this.
I have spoken of the probability of extinction and the rate of substitution once past extinction, but now to something more prosaic, genetic drift. My post is based on John Gillespie's treatment in Evolutionary Genetics: Concepts & Case Studies. Like R.A. Fisher he does not think much of…
Over at my other weblog there is a post up, Genomics and socialized health care, which asks if the new DNA era might not explode the acturial edifice that is modern health insurance in the United States. I suspect in this case many will welcome a "broken" system which needs to be replaced by a…
Question:
What are the best pickup lines for scientists and science-savvy folk?...
I'll go narrow-church: low mutational load baby, look beyond the proximate and focus on the ultimate.
It seems that The Family That Walks on All Fours is now on NOVA. I don't have a television so I won't be seeing it, but some of you might catch a re-run. Years ago I remember a slogan: "If PBS doesn't do it, who will?" Hm.
Ancient Crash, Epic Wave is a story in The New York Times about an enormous impact 4,800 years which might have had world-wide repercussions:
At the southern end of Madagascar lie four enormous wedge-shaped sediment deposits, called chevrons, that are composed of material from the ocean floor. Each…
This is more for google, but if you missed anything, you should check it out. Here is a replay of the introgression & Neandertal related posts....
Preview:
Neandertal & H. sapiens sapiens interbreeding
Neandertal-"modern" mixing
Introgression related posts over the past 6 months
Main course…
Scientific American has a nice link round up on l'affaire Lahn & Neandertals.
Aziz points me to this article over at alt.muslim which reviews Murder in Amsterdam by Ian Buruma. It is a fair review, but this caught my attention:
...Buruma's parallelisation of the careers of both Fortuyn and Van Gogh and their capitalisation on Islamophobia begs the question of how the…
John Hawks has a long post on introgression in the context of the Species Concept problem.
The Inductivist cranked the GSS to figure which American ethnic groups are spiritual and which are not, and this is what he found:
SpiritualityEthnic Group
1.92East Asians
2.78Scandanavians
2.8Italians
2.9Irish
2.9Germans
2.91Mexicans
2.95English/Welsh
3.12American Indians
3.26Blacks
3.29Scots
It's been a bit rainy in the Northwest, Kevin Vranes has some commentary. There is a joke that one reason that the Pacific Northwest is so unchurched is that God is all around us nature. Usually we are taking about majestic vistas, but sometimes it is also about the fury of the Lord.
This week's selection from Islam Online is pretty strange, and involves transexuality and its relationship to Islamic law. Enjoy below the fold....
Question:
I have a very strange question. I'am 5 months ago turned to Islam alhamdulillah, I was a non-believer. Now I have a question about my past.…
Yesterday Michael Blowhard enthusiastically linked to the recent Neandertal introgression story, and a reader commented:
Don't bet on it, Michael. Paleoarchaeology postdoc. and regular Querencia reader Laura wrote to me off- blog:
"Saw your blog and the mention of the neanderthal interbreeding…
SEED hits the major points, and Paabo confirms:
At last, anthropology and genetics have a point of agreement in terms of the fate of Neanderthals. Henry Harpending, an anthropologist at the University of Utah who edited Lahn's paper, described the analysis supporting its conclusions as "quite…
From John Hawks:
I heard from a long-time correspondent this morning concerning introgression of microcephalin from archaic humans. I'm not sharing the whole message, but I thought it would be worth paraphrasing a key point for some thought.
The basic point is this: Why are we talking about "…
Since I will be writing a great deal about Neandertals, please keep this image in your mind. I know that most readers of this blog don't view Neandertals as chimps, but I check google news for evolution and genetics related topics and the recent spate of articles on archaic genomics did spawn a…
Two articles, here and here ($) on the Paabo group's sequencing attempt. Seems rather well timed. I strongly suspect that all the morphological papers that came out in the last few months anticipated Lahn's work, it isn't like stuff doesn't float around as pre-prints.
Chris Lydon quoted me again on Radio Open Source on the post election episode. It's in the last 10 minutes of the podcast. He read this whole section from my post last night:
The Democrats do not bring a smile to my face. They are lovers of big government and righteous paternalism. It seems…
Slashdot now has a post on Neandertal introgression:
While modern day eugenicists might all too eagerly read into these findings to draw their own politically biased conclusions, people such as myself, who happen to be of northern European ancestry, may find it fascinating that somewhere in our…
The paper of record reports on introgression. Here is a tantalizing tidbit:
Two other reports of DNA studies of possible mixing of human and related genes are expected to be published in the next few weeks.
...I have suspicions, but I'm in the dark, so I'll be checking in on John Hawks regularly…