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Spatial dispersal, parallel adaptation, and the "Stooge effect"
Peter Ralph and Graham Coop have an interesting paper in the current Genetics, titled, "Parallel Adaptation: One or Many Waves of Advance of an Advantageous Allele?" [1] Fisher [2] famously considered...
View ArticleRidded of rinderpest
Donald McNeil, Jr.:: In only the second elimination of a disease in history, rinderpest — a virus that used to kill cattle and wildlife by the millions — has been declared wiped off the face of the...
View ArticleThis is a blog
Farhad Manjoo at Slate enters an essay, "This Is Not A Blog Post" hand-wringing about the convergence of blogs and magazines. Soon, Gawker will no longer be a blog. The same goes for other sites in the...
View ArticleBackdrop to scientist quotes
JR Minkel did a story on evolved sex differences for Scientific American ("Student Surveys Contradict Claims of Evolved Sex Differences"). Personally, I never take the results of student surveys to be...
View ArticleNeolithic milk fog
Razib points today to an article in Der Spiegel about the revival of folk migration as an explanation for the Neolithic in Europe. His post ("Völkerwanderung back with a vengeance") is worth reading....
View ArticleLeigh Van Valen
I have word that Leigh Van Valen died yesterday. Widely known in evolutionary biology for the "Red Queen hypothesis", he also contributed to the study of human evolution and was a frequent contributor...
View ArticleNeandertals and the death rays from outer space
OK, so maybe it wasn't volcanoes. Jean-Pierre Valet and Hélène Valladas in a brand new paper [1] propose that geomagnetic excursions at around 40,000 and around 32,000 years ago would have weakened the...
View ArticleSpecies concept overview
John Wilkins is an expert on species concepts in biology; he has written a short piece for wide circulation on the topic which is archived at his blog: "How many species concepts are there?" I just...
View Article"You could blue screen Ardi"
The Guardian is running an interview with Pauline Fowler, whose company Animated Extras has been involved in many film and television projects where apes and hominins are part of the cast. It's an...
View ArticleAncestry unzipped
One of the incredible benefits of the open source approach to genomics is that non-practitioners have a chance to see how interpretations are built. Sometimes it's a real "warts and all" picture of...
View ArticleSloth bombers
Brian Switek notes a new study on the locomotor dynamics of sloths. I perked up when reading this passage... Superficial appearances to the contrary, two-toed and three-toed sloths are not very closely...
View ArticlemtDNA, 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 [1]: Gene Genealogies Strongly Distorted by Weakly Interfering...
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"Such words as the tide dictates"
The Guardian has a delightful excerpt of a book about typography -- Just My Type, by Simon Garfield. I don't know if it has a U.S. publisher yet, but its author has a wonderful way of describing the...
View ArticleNosferatu
Does this word not sound like the midnight call of the Bird of Death? Just asking....
View ArticleOzzy Osbourne, archaic human
Via a reader: The Daily Mail really aims for the lowest common denominator of genetics: "We've all suspected, now it's official: Ozzy Osbourne IS a Neanderthal" He claims his ‘superhuman’ genes have...
View ArticlePaul Martin
Sadly, Paul Martin died last month. A reader sent along a remembrance from the University of Arizona. Martin is best known as an advocate for the "overkill" hypothesis for the extinction of Pleistocene...
View ArticleZhirendong puts the chin in China
A 100,000-year-old modern human from China? That's the claim made by Liu and colleagues [1], who report on a mandible and isolated teeth from Zhirendong, in South China. The remains lie under a thin...
View ArticlePlague from within
Ewen Callaway describes work probing the biology of a chimpanzee endogenous retrovirus: "Ancient chimp virus 'brought back to life'" The ancient virus exploits a transport protein that normally pipes...
View ArticleOverheard
GOODWIN: Are atoms made of smaller atoms? ME: No, atoms are made of smaller particles, called protons, neutrons and electrons. GOODWIN: I'm a neutron and you're a proton. LUCY: No, I'm a neutron!...
View ArticleNow for anthropological genomics
The first of the papers describing results from the 1000 Genomes project has been released today in Nature [1]. This is "big project" genomics news. Like many announcements of this kind, it represents...
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