Razib Khan
Human Genome Diversity Project preserves detailed info of isolated population groups
The recent "Genetic Atlas of Human Admixture History" shines a light on the useful, unique, and publicly available Human Genome ...
Ancestry and bitter tastes
I do love me some sprouts! Greens, bitters, strong flavors of all sorts. I’ve always been like this. Some of ...
How do traits trickle down from grandparents to grandchildren? Partially by chance.
Personal genome sequencing allows us to take a closer look at inheritance and highlights the situations in which genetic and ...
Why I love genetics
A few years ago I had a discussion with a friend about our academic backgrounds. She is a neurobiologist by ...
Evolution has a simple genetic skeleton
Genetics can seem complex, especially theoretical evolutionary models. But the reality is that these models are ultimately grounded in a ...
Tuberculosis and humans have been paired for ~100,000 years
The paper, Out-of-Africa migration and Neolithic coexpansion of Mycobacterium tuberculosis with modern humans, which just came out recently, has naturally been making a ...
Breeding a better companion cat?
John Bradshaw, author of Cat Sense: How the New Feline Science Can Make You a Better Friend to Your Pet, has ...
The Sports Gene: Athleticism as a complex trait
Sports Illustrated writer David Epstein has a new book out, The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance. The title strikes me ...
Ancestry testing as a Rorschach test
The website The Root often has a Q & A with various African Americans, famous and not so famous, about their genealogy ...
Natural selection is randomly inevitable
Evolutionary genetics as a field emerged in the early 20th century. There were some upsides to this. R. A. Fisher was alive, so ...
The statistics of genetic variation
You have probably heard or read that most genetic variation is within races, not between races. This assertion has led, in my opinion, to unwarranted inferences ...
The inbred lineage you can improve
Thanks to the efforts of geneticists the story of the extinction of the Spanish Habsburgs is now well known. They are in short a ...
Genetic diversity and intellectual disability
It is generally understood that inbreeding has some negative biological consequences for complex animals. But what, specifically, are the consequences of ...
The Y chromosome shall not die
The following is an edited excerpt. One of the weirder stories over the past decade in relation to the Y ...
Do liberals oppose genetically modified organisms more than conservatives?
The following is an excerpt. There has been recent talk about GMOs and political orientation recently. Keith Kloor has pointers to the ...
The genetic legacy of the conquistadors
The following is an edited excerpt. A few year ago there was a minor controversy when some evolutionary genomicists reported ...
The forecast on the race, genetics, and intelligence debate
The following is an editorial summary. It is often said that race is a social fact and a biological fiction ...
10,000 hours may gain you little if you have no talent
The following is an excerpt. A few years ago Malcolm Gladwell made the “10,000 hour rule” famous in his book Outliers. In practice (e.g., discussions ...
Why race as a biological construct matters
The following is an excerpt of a longer story. My own inclination has been to not get bogged down in ...
Don’t forget parents share genes with their offspring
The following is an excerpt. In 2002 I read The Blank Slate. With all due respect to Steven Pinker one of ...
Why a foolish instinct for love?
The following is an edited excerpt. I remember the specific moment when I was 13 that I became aware ...
The inevitability of eugenics as preventative health
The following is an edited excerpt. The real fundamental issue here is that genes are at least somewhat in the ...
Schizophrenia about genetics
The following is an edited excerpt. The genetics of schizophrenia is a fertile if fraught topic. But I won’t be discussing that ...
Pigmentation: the simplest of complex traits not so simple?
The following is an excerpt. One of the pitfalls about talking about genetics, especially human genetics, is that the public wants ...
Those idiot savant Neandertals
The following is an edited excerpt. Another Neandertal paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Basically [it says that] the morphology ...
Genes are not esoteric knowledge
The following is an edited excerpt. Over at Slate the advice columnist received an email from a man who found out that his wife ...
Why culture is chunky and genes are creamy
The following is an excerpt. My daughter has four grandparents. Genetically she is a little over 25 percent her paternal ...
The myth of common cuckoldry
The following is an excerpt. One of the quasi-facts which I often stumble upon is the idea that in 10 ...
