Genetic drift eliminated rare mtDNA haplotypes from Iceland
How powerful has genetic drift been in recent human evolution? That's the question I raised the other day with reference to the claim that a heart disease risk-inducing allele had become common by...
View ArticlemtDNA selection in Iceland?
Leave it to me to have readers unwilling to ignore selection in recent populations! Here's an e-mail: Why couldn't the Icelandic genetic changes have been the result of selection that favored some...
View ArticleClik here to view.
When genetic drift reduces entropy
This is the third in a series on information theory and tests for recent selection. The first post, “Information theory: a short introduction”, covered some of the basics of entropy. The second post,...
View ArticlePlumbing for bottlenecks
My series on mutual information and tests of selection (which began with "Information theory: a short introduction") is at a branching point. One of the critical factors determining the power of such...
View Article"Hundreds of natural selection studies could be wrong"
Happily, though, the study isn't about our method for finding recent selection! Instead, Masatoshi Nei and colleagues at Penn State have the long knives out for tests of selection based on excess amino...
View ArticleMore 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 come to opposite conclusions, based on...
View ArticleAn (old) interview with Warren Ewens
I ran across an interview between Anna Plutinski and population geneticist Warren Ewens. I cannot say enough about Ewens' book, Mathematical Population Genetics. If you can work through it, you can do...
View ArticleMailbag: Statistics and future evolution
I was trying to find out more about recent research predicting a relative convergence of racial features in future generations (but I don't know anything about "rapid evolution by drift" or things like...
View Article"The worm in the fruit of the mitochondrial DNA tree"
François Balloux (2009) has a polemic in the online access area of Heredity presenting references about mtDNA selection, and arguing that the use of this single genetic marker is no longer warranted...
View ArticleThe Finnish line
A new paper by Jukka Palo and colleagues investigates the population history of Finland: The Finnish population in Northern Europe has been a target of extensive genetic studies during the last...
View ArticleGenealogy and genetics
Larry Moran writes, "Are you a descendant of Charlemagne?"Thousands of amateur genealogists have contributed to a huge database of family relationships, including genetic analyses. What does this teach...
View ArticleSelection 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 here for people to have access after and beyond...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Genetic drift
Synopsis: Many changes in gene frequencies are caused by random chance differences in reproduction.If everyone in a population lived a long life, mated, and reproduced absolutely equally (two offspring...
View ArticleFounder effect
Synopsis: The founder effect is a special case of genetic drift that can happen when a small number of individuals found a new population The founder effect is caused by genetic drift in a small number...
View ArticleVestigial traits under the microscope
Australian paleoanthropologist Darren Curnoe has been blogging at The Conversation, with some interesting posts. This week, he has written on the topic of vestigial organs and phylogenetic inertia:...
View Article
