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Search Results for '"lactase persistence"'
Lactase persistence and BMI – milk does a body fat?
As you know lactase persistence (LP), which confers the ability to digest lactose sugar as an adult, is an evolutionarily recent development. On the order of 1/3 of the human population exhibits LP, due to a variety of genetic mutations which seem to arise in the cultural background of the domestication of cattle. Some have […]
What genes can't tell us about lactase persistence
Lactase persistence results in the ability to break down the lactose sugar in milk as an adult, lactase being the enzyme which breaks down lactose. If one can not digest that sugar, and still consumes milk, then one exhibits the symptoms of lactose intolerance. Originally diagnosed as a disease it has come to light that […]
Lactase persistence correlates with greater weight
Dienekes reports on an abstracts for paper presentations at the ESHG 2009. This was is particularly interesting: European Lactase Persistence Allele is Associated With Increase in Body Mass Index J. A. Kettunen et al. The global prevalence of obesity, usually indexed by body mass index (BMI) cut-offs, has increased significantly in the recent decades, mainly […]
The spread of lactase persistence
Interesting bit of interdisciplinary work on the spread of lactase persistance: Thomas found that the gene variant coincided well with the rise of animal domestication, indicating that humans became dairy farmers almost as soon as they began to keep animals. To track the gene’s spread across Europe, Thomas designed a computer model that took into […]
Lactase persistence in Britain
Lactase persistence-related genetic variant: population substructure and health outcomes: Lactase persistence is an autosomal-dominant trait that is common in European-derived populations. A basic tendency for lactase persistence to increase from the southeast to the northwest across European populations has been noted, but such trends within countries have not been extensively studied. We genotyped the C/T-13910 […]
Convergent evolution of lactase persistence – part n
Note: I got this article via AJHG’s RSS. It doesn’t seem to have gone live on the site so there might be temporary problems accessing the link. Evidence of Still-Ongoing Convergence Evolution of the Lactase Persistence T-13910 Alleles in Humans: A single-nucleotide variant, C/T-13910, located 14 kb upstream of the lactase gene (LCT), has been […]
Selection without adjective and bound
In my post below where I take a stand against the tired, but inevitable, assumption that a post demographic transition society necessarily entails a cessation of biology evolution, a reader brings up a trite but specious observation: But you’re missing the point really. We’ve slowed (not stopped because it can’t be stopped) because we now […]
Soft sweeps in the Ethiopian highlands
The trait of lactase persistence (lactose tolerance) is probably one of the better schoolbook examples of natural selection in human populations. The reasons for this are probably two-fold. There is a very strong signature of selection within a specific gene known to associate with the trait in question in many populations. And, there is a […]
Distributed variation prefers the golden mean
One of the things that people like to do when thinking about evolutionary processes is to consider future predictions of a model. The problem with this is that evolutionary trajectories are not defined just by linear transitions driven by powerful positive selection. There are long term balancing forces which result in modulated equilibria. In some […]
How the race, intelligence, and genetics question will semi-resolve within the next 10 years
Prompted by my post Ta-Nehisi Coates reached out to Neil Risch for clarification on the nature (or lack thereof) of human races. All for the good. The interview is wide ranging, and I recommend you check it out. Read the comments too! Very enlightening (take that however you want). When it comes to this debate […]
Is Girls’ Generation the outcome of the Pleistocene mind?
There’s an excellent paper up at Cell right now, Modeling Recent Human Evolution in Mice by Expression of a Selected EDAR Variant. It synthesizes genomics, computational modeling, as well as the effective execution of mouse models to explore non-pathological phenotypic variation in humans. It was likely due the last element that this paper, which pushes […]
The causes of evolutionary genetics
A few days ago I was browsing Haldane’s Sieve,when I stumbled upon an amusing discussion which arose on it’s “About” page. This “inside baseball” banter got me to thinking about my own intellectual evolution. Over the past few years I’ve been delving more deeply into phylogenetics and phylogeography, enabled by the rise of genomics, the […]
The crowds knows better than you?
Justin Wolfers & Betsy Stevenson have a piece up in Bloomberg, Crowds Are This Election’s Real Winners. In The Signal and the Noise Nate Silver has a chapter on Wolfers’ belief that prediction markets are superior to the sort of quantitative analysis that is his stock & trade. The belief isn’t based on an intuition. […]
The Bushmen tell us a lot about human evolution because they are humans who have evolved
When it comes to the human genetics of the Khoe-San there’s a little that’s stale and unoriginal for me in terms of presentation. The elements are always composed the same. The Bushmen are the “most ancient” humans, who can tell us something about “our past,” about “our evolution.” Tried & tested banalities just bubble forth […]
Why northern Europeans are taller than southern Europeans?
In part, genes. Luke Jostins reported this from a conference last year, so not too surprising. Evidence of widespread selection on standing variation in Europe at height-associated SNPs. Let me jump to the summary: In summary, we have provided an empirical example of widespread weak selection on standing variation. We observed genetic differences using multiple […]
Rise of the planet of the Indo-Europeans
In response to my post below a friend emailed me the above sentence. As I suggest below it sounds crazy, and I don’t know if I believe it. But here’s an abstract from the Reich lab from June: Estimating a date of mixture of ancestral South Asian populations Linguistic and genetic studies have demonstrated that […]
The milkmen
Dienekes and Maju have both commented on a new paper which looked at the likelihood of lactase persistence in Neolithic remains from Spain, but I thought I would comment on it as well. The paper is: Low prevalence of lactase persistence in Neolithic South-West Europe. The location is on the fringes of the modern Basque […]
The gift of the gopi
Krishna with milk-maids Unlike in some Asian societies dairy products are relatively well known in South Asia. Apparently at some point my paternal grandmother’s family operated a milk production business. This is notable because Bengal is not quite the land of pastoralists. In much of North India milk and milk-products loom larger, in particular ghee. […]
Crohn's disease is about barely keeping you alive
The Pith: Natural selection is a quick & dirty operator. When subject to novel environments it can react rapidly, bringing both the good and the bad. The key toward successful adaptation is not perfection, but being better than the alternatives. This may mean that many contemporary diseases are side effects of past evolutionary genetic compromises. […]
Non-zero sum transitions in the human past
A few people have pointed me to the recent paper in Science, Tenfold Population Increase in Western Europe at the Neandertal–to–Modern Human Transition. The basic result is obvious, and not totally revolutionary: anatomically modern humans may simply have demographically absorbed the Neandertals (the word “absorbed” has many connotations here obviously). The results are clear in […]
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