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Search Results for 'slc24a5'
Pigmentation: the simplest of complex traits not so simple?
One of the pitfalls about talking about genetics, especially human genetics, is that the public wants a specific gene for a specific trait. Ergo, the “God gene” or the “language gene.” In some cases science has been able to pull a rabbit out of the hat, and offer up a gene for a trait. But [...]
Evidence that Afrikaners surely have non-European ancestry
I was reviewing some literature for a blog-post-to-come and I noticed a figure in a paper I’ve long been aware of which indicates to me that Afrikaners surely have a non-trivial proportion of non-European ancestry. The paper is Population differences of two coding SNPs in pigmentation-related genes SLC24A5 and SLC45A2. It’s a forensics result. Basically [...]
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 [...]
Not all genes are created the same
The map to the right shows the frequencies of HGDP populations on SLC45A2, which is a locus that has been implicated in skin color variation in humans. It’s for the SNP rs16891982, and I yanked the figure from IrisPlex: A sensitive DNA tool for accurate prediction of blue and brown eye colour in the absence [...]
Europeans got less shaded in stages
The Pith: the evolution of lighter skin is complex, and seems to have occurred in stages. The current European phenotype may date to the end of the last Ice Age. A new paper in Molecular Biology and Evolution, The timing of pigmentation lightening in Europeans, is rather interesting. It’s important because skin pigmentation has been [...]
The law of reversion to type as cultural illusion
A comment below: Does the higher genetic diversity in sub-Saharan Africans explain why mixed children of blacks + other couples usually look more black than anything? As in, the higher number of genetic characteristics overwhelms those of the other parent and allows them to be present in the child. But this makes you ask: is [...]
Ashkenazi Jews are not inbred – 2
I know I excoriate readers of this weblog for being stupid, ignorant, or lazy. But this constant badgering does result in genuinely insightful and important comments precisely and carefully stated on occasion. I put up my previous post in haste, and when I published it I wasn’t totally happy with the evidence from which the [...]
Not out of Sheba
Liya Kebede, Credit There is a new paper, Ethiopian Genetic Diversity Reveals Linguistic Stratification and Complex Influences on the Ethiopian Gene Pool, which is being sensationalized in the media. For example, the BBC headline: ‘DNA clues to Queen of Sheba tale’. I assumed that this was just the media, but to my surprise the authors [...]
The evolution of the human face
The face is an important aspect of our phenotype. So important that facial recognition is one of many innate reflexive cognitive competencies. By this, I mean that you can recognize a face in a gestalt manner, just like you can recognize a set of three marbles. You don’t have to think about it in a [...]
Neanderthals came in all colors
There’s a report in Science about a new short paper about Neandertal pigmentation genetics. The context is this. First, in 2007 an ingenuous paper was published which inferred that it may be that Neandertals had red hair, at least based on an N = 2 from two divergent locations. The new study looks at three [...]
Natural selection and dopamine receptor genes
Long time readers will be familiar with the large literature in behavior genetics/genomics and dopamine receptor genes. So with that, I point you to a paper exploring the patterns of variation and their relationship to possible natural selection, No Evidence for Strong Recent Positive Selection Favoring the 7 Repeat Allele of VNTR in the DRD4 [...]
The social and biological construction of race
Many of our categories are human constructions which map upon patterns in nature which we perceive rather darkly. The joints about which nature turns are as they are, our own names and representations are a different thing altogether. This does not mean that our categories have no utility, but we should be careful of confusing [...]
Mendelism is not magic
Michelle points me to this article in The Lost Angeles Times, The Colors of the Family: I was holding my 1-year-old, ambling about downtown with some friends. White friends. She must have thought my boy belonged to one of them. There’s a simple explanation: I’m black but my son, Ashe, is white. At least he [...]
Peeling the population genetic Indian onion
There’s a new paper in The American Journal of Human Genetics, Shared and Unique Components of Human Population Structure and Genome-Wide Signals of Positive Selection in South Asia. It’s free, so go read it. I don’t have time to comment in detail, but I did read the paper, and I want to mention a few [...]
But it still adapts!
Dienekes and Maju recently pointed to a paper, Contrasting signals of positive selection in genes involved in human skin color variation from tests based on SNP scans and resequencing, in Investigative Genetics. Skin color is an interesting trait because it’s one of the big “wins” in human genomics over the past 10 years. To a great [...]
Mixed-race people are mildly complicated
I was pointed today to a piece in the BBC titled What makes a mixed race twin white or black?. The British media seems to revisit this topic repeatedly. There are perhaps three reasons I can offer for this. First, it tends toward sensationalism. Even though the BBC is relatively staid, when it comes to [...]
Dominance, the social construct that confuses
A story in The Los Angeles Times seems to point medical implications of being a sickle cell carrier, Sickle cell trait: The silent killer: At least 17 high school and college athletes’ deaths have been tied to sickle cell trait during the past 11 years. The group includes Olivier Louis, a player at Wekiva High [...]
Southeast Asian migrations, Indians and Tai
If you have not read my post “To the antipode of Asia”, this might be a good time to do so if you are unfamiliar with the history, prehistory, and ethnography of mainland Southeast Asia. In this post I will focus on mainland Southeast Asia, and how it relates implicitly to India and China genetically, [...]
The rise of genetic architecture
In science, like most things, one prefers simple over complex whenever possible. You keep adding variables until the explanatory juice starts hitting diminishing marginal returns. So cystic fibrosis is due to a mutation at one gene, and the disease expresses recessively at that locus. The reality is that one mutation accounts for ~65-70% of cystic [...]
Of association & evolution
Two of the main avenues of research which I track rather closely in this space are genome-wide association studies (GWAS), which attempt to establish a connection between a trait/disease and particular genetic markers, and inquiries into the evolutionary parameters which shape the structure of variation within the human genome. Often with specific relation to a particular [...]
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