Monthly Archives: July 2012

Madagascar was originally settled by Indonesians, specifically people from South Borneo, possibly as early as 300 BC.   Recent genetic work on their mtDNA suggests that the number of founding mothers was small, around 30, and those researchers have speculated that … Continue reading →

Joseph Greenberg believed that the native languages of the Americas fell into three macro-families: Eskimos-Aleut, Na-Dene (mainly the Athabaskan languages, spoken in Western Canada and the American Southwest), and Amerind (all of the rest).  Often this theory was paired with … Continue reading →

 There has been, over the past couple of generations, a gradual tendency for the Presidency to acquire power and the trappings of power to an almost Imperial extent.  Certainly Presidential transportation is one of the most spectacular examples: having two of … Continue reading →

The model that Greg is dancing around suggests (1) that there is variation in mutation rate dependent on temperature or something correlated with temperature, (2) higher mutation rates cause a higher genetic burden in human populations, (3) leading to IQ … Continue reading →

Several recent papers  give me the impression that there is regional variation in mutational load.   One can slice this a number of ways. A recent Science article looked at mutations that knocked out genes – loss-of-function or LOF mutations.  Mutational … Continue reading →

At the recent SMBE meeting in Dublin, there was an interesting talk (judging from the abstract) about archaic genes in modern humans.  The  authors were Sriram Sankararaman, Nick Patterson, Swapan Mallick,, Svante Paabo, and David Reich. They believe that they … Continue reading →

Big pharma has taken a new course over the past few years.  In the past, most useful drugs originated in some kind of living organism – penicillin,  quinine, insulin, etc etc.   Nowadays, big pharmaceutical companies use combinatorial chemistry and computer … Continue reading →