Category Archives: Genetics

Once upon a time, people often said that ~10% of children had a biological father other than their nominal father, usually called false paternity or nonpaternity. This notion was particularly common in sociobiological circles. There were others who thought the … Continue reading →

if someone were to try to create a Neanderthal a few years from now, starting with ancient DNA, they’d have to have worry a lot about data errors, because such errors would translate into mutations, which might be harmful or … Continue reading →

Kevin Mitchell wrote an essay this summer (“The genetics of stupidity”) that got some attention. The idea is that most or all of the genetic influence affecting intelligence is genetic load.  Although each deleterious mutation is very rare,  the average  … Continue reading →

According to the Decode results,  mothers contribute 15 mutations, regardless of age, while men contribute 25 + 2*(g-20) mutations, when g  is the average paternal age.  As I pointed out earlier, if g is the same in both sexes, the … Continue reading →

According to Jim Crow”s 2006 article,  base substitutions are mostly (overwhelmingly) from males and increase with paternal age, but small deletions are contributed about equally by males and females, with no noticeable age effect. Probably the deletions happen during meiosis. … Continue reading →

About 1.5% of the genome codes for proteins, and we understand proteins (and the genetic code) well enough to analyze mutations in those coding regions.  About 70% of nucleotide changes in codons change the amino acid sequence. Most of those … Continue reading →

Human population genetics in the 1960s was obsessed with the question of genetic load. Much of the motivation was concern about health consequences of radiation and nuclear weapons. We now know that radiation does bad things to organisms but that … Continue reading →

At this point, it seems that paternal age is a significant driver of the human mutation rate,  likely the main driver.   Obviously this implies that many medical problems are more common in the children of older fathers, which is … Continue reading →

Concerning the notion that there may be important regional differences in genetic load:   guys, at this point they’re not hypothetical. Last year they were, and I kept my suspicions to myself, but now they’ve been seen, been measured. It … Continue reading →