Category Archives: Ashkenazi Jews

Live Not By Lies

Posted on April 8, 2018 by gcochran9

The Genomics of Race and Identity Reich starts out strong, telling the story of his work on identifying African-origin alleles that drive increased prostate cancer risk in African-Americans – and the dumbshit responses he got from his colleagues. He mentions … Continue reading →

Posted in Ashkenazi Jews, Book Reviews, Genetics | 188 Comments

Familial Mediterranean fever

Posted on January 9, 2015 by gcochran9

FMF is a recessive hereditary disorder caused by mutations in MEFV, the gene for the protein pyrin. Pyrin, produced in white blood cells,  inhibits inflammation, and the FMF mutations unleash inflammation to varying degrees. The disease manifests in painful inflammatory … Continue reading →

Posted in Ashkenazi Jews, Evolutionary Medicine, Genetics, Uncategorized | 9 Comments

Ashkenazi Ancestry revisited

Posted on September 9, 2014 by gcochran9

Shai Carmi has his article out on Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry.  A few comments: First, looks like a good job, on the whole. Perhaps Carmi had special training… Second, about dates: they assume a mutation rate of 1.44 x 10-8 per … Continue reading →

Posted in Ashkenazi Jews | 113 Comments

Ashkenazi Ancestry

Posted on June 24, 2014 by gcochran9

I’m looking at abstracts on Ashkenazi genetics from ASHG 2013 and SMBE 2014 – by the same group, with Shai Carmi as the lead author.  They did 128 whole genomes, 50x deep. They concluded Ashkenazi Jews were about 50% Middle … Continue reading →

Posted in Ashkenazi Jews, Genetics | 94 Comments

The Son Also Rises

Posted on March 23, 2014 by gcochran9

Greg Clark has a new book out, The Son Also Rises. His thesis, in short, is that moxie has high heritability. Most studies show fairly high social mobility from one generation to the next – but Clark finds (using surname … Continue reading →

Posted in Ashkenazi Jews, assortative mating, Book Reviews, Education, Genetics | 80 Comments

Silver Blaze

Posted on February 17, 2014 by gcochran9

The recent paper on three ancestral European populations has some truly interesting stuff buried deep in the supplements.   This is not the first time that this has happened: if you read the supplements to their big Neanderthal paper, back in … Continue reading →

Posted in Amerindians, Ashkenazi Jews, Denisovans, European Prehistory, Genetics, Indo-European, Linguistics, Neanderthals | 422 Comments

Jewish Moms

Posted on October 8, 2013 by gcochran9

For some time, we have known that many Jewish populations  had mostly-Near Eastern  paternal ancestry (looking at y-chromosomes) and mostly-local maternal ancestry  looking at mtDNA). Autosomal admixture studies generally agree. This is easiest to see when the host population is … Continue reading →

Posted in Ashkenazi Jews, Genetics | 123 Comments