Tag Archives: Homo sapiens

500 Queer Scientists

When I heard the first time about 500 Queer Scientists (@QueerSci, #QueerSTEM) I thought for myself ‘Why do we need to support STEM scientists based on their sexual orientation?’. This is how ignorant and clumsy I am. We got sensitized … Continue reading

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We can make academia more family friendly

This one tickled me for too long. It became a serious itch and I feel I have to say something. Two weeks ago, Rebecca Calisi Rodríguez and a Working Group of Mothers in Science published an opinion article in the … Continue reading

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Population genomics in the "melting pot"

North America is full of new arrivals. Europeans colonized the continent starting half a millennium ago, displaced and eradicated native populations, and brought enslaved workers from Africa with them — and further immigrants have followed ever since. This mass movement … Continue reading

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Divergence and Linked Background Selection

We have widely discussed the reduction in neutral diversity due to demography and linked selection effects (e.g. selective sweeps and hitchhiking, or background selection) in several previous posts (e.g see here, here, and here). However, how linked selection affects neutral divergence … Continue reading

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Ice-Age Euro-trips

Recent works that attempt to get at human migrations inside Europe paint a complex portrait of migratory events, admixture with archaic hominids, and adaptive evolution to new geographies, and a changing global climate. Analyzing whole genomes of 51 ancient humans … Continue reading

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Long distance dispersal of modern humans outside of Africa

Long distance dispersal (LDD) has long known to be an artifact of human migrations out of Africa. However, the effects of LDD on modern human diversity, and models of LDD in human colonization are yet to be characterized. Using an … Continue reading

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Sweptaway – Part 1

Brace yourselves for a series of new posts on selection, especially with articles from the special Molecular Ecology issue on “Detecting selection in natural populations: making sense of genome scans and towards alternative solutions” starting to roll out! Selective sweeps … Continue reading

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PCA of multilocus genotypes in R

An earlier post from Mark Christie showed up on my feed on calculating allele frequencies from genotypic data in R, and I wanted to put together a quick tutorial on making PCA (Principal Components Analysis) plots using genotypes. I used … Continue reading

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Who came first – the Paleo- or Native American?

In yet another infamous Science vs Nature race, two studies published this Tuesday toss more cans of worms at the ongoing debate about the founding of the Americas – with disparate findings. Uh oh. Skoglund et al. Nature (2015) Genetic … Continue reading

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Societal constructs, and Genetic diversity

While we grapple with numerous discoveries of variation in genomic diversity in humans, interest has subsequently risen in understanding their causes/results. Two recent papers describe experiments to determine (a) the effects of marital rules (who gets to marry whom) on … Continue reading

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