The Pith: Natural selection is a quick & dirty operator. When subject to novel environments it can react rapidly, bringing both the good and the bad. The key toward successful adaptation is not perfection, but being better than the alternatives. This may mean that many contemporary diseases are side effects of past evolutionary genetic compromises.... Read More

The Pith: You are expected to have 30 new mutations which differentiate you from your parents. But, there is wiggle room around this number, and you may have more or less. This number may vary across siblings, and explain differences across siblings. Additionally, previously used estimates of mutation rates which may have been too high... Read More

The figure to the left is a three dimensional representation of principal components 1, 2, and 3, generated from a sample of Gujaratis from Houston, and Chinese from Denver. When these two populations are pooled together the Chinese form a very homogeneous cluster. They don't vary much across the three top explanatory dimensions of genetic... Read More

The Pith: In this post I examine the relationship between racial ancestry and cancer mortality risks conditioned on particular courses of treatment. I review research which indicates that the amount of Native American ancestry can be a very important signal as to your response to treatment if you have leukemia, as measured by probability of... Read More

I recall projections in the early 2000s that 25% of the American population would be employed as systems administrators circa 2020 if rates of employment growth at that time were extrapolated. Obviously the projections weren't taken too seriously, and the pieces were generally making fun of the idea that IT would reduce labor inputs and... Read More

It's just a fact that contemporary human evolutionary genetics has relied upon its potential insights into disease to generate funding, support and interest. I don't think that this is much of a silver lining when set next to the suffering caused by disease, but it's a silver lining nevertheless. Therefore findings which would be of... Read More