Over at The Genetic Literacy Project Jon Entine has a post up, Usain Bolt’s Olympic gold proves again why no Asian, white–or East African–will ever be crowned world’s fastest human. Fifteen years ago Jon wrote Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports And Why We're Afraid To Talk About It, so he knows something about this... Read More

The above statistics on the labor force at Twitter compared to the overall labor force indicate that non-Hispanic whites are underrepresented in tech firms in Silicon Valley. This is true overall in prominent tech firms. 51% of Facebook's employees are non-Hispanic whites. So how to make sense of these sorts of articles:  Twitter’s White-People... Read More

Periodically rather than offering up original thoughts it is needful to engage defensive warfare against pernicious memes. For example, one thesis that is commonly bandied about today is that racial admixture will result in the blending away of all differences, toward a homogeneous beige future without end. This is false. It is false for several... Read More

"Tree thinking", just like "population thinking", is essential to understanding evolutionary biology. But there are problems with this. First, even on a macroevolutionary scale there is massive violation of separation between the branches of the tree of life due to lateral gene flow, whether directly or mediated via viruses. As you drill down to a... Read More

The image to the left is the 'average' face of a Mexican woman as generated by the University of Glasgow Face Research Lab. Aside from the fact that the face is prettier than the typical human because of the well known tendency of averaging facial features removing unattractive asymmetry it is racially what you might... Read More

When I was watching Boyhood I assumed that some moron would point out that the protagonist's social milieu was overwhelmingly white. And it's out: Not Everyone's Boyhood. Many of my friends have a hard time accepting I identify as conservative, but reading stuff like this makes it clear why I'm conservative, I feel like puking... Read More

A few weeks ago people were arguing about the utility of the model based clustering packages which produce intuitive bar plots which break down individual and population percentages. To understand the fundamental basis of these packages I'll refer you to the original Pritchard et al. paper. As you probably know at this point one of... Read More

One of the issues that comes up over and over again is the assertion that folk racial categories are totally useless in terms of taxonomic utility. This is just plain false. Obviously "folk" anything is usually inferior to a scientific form of analysis, but often they are better than nothing. And so it is with... Read More

Of late people have been leaving off-topic comments early on in threads. I don't understand why this is happening, as I always post (or try to) an "Open Thread" every Sunday. I don't post enough at this point where this isn't usually on the front page, or near it. Please make use of it! From... Read More

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article up on the intersection of genomics and sociology, In Research Involving Genome Analysis, Some See a ‘New Racism’. Most of the quotes are from sociologists, which is a problem, because whenever I try and delve into the topic it seems that sociologists don't actually engage with the... Read More

One of the most interesting results in the preprint on ancient European genetics (or more accurately, the ethnogenesis of Europeans in a genetic sense) is the fact that the ~8,000 year old hunter-gatherer sample from Luxembourg had a GG genotype on the SLC24A5 locus. Actually, interesting isn't the right word, shock, and frankly a little... Read More

Many of you probably know about Dave Chappelle's black white supremacist sketch (NSFW video!), though fewer are aware of Leo Felton, a white supremacist (ex, after he was outed) with a black father (a less tragic outcome than Dan Burros, the Jewish American Nazi). I know, these sound like they're out of South Park episodes,... Read More

The New York Times recently put up a piece, Has ‘Caucasian’ Lost Its Meaning? Much of the analysis in the article has too much of a feeling of ethnographic 'close reading', but I still am excited that the middle-brow journal of record has started to weigh in on the ridiculousness of the whole situation. I've... Read More

Prompted by my post Ta-Nehisi Coates reached out to Neil Risch for clarification on the nature (or lack thereof) of human races. All for the good. The interview is wide ranging, and I recommend you check it out. Read the comments too! Very enlightening (take that however you want). When it comes to this debate... Read More

A comment below: But this makes you ask: is the assumption that people with some African heritage tend to exhibit that heritage disproportionately even true? From an American perspective the answer is obviously yes. But from a non-American perspective not always. Why? Doe the laws of genetics operate differently for Americans and non-Americans? I doubt... Read More

A fascinating comment below: In traveling across America, the Scots Irish have consistently blown my mind as far and away the most persistent and unchanging regional subculture in the country. Their family structures, religion and politics, and social lives all remain unchanged compared to the wholesale abandonment of tradition that’s occurred nearly everywhere else. Unfortunately,... Read More

I notice that the media has started reporting that scientific genealogy has now established to a great extent the likely origin of the Melungeons. You can find the original paper online. The gist is that the Melungeons seem to exhibit a large proportion of Sub-Saharan African origin Y chromosomal lineages, and European mtDNA lineages. The... Read More

It is sometimes fashionable to assert that higher socioeconomic status whites are the sort who will impose integration on lower socioeconomic status whites, all the while sequestering themselves away. I assumed this was a rough reflection of reality. But after looking at the General Social Survey I am not sure that this chestnut of cynical... Read More

There have been a variety of responses to my column in The Crux on race. To be fair, because the audience for The Crux does not consist of genome nerds I engaged in some first approximations which some readers have taken objection to. For example, the genetic architecture of blue vs. brown eye inheritance is... Read More

In the comments below: This is a fair point. I switched computers recently, and the Behar et al. data set I had seems to have become corrupted. So I snatched the Mozabites from the HGDP, and removed the Gujaratis from the previous run. I also added Russians, Druze, and some extra Amerindian groups. At K... Read More

About a week ago I put up a post put on an analysis of a paper which reported on the ancestral make up of 50 Cubans (as well as assorted other Hispanic/Latino groups). One aspect of the paper which was somewhat notable is that 1 out of 3 Cubans were 90 percent or more European... Read More