A few links

The Unsilenced Science: The Racial Controversy of a Violent Gene

Viking ancestry explored on the Isle of Man by researchers
Viking's first took up settlement on the Isle of Man at the end of the 8th century.

The research team will analyse Y chromosomes which are linked with surnames and then estimate proportions of Norwegian ancestry in these samples.

Recent adverse trends in semen quality and testis cancer incidence among Finnish men
These simultaneous and rapidly occurring adverse trends suggest that the underlying causes are environmental and, as such, preventable. Our findings necessitate not only further surveillance of male reproductive health but also research to detect and remove the underlying factors.

Genetic Genealogy and the Single Segment. One minor point of disagreement. The author writes:
What this means for genealogy on 23andMe is that for two people sharing one segment identical by descent there is no way to reliably estimate how far back the common ancestor was. Furthermore, no improvement in software can possibly change that, because the limitation is imposed by the genetics itself.
For relatively sparse databases and at present levels of testing resolution, this is more or less true. However, two things could potentially change this: (1) denser databases linked to pedigree information should allow small segments in living individuals to be attributed with high confidence to particular distant ancestors in many cases; (2) high-quality complete genome sequences should provide additional resolution, potentially allowing the level of relationship represented by a small segment to be estimated with greater precision (e.g. using STR haplotypes, recent/novel SNPs, and other sorts of variation not captured by SNP microarrays).

No comments: