Dunbar paper on light and eye size in human

Interesting. They "..demonstrate a significant positive relationship between absolute latitude and human orbital volume"

Guardian recap HERE

1000 Genomes Project

The first major paper from the project was published last week in Nature.

So now we supposed have 94% of human variable sites documented -- including the identification of many 'rare variants'.

An interest snippet from the Nature News article:

"results of the survey revealed, with each person's genome carrying some 250 or 300 so-called 'loss-of-function' mutations that incapacitate the gene in which they occur.

"That's quite a lot — it's on the order of 1% of all genes," says Richard Durbin, a genomicist at the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in Hinxton, UK, and one of the chief architects of the project."

Selection at high altitudes

New papers in Science using genome scans to identify genes associated with high altitude adaptations in humans.

Perspective on this by Jaz Storz is HERE

malaria shows same pattern out of Africa

The pattern of genetic diversity in malaria (2 genes) matches human migration out of Africa, contracting the suggestion that the 1st human malaria infections coincided with the origins of agriculture. Science tidbit on Current Biology paper here.

FAQs about Human Genome Diversity

I'll have to add this nice TIG review on human genome diversity to the Mol Anth reading list...