About the author

Dan Rhoads

Dan is a postdoc working at the University of Cyprus in developmental biology. He has a BSc in molecular biology and a PhD pharmacology and biochemistry.

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Welcome back from the Winter Holidays, it’s time to start the regular ‘Around the Blogs’ segment again. I’ve taken notice of a handful of interesting articles around the blogs on human genetics, so I’ll focus on that this week.

Genetic differences between human populations: more drift than selection?
Dan MacArthur points to a paper claiming that large allele frequency differences between populations are due to demographic effects, rather than selection. That is, most of the differences between different races are due to drift rather than selection.

p-ter also contributes with:
Selection or demography in differences between human populations?

As does John Hawks with:
Surfing and recent selection

And the study was also blogged on a couple months ago by Dienekes:
Allele-surfing versus positive selection

Lastly, and related but on a slightly different topic:
A genetic test to tell you what “population” you are?