Book review: INEQUALITY: A GENETIC HISTORY by Carles Lalueza-Fox
Given its putative topic, Lalueza-Fox’s (2022) book is most notable for what it doesn’t discuss.
The non sequitur of Lewontin’s fallacy
Nobody who makes Lewontin’s argument should be taken seriously.
DNA phenotyping for appearance: A forensic dead end
One of my guilty pleasures is true crime television shows. I’m fascinated by the twists and turns that go into identifying, accusing, and convicting a criminal and the mystery surrounding those who have (so far) gotten away with their crimes. Several years ago, a new forensic technique called DNA phenotyping caught my eye. DNA phenotyping…
Ancient DNA: A window into human nature and change
I read an article this week which described an analysis of ancient DNA samples from Portugal to understand how prehistoric populations mingled and merged to form the modern Portuguese gene pool (Martiniano et al. 2017). This type of article is not unusual. Similar studies have been conducted on populations from every inhabited continent. What interested…
Ethics of DNA research on indigenous people: Not thorny at all
Undark published an article on September 30, 2019, about the “thorny ethics” of collecting genetic data from the world’s indigenous populations. This is an important issue because genomic databases consist overwhelmingly of people of European ancestry. Results from these databases will not generalize well to non-European populations. In fact, the more distantly related a group…
