Genome-wide analysis of a long-term evolution experiment with Drosophila. Interesting: “in our sexual populations, adaptation is not associated with ‘classic’ sweeps whereby newly arising, unconditionally advantageous mutations become fixed. More parsimonious explanations include ‘incomplete’ sweep models, in which mutations have not had enough time to fix, and ‘soft’ sweep models, in which selection acts on pre-existing, common genetic variants. We conclude that, at least for life history characters such as development time, unconditionally advantageous alleles rarely arise, are associated with small net fitness gains or cannot fix because selection coefficients change over time.”
Voters Deliver a Reminder to Republicans (and Pundits). Seems like an illustration of Nassim Taleb’s worries about the illusion of robustness. That being said, I think quantitative predictive models such as Nate Silver’s are critical in dampening the swell of irrelevancy which comes from verbal pundits.
In the heartland of Eurasia: the multilocus genetic landscape of Central Asian populations. “Contrary to what is generally thought, our results suggest that the recurrent expansions of eastern nomadic groups did not result in the complete replacement of local populations, but rather into partial admixture.” No offense, but which morons “generally” think this?
Hybrids May Thrive Where Parents Fear to Tread. It is important to note that expectations of sterility as a function of genetic distance are highly sensitive to lineage. There are differences between mammals with invasive vs. non-invasive placenta, birds, and plants.