jim sims

Venter on Venter and other topics

J. Craig Venter is a very interesting guy, a maverick of sorts in the scientific community, and here he is discussing his various projects including sequencing the first human genome, his own.  Also discussed are attempts to determine the minimum number of genes that constitute a living organism and the creation of artificial living organisms.  He is introduced as the man who lead the teams that have squenced more than 99.99% of the genes that have been sequenced to date.  Needless to say, Dr. Venter is not a humble guy, as this video shows.

Human Y-chromosome tree gets more branches

The Y-chromosome Consortium has new data, a new phylogenetic tree for the human Y-chromosome and new age estimates for the major haplogroups.  There are two major new haplogroups: S and T.  There are also many additional "twigs" on the new tree too. Although the actual paper requires paid access, the new tree, age tables and the coarse geographic distribution of the major haplogroups is open access. Click here to get the latest data.

European men 101

Kalevi Wiik in a new paper in  J. Genet. Geneal. 4:35-85, 2008 attempts to summarize the scientific literature with regard to the genetic origins of European men.  The title of this post has two meanings:  first, the article is a kind of primer and the other meaning refers to the 101 maps in this lengthy article. For those without access to the scientific literature, this will be a good source of information and maps of haplogroup frequencies.

Mike Hammer speaks on human origins

There is an excellent lecture on the current scientific consensus view of the origins of modern humans.  The speaker is Mike Hammer, Ph.D. currently at the University of Arizona.  I have personally heard Dr. Hammer speak on two different occasions at Family Tree DNA surname project administrator conferences.  His one hour and five minute lecture is available on the iTunes web store as a free video podcast in the iTunes University section.   This lecture is aimed at an educated lay audience.  This talk summarizes what we think we know as we put together the archaeological, anthropological and molecular genetic lines of evidence.  This podcast is part of a lecture series Evolution:  Our World and Ourselves at the University of Arizona.

National Academy of Sciences New Book: Science, Evolution and Creationism

This blog is a natural history and genetic genealogy blog, and as such, the material you will find here is based on the current scientific understanding of how nature works and how techniques of molecular biology can be applied to genealogy.  For those who may be unclear how science works and what the current scientific understanding of human origins is, the U.S. National Academy of Science has a new publication called Science, Evolution and Creationism. Read the press release with links to the book.  A free pdf version of the book (89 pages) is available via a link on the press release page.  There is also an audio on demand file, which requires RealPlayer, that covers the release of the book.  Audio quality leaves a lot to be desired.