Razib Khan

😀

a headshot of David Botstein

We are deeply saddened to share the news of the passing of David Botstein, a towering figure in modern #genetics and a foundational force behind SGD.
www.yeastgenome.org/blog/in-memo... #yeast #modelOrganism

ok. i spit out my coffee that was so funny

Facing Facts, even fraught ones: the quest for proto-Indo-Europeans in 2023 How genetics illuminates the rise of Eurasian steppe pastoralism

Facing Facts, even fraught ones: the quest for proto-Indo-Europeans in 2023
open.substack.com/pub/razib/p/...

More than kin, less than kind: Jews and Palestinians as Canaanite cousins The cold facts recorded in Jewish and Palestinian genetics today and historically

More than kin, less than kind: Jews and Palestinians as Canaanite cousins
www.razibkhan.com/p/more-than-...

The emergence of the domestic dog lineage occurred soon after the human expansion out of Africa 50,000 years ago.

Now we have genetics to trace the evolution of man’s best friend. @razibkhan.bsky.social digs into its past:

buff.ly/aF3GBfG

so what's going on here?

Lost Green Saharans: ancient DNA unearths a new race from a verdant North African interlude These 7000-year-old humans are neither Eurasian nor sub-Saharan African

Lost Green Saharans: ancient DNA unearths a new race from a verdant North African interlude
www.razibkhan.com/p/lost-green...

Vance is a guy who’s decided to use his perceptiveness about the nature of the Trump movement exclusively for own power and gain and so far it’s worked

www.richardhanania.com/p/jd-vance-i...

John Hawks and Chris Stringer: Neanderthals, Denisovans and humans, oh my! Two paleoanthropologists talk about the state of the field

John Hawks and Chris Stringer: Neanderthals, Denisovans and humans, oh my!
www.razibkhan.com/p/john-hawks...

To the memory of the good Jim. From the RAF bar of the Eagle which is where they used to drink.

He made a massive impact. Respect.

Am I allowed to say retarded here?

A Nile shadow 4,500 years old 2500 BC DNA closes old case, poses new questions about prehistory

A Nile shadow 4,500 years old
www.razibkhan.com/p/a-nile-sha...

jesse singal

Jesse singal

🚨 New preprint out!
We reconstructed parental haplotypes in >440k individuals (UK & Estonian biobanks) to estimate assortative mating directly in the parental generation.
This reveals intensified assortment in recent generations.
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Fortune favors the fearless: millennia of Austronesian maritime feats Epic Explorers of the Stone Age: the full scope of Austronesian audacity, part 1/2

Fortune favors the fearless: millennia of Austronesian maritime feats
www.razibkhan.com/p/fortune-fa...

Intermarriage rates by race/ethnicity.

History of Molecular Biology Collection This unparalleled collection includes Rosalind Franklin's historic 'Photo 51,' which revealed the double-helix structure of DNA.

News in the history of molecular biology. The Science History Institute in Philadelphia has acquired a huge archive of correspondence and other scientific material from the pioneers of molecular biology (Franklin, Klug, Perutz, Delbrück etc, with items from Crick and Watson, too). 1/n

When civilization control-alt-deletes: prehistoric Europe’s false dawn and long reboot Reflecting on Europe’s lost 5,000-year-old first draft

This from @razibkhan.bsky.social is very interesting indeed:
"When civilization control-alt-deletes: prehistoric Europe’s false dawn and long reboot: Reflecting on Europe’s lost 5,000-year-old first draft"
www.razibkhan.com/p/when-civil...

Trump executive order seeks to centralize control of grantmaking under political appointees A sweeping new executive order seeks to transform how the federal government awards billions of dollars in research grants

Trump executive order seeks to centralize control of grantmaking under political appointees www.statnews.com/2025/08/08/t...

Pretty amazing. Potatoes are the outcome of an ~9 million year ago hybridization that led to an explosive radiation. The evolution of storage.

Still no good evidence that inversions dominate evolution.

big names are now putting the stamp of approval on polygenic embryo selection

Frontiers | The behavioural ecology of hominin locomotion: what can we learn from landscapes of fear and primate terrestriality? A defining feature of the hominin clade is bipedality, often parcelled together with terrestriality. However, there is increasing evidence of locomotor diver...

Hammond et al 2025. 'The behavioural ecology of hominin locomotion' 👌 www.frontiersin.org/journals/eco...

A human homolog of SIR2 antiphage proteins mediates immunity via the Toll-like receptor pathway Key actors of mammalian immunity originated from bacterial antiphage systems. The full extent of immune system conservation between bacteria and eukaryotes is unknown. Here, we show that the silent in...

Evolutionary molecular biology paying dividends again - this time in finding new modulators of innate immunity - www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I ways forget the 🦠 🐘 🧪

‘People can change their minds’: the evolutionary biologi... Ella Al-Shamahi is the erudite presenter of a breathtaking new series about our 300,000-year history. But her own evolution story isn’t short of drama ei...

observer.co.uk/news/science...