"So, to recap, 1) Cool paper. 2) Sex between blue-eyed people is not incest. 3) We have no idea when or where this mutation came from, but it is now conceivable that we could ask the question. 4) Embarrassingly bad science reporting spontaneously rises from the grave four years later and tries to eat your brain. "

Going from a p-value of 10^-16 to 0.027 is --- painful. IFrom the lack of a response, I tend to infer that there's no arguing back...
Prediction: the original association will continue to be cited without correction.

"The farming way of life originated in the Near East some 11,000 years ago and had reached most of the European continent 5000 years later. However, the impact of the agricultural revolution on demography and patterns of genomic variation in Europe remains unknown. We obtained 249 million base pairs of genomic DNA from ~5000-year-old remains of three hunter-gatherers and one farmer excavated in Scandinavia and find that the farmer is genetically most similar to extant southern Europeans, contrasting sharply to the hunter-gatherers, whose distinct genetic signature is most similar to that of extant northern Europeans. Our results suggest that migration from southern Europe catalyzed the spread of agriculture and that admixture in the wake of this expansion eventually shaped the genomic landscape of modern-day Europe."

It's cool that they can do that, but that last sentence is, well, more than a bit of a reach.

Massively-hyped paper trying to model language history using lightly-repurposed biological models comprehensively debunked by very careful and linguistically-informed data analysis. One of the authors of the debunking shows up in the comments, and says:
"Finally, regarding press; a few news organisations were interested in the initial pitch, but lost interest when they realised that we didn't have a good story here about human origins."

"Human genetics has been haunted by the mystery of “missing heritability” of common traits. Although studies have discovered >1,200 variants associated with common diseases and traits, these variants typically appear to explain only a minority of the heritability. The proportion of heritability explained by a set of variants is the ratio of (i) the heritability due to these variants (numerator), estimated directly from their observed effects, to (ii) the total heritability (denominator), inferred indirectly from population data. The prevailing view has been that the explanation for missing heritability lies in the numerator—that is, in as-yet undiscovered variants. While many variants surely remain to be found, we show here that a substantial portion of missing heritability could arise from overestimation of the denominator, creating “phantom heritability.” Specifically, (i) estimates of total heritability implicitly assume the trait involves no genetic interactions (epistasis) among loci; (ii) this assumption is not justified, because models with interactions are also consistent with observable data; and (iii) under such models, the total heritability may be much smaller and thus the proportion of heritability explained much larger. For example, 80% of the currently missing heritability for Crohn's disease could be due to genetic interactions, if the disease involves interaction among three pathways. In short, missing heritability need not directly correspond to missing variants, because current estimates of total heritability may be significantly inflated by genetic interactions. Finally, we describe a method for estimating heritability from isolated populations that is not inflated by genetic interactions."
--- I'm not sure about the validity of their slope-based estimator of narrow heritability, I should ask K.R. about that.

From the annals of confirming the obvious: "The genetic and demographic impact of European contact with Native Americans has remained unclear despite recent interest. Whereas archeological and historical records indicate that European contact resulted in widespread mortality from various sources, genetic studies have found little evidence of a recent contraction in Native American population size. In this study we use a large dataset including both ancient and contemporary mitochondrial DNA to construct a high-resolution portrait of the Holocene and late Pleistocene population size of indigenous Americans. Our reconstruction suggests that Native Americans suffered a significant, although transient, contraction in population size some 500 y before the present, during which female effective size was reduced by ∼50%. These results support analyses of historical records indicating that European colonization induced widespread mortality among indigenous Americans."

"Variation in the masticatory behavior of hunter-gatherer and agricultural populations is hypothesized to be one of the major forces affecting the form of the human mandible. However, this has yet to be analyzed at a global level. Here, the relationship between global mandibular shape variation and subsistence economy is tested, while controlling for the potentially confounding effects of shared population history, geography, and climate. The results demonstrate that the mandible, in contrast to the cranium, significantly reflects subsistence strategy rather than neutral genetic patterns, with hunter-gatherers having consistently longer and narrower mandibles than agriculturalists. These results support notions that a decrease in masticatory stress among agriculturalists causes the mandible to grow and develop differently. This developmental argument also explains why there is often a mismatch between the size of the lower face and the dentition, which, in turn, leads to increased prevalence of dental crowding and malocclusions in modern postindustrial populations. Therefore, these results have important implications for our understanding of human masticatory adaptation."

Look at those simulation results!

Now that is how you give these idiots the business...  The last paragraph is a lovely encapsulation of just how foolish the whole enterprise really is.

They do not mean "supervised learning" the way learning theorists do.  "We propose a simple theoretical model of supervised learning that is poten- tially useful to interpret a number of empirical phenomena relevant to the nature- nurture debate. The model captures a basic trade-off between sheltering the child from the consequences of his mistakes and allowing him to learn from experience. We characterize the optimal parenting policy and its comparative-statics proper- ties. We then show that key features of the optimal policy can be useful to interpret provocative findings from behavioral genetics."

More from Turkheimer.

ETA: I withdraw my approval, and question my own reading skills.  See
http://bayes.wordpress.com/2010/12/14/it-takes-three-to-read-this-stupid-article-marge-two-to-write-it-and-one-to-read-it/

"will assert with truculence and jutted jaw that the derivation of commercially relevant and actionable insurance information from genetics is much, much more difficult than that, and furthermore, will tentatively and politely advance the possibility that to "accurately assess the cost of medical treatment over a lifetime" might end up being at least as much of a tough-nut as the socialist calculation problem.  As the rant linked above tries to point out, the big issue here is the "Titanic problem" (from Hitchcock's aphorism about it being possible to make a suspenseful film about the Titanic given that everyone knows that it sinks - they don't know when). Knowing genetic propensities to develop various conditions is just about one tiny baby step along the way to making a cost estimate ..."

Especially: not knowing what treatments will be available, or how costly, 20--40 years after the genetic test is performed! (Another teaching example for 350, I think.)

Oh sweet heaven no: "We develop a theory of interstate conflict in which the degree of genealogical relatedness between populations has a positive effect on their conflict propensities because more closely related populations, on average, tend to interact more and develop more disputes over sets of common issues. We examine the empirical relationship between the occurrence of interstate conflicts and the degree of relatedness between countries, showing that populations that are genetically closer are more prone to go to war with each other, even after controlling for a wide set of measures of geographic distance and other factors that affect conflict, including measures of trade and democracy."

Do not try to draw any kind of conclusion about which gene does what without knowing about population structure. Just don't.

Very nice.

"We find that gradients and waves observed in ... maps resemble sinusoidal mathematical artifacts that arise generally when PCA is applied to spatial data, implying that the patterns do not necessarily reflect specific migration events."

Truly, a stunning demonstration of the power and precision of behavioral genetics.

Summary of the _Nature Genetics_ paper on recent differential natural selection. Results not exactly stunning unless you're a racist idiot.

Some sensible-sounding remarks on the genetics (or lack thereof) of sexual orientation. (See also: English public schools, monasteries.)