Daily Data Dump - October 25th, 2010

Detailed admixture analysis of West Eurasian populations (+ GenomesUnzipped individuals). Dienekes looks at the Genomes Unzipped guys in the context of Eurasian variation. He explains why he prefers bar plots of inferred ancestral quanta over PCA and MDS charts. A World Upside Down for Greeks. "In Greece, small businesses — defined as stores or workshops employing fewer than 10 people, though many are one-person operations — account for 96 percent of all enterprises and employ around two million of Greece’s five million-strong work force." Part of this is presumably familialism. Greeks don't trust each other, so private sector activity is always on a small scale. And part of it is probably the constricted regulatory framework of the Greek economy which prevents the emergence of corporations with some economies of scale. But either way it seems that this is too strong of a bias to be an efficient allocation of labor. African signatures of recent positive selection in human FOXI1. Climate change driving adaptation in Africa? Another Study Against Refined Grains. The jury still out on the whole grains. I would add though that inter-individual variation needs to be added to this. Perhaps we should all buy blood sugar monitors and see how our insulin spikes? Pervasive Cryptic Epistasis in Molecular Evolution. They're looking at bacteria here, but still of interest.