Posted December 03, 2011
I'm not posting for the games.
There is some potentially really interesting work at the intersection of population genetics and archaeology. I read this about one attempt:
http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2011/11/11/who-were-the-99-of-ancient-rome/
Ignoring the obvious tie-ins to our current socio-political happenings in an article about ancient Rome, ancient DNA sequencing is becoming more possible (judging by the papers coming out using it) as sequencing costs go down and our methods to prevent further contamination improve. I imagine there are a lot of interesting questions that could be asked sequencing not only ancient human bones, but ancient flora and fauna. There are a lot of population genetics tools aimed at measuring population substructure, migration, population size changes, etc ..., that could be just as easily applied to ancient data (and be even more powerful when used in comparison to sequences from modern populations). Perhaps large scale re-sequencing of ancient DNA is still a bit away (I am not an expert in ancient DNA sequencing so I don't know its current state), but I think that could be cool for both population genetics and archeology.
As for creationists, the first citation I got for my first (and currently only) paper was from a creationist website, but hey Google scholar still counts it as a citation! So they were useful for something. :) When I brought this up at my committee meeting, one of the professors just laughed, "I long for the days when it were just the creationists citing my works, these days I get the white power people as well." He does a lot of work on modern human populations genetics. One should understand that in neither case, the creationists or the white power people, do they cite the papers in a context that makes sense or show understanding of those papers. But I suppose they like to put little reference numbers next to their most ... amusing lines of thought to make themselves feel better. Sort of like that XKCD ... http://xkcd.com/906/
There is some potentially really interesting work at the intersection of population genetics and archaeology. I read this about one attempt:
http://lightyears.blogs.cnn.com/2011/11/11/who-were-the-99-of-ancient-rome/
Ignoring the obvious tie-ins to our current socio-political happenings in an article about ancient Rome, ancient DNA sequencing is becoming more possible (judging by the papers coming out using it) as sequencing costs go down and our methods to prevent further contamination improve. I imagine there are a lot of interesting questions that could be asked sequencing not only ancient human bones, but ancient flora and fauna. There are a lot of population genetics tools aimed at measuring population substructure, migration, population size changes, etc ..., that could be just as easily applied to ancient data (and be even more powerful when used in comparison to sequences from modern populations). Perhaps large scale re-sequencing of ancient DNA is still a bit away (I am not an expert in ancient DNA sequencing so I don't know its current state), but I think that could be cool for both population genetics and archeology.
As for creationists, the first citation I got for my first (and currently only) paper was from a creationist website, but hey Google scholar still counts it as a citation! So they were useful for something. :) When I brought this up at my committee meeting, one of the professors just laughed, "I long for the days when it were just the creationists citing my works, these days I get the white power people as well." He does a lot of work on modern human populations genetics. One should understand that in neither case, the creationists or the white power people, do they cite the papers in a context that makes sense or show understanding of those papers. But I suppose they like to put little reference numbers next to their most ... amusing lines of thought to make themselves feel better. Sort of like that XKCD ... http://xkcd.com/906/
Post edited December 03, 2011 by crazy_dave
