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Aylwyn Scally Profile picture
Aylwyn Scally
@aylwyn_scally
Human evolutionary genetics, University of Cambridge. @Cambridge_Uni, @GeneticsCam, @DarwinCollege 🇮🇪
Oct 22, 2022 • 14 tweets • 4 min read
A lot of people have suggested Africa, and specifically East Africa, as the answer to this for everyone alive. It's true that we are reasonably sure there was a time in the past when all our ancestors (all who were alive at that time) were in Africa.
(And note that by 'ancestors' I mean our genealogical ancestors, which includes all genetic ancestors - see journals.plos.org/plosgenetics/a… for a discussion, and as we know, all our genealogical ancestors are shared beyond a few thousand years ago; .)
Dec 10, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Top grant advice from Twitter:
1. Excite the reviewer! Remember when you decided to write a boring grant? That was where you went wrong.
2. Give lots of detail, but also not too much. If you count up the detail and it's not equal to the correct amount, that's a problem. 3. Make sure the proposal is important for the field and can only be done by you, at your institution. Many people propose things that another highly qualified scientist in their field could do, which is obviously of little interest to funders.
Jul 24, 2020 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
Some thoughts on the recent paper about Polynesian ancestry by Ioannidis et al. (Long thread.) nature.com/articles/s4158… The paper investigates ancestry in present-day Polynesians using genetic data from 354 individuals. Amongst other things, it finds a component of ancestry which is closer to that found in ancient and present-day Native Americans ..
Jun 9, 2020 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
This is a great essay on the legacy of eugenics in genetics and statistics. As @rvrohlfs points out, eugenic terminology still persists in key aspects of these fields today, as do, to some extent, even some ideas. genestogenomes.org/understanding-… As scientists it is vital that we acknowledge and confront this legacy in our teaching, research & communication. I fully support Rori's call to discuss it, and to interact with colleagues in the social sciences and humanities who have been tackling these issues for a long time.
May 16, 2019 • 11 tweets • 2 min read
Some thoughts about this piece on 'race' and population genetics. It's nice that it affirms that population geneticists are not actual racists. And there are indeed some relevant criticisms one could make about popgen as a field, both in general and in specific instances. But I'm concerned that readers might conclude that what geneticists study as population structure is somehow a continuation of racist ideas. This is wrong. Population structure is not 'race', and in scientific work geneticists never use that term or the concept it represents.