My post from a few weeks ago, Why does race matter for women?, elicited a lot of response (made it to the front page of Digg). Most of the open public discourse on race is bracketed in a few coarse frameworks; it is a social construction, and no one cares who is truly enlightened anymore, white racism keeps people of color down, etc. Though of utility in sloganeering I think most of these generalizations are such half-approximations that they mislead a great deal of time. So for example the interesting repeated finding that women in the United States are consistently more race conscious in partner selection than males in terms of avowed and revealed preferences (the study I posted on was just the most thorough, there were a few other prior surveys that showed the same general surprising finding). Public dialogue and discussion doesn't operate much with the assumption that women are the repository of race consciousness and purity, that seems a rather retrograde view among White People, but something close to it seems to operate in the day to day (as many 25 year old Asian American male virgins might attest to).

With that in mind, Yann points me to a new paper, Prevalence of obesity in multi-racial vs. mono-racial individuals:

Indo-European and Asian origins for Chilean and Pacific chickens revealed by mtDNA:

European chickens were introduced into the American continents by the Spanish after their arrival in the 15th century. However, there is ongoing debate as to the presence of pre-Columbian chickens among Amerindians in South America, particularly in relation to Chilean breeds such as the Araucana and Passion Fowl...The modern Chilean sequences cluster closely with haplotypes predominantly distributed among European, Indian subcontinental, and Southeast Asian chickens, consistent with a European genetic origin. A published, apparently pre-Columbian, Chilean specimen and six pre-European Polynesian specimens also cluster with the same European/Indian subcontinental/Southeast Asian sequences, providing no support for a Polynesian introduction of chickens to South America....

I've posted a fair amount about the new field of historical population genetics. Some of the most popular mass-market books in genetics deal with this field, for example Spencer Wells' Journey of Man. On the other hand, there's a lot of sloppy overreach on the part of some practitioners, especially due to the excessive reliance on uniparental lineages; the unbroken female and male lineages (mtDNA and NRY). Nevertheless, in specific narrow cases where hypotheses are being tested they can be very illuminating.

For example, here is a question: do the mixed-race populations of the Caribbean exhibit any evidence of descent from the indigenous pre-Columbian populations? This is an open question because it was in the Caribbean that the first and most extreme die-offs of native populations occurred when exposed to Eurasian pathogens. The short answer seems to be yes, some indigenous ancestry does persist into the present.

This was first confirmed in Puerto Rico, Reconstructing the population history of Puerto Rico by means of mtDNA phylogeographic analysis: