The end of genomics, the beginning of analysis  By Razib Khan |
September 11, 2013 12:26 am  A Tree of Life   Credit:
Verisimilus   Credit: Johnuniq   R. A. Fisher  But shifting from
such near-metaphysical generalities to more in-the-trenches
science as it is done, we are faced today with the swell of
sequence data due to the genomic revolution. What does this
matter for our understanding of evolution? Many of the original
arguments of evolutionary geneticists such as R. A. Fisher and
Sewall Wright were predicated on inferences from the inheritance
patterns of a few genes which were easily identifiable by their
phenotypic markers. But a more likely frame for the dispute was
one where the inferences were purely theoretical, deduction with
a minimal level of empirical messiness intervening. In contrast
today we live in an age where someone may pity you if you don’t
have a very well assembled genome of your organism (on the order
of billions of base pairs for mammals), and so have to make due
with SNP marker dat