[guga42k]

Is that survivorship bias here? surely people in Africa should have higher rate of the mutation. because people who didn't have it died from malaria.

[vagabund]

This study measures the rate of de novo (not inherited) HbS mutation, and finds it occurs at significantly greater than random chance in populations where malaria is prevalent. So there is a survivorship bias, but not just for the inheritance of the specific downstream adaptively relevant mutation, but also for some meta-process that controls the rate at which that mutation appears anew without inheritance. They're able to observe this through a new method that can measure the rate of de novo mutations in specific areas of interest in the genome, as opposed to prior methods which were constrained to measuring the rate of mutations in general across the whole genome.

[moonshinefe]

Thanks for explaining that. The article just jumps right into using "de novo" all over the place with minimal explanation, but the link they highlight it with is broken.