David Reich

And so this is a period of time where we've done an experiment of nature.

A push has happened against the human genome.

There's agriculture.

There's people living more densely.

There's infectious disease happening in a different way, in a different type than before.

How does the genome respond to this traumatic set of conditions?

You can actually watch all these little variables, all these little gene frequencies, tens of millions of them shifting up and down in coordination.

What can you learn from that?

Because we now have all the measurements, right?

We have a selection coefficient measured at 10 million positions across the genome.

How do you

And we know what the effect of those are on traits today because they've been measured in large numbers on the order of a million people today.

So what can you do with this data set?

How relevant is this to important evolution?

So I think that that's the type of rich data that could potentially be mined to learn something sort of qualitatively interesting beyond the storytelling that's characterized molecular biology, beyond the Fox P2, where you say, oh, maybe it's this, maybe this is the Holy Grail, or maybe that, maybe that's the Holy Grail.

Maybe you learn something

about the process that's deep and profound.

And so I think that my million dollars goes to someone who can actually come up with a way of thinking about the process that's really kind of qualitatively profound.

Well, you're asking me a cultural question, not a genetic one.

So what you see in the genetic data from South Asia is an amazing process.