What the hey, I'll break the ice. (These are from Haplotter).

FATP4. It's under selection in Europeans but not the other two. Here is the OMIM entry:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entr...m.cgi? id=604194

It's implicated in obesity and the bad things associated with it (insulin resistance, triglyceride concentration, etc.). So susceptibility to these bad things probably reflects the ancestral condition, before the transition to agriculture.

COL7A1. It's under selection in Asians but not the other two. It's a type of collagen that forms the anchoring fibrils in the junction of the dermis and epidermis of the skin. So, either Asian skin is has been selected to have a tighter mesh between the two skin layers, or a looser mesh. (Diseases here cause skin to easily fall off.)

Also COL1A1, or just nearby. Also under selection in Asians but not the other two. This type of collagen is the foundation of scar tissue, and is also present in tendons. Asians may be under different selection pressures related to scarring? They sure got some funky skin.

Near HR shows older selection in all pops, and none recent, so that could be loss of body hair. Unfortunately, I couldn't find a good gene to look for re: hairiness -- and probably wouldn't matter much anyway, since HapMap uses hairless pops. If only there were more Browns, Arabs, and Greeks...

But when are they going to expand beyond these three populations for the HapMap? I'm getting tired of Yoruba, Utah whites and East Asians.

I might just as well go throw cardboard boxes behind the house.

And re: taste perception.
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2005/08...itive- sweep.php

TRPV1, the capsaicin receptor, is under recent selection in West Africa. But two genes in this region, TAX1BP3 and P2RX5, show much lower p-values for the selection statistic. The latter is highly expressed in white blood cells, and the former is obscure enough not to be in the OMIM database, but its name is "Tax1 human T-cell leukemia virus type I binding protein 3."

West Africa has certainly been under stronger selection for disease resistance than taste, so this could be another case of "weird" variation being due to selection for something linked to it. Eye and hair color in Europeans. Probably also dry ear wax in NE Asia.

re: earwax. the gene controlling wet vs. dry (ABCC11) shows a signal (by Tajima's D), but the peak is over a nearby gene--eyeballing it, looks like PHKB, which is involved in glycogen storage in the liver. perhaps dry earwax is hitchhiking?