evolgen
Archives for February, 2006
Circus of the Spineless Numero 6
Posted by RPM on February 28, 2006 The sixth edition of the Circus of the Spineless is up at Science and Politics. Get your fix of inverts now…
What Makes a Conference Good?
Posted by RPM on February 28, 2006 There’s a fun article in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology on what distinguishes a good scientific meeting from a not so good one. The author advocates attending small meetings or workshops (under 100 people), which is tough for a young scientist. Small workshops are usually either not well advertised or difficult to get to. The…
Long Branch Attraction and the Branching Order of Deuterostomes
Posted by RPM on February 27, 2006 You, me, your pet dog, and any other animal with a backbone are deuterostomes. So are sea stars, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers. During early development you, me, and echinoderms (sea stars et al) are a round ball of cells. The ball of cells invaginates and that opening becomes our anus. This differs from other…
Copy Number Polymorphism
Posted by RPM on February 27, 2006 I have a little bit of an infatuation with copy number polymorphism (CNP), which describes the fact that individuals within a population can differ from each other in gene content. Some genes, such as olfactory receptors (ORs), have many different related variants in any animal genome. New copies spring up via duplication events (a type…
A Shout-Out to the New Peeps
Posted by RPM on February 26, 2006 The Frink Tank has jumped the shark and joined the ScienceBlogs evil empire. If you like your science with a dash of humor (and dick jokes) check them out. Another blog, Stoat, has come on board. This one’s new to me, but it looks like it deals with climate sciences (and no dick jokes).
What to do with Your Negative Results
Posted by RPM on February 26, 2006 My advisor received an email from a fairly prominent geneticist regarding some results published by Dobzhansky over fifty years ago. The geneticist had done some back of the envelope calculations and noticed some trends that had been overlooked for a half of a century. We happened to have the animals to replicate the experiments (and…
Commenting on evolgen
Posted by RPM on February 26, 2006 When ScienceBlogs first started out, it was sending out some bad cookies. If you’re having trouble commenting on evolgen, delete all of your ScienceBlogs cookies so that you can get the new ones.
Evolution Wiki
Posted by RPM on February 25, 2006 I have always been disappointed by the EvoWiki — I found that I could get better information on evolutionary biology from the regular Wikipedia. Now some folks have organized the evolution content on Wikipedia into navigation templates. I have not examined the content of the entries listed in these templates, but this seems like a…
Now This is Intelligent Design
Posted by RPM on February 24, 2006 My apologies for the utter lack of posting over the past week. I’ve got stuff sitting around waiting to be written about, and I just haven’t been writing. I’m not going to make excuses; I just haven’t been managing my time well. While you wait for me to post again (soon, I promise), I give…
It Beats Pairs Figure Skating
Posted by RPM on February 16, 2006 Apparently, you can fall down in figure skating and still win a silver medal. Imagine if this happened in a real sport. Say, for example, one of the Italian hockey players falls to the ice and a Canadian player scores a goal. Does the Italian team get a do over? I don’t know what I…