Population Genetics:
David Haussler and colleagues have identified a 118 base pair sequence that has evolved really fast along the human lineage relative to the chimpanzee lineage (Carl Zimmer has a good review). In fact, this sequence differs by two base pairs...
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Posted on August 17, 2006 08:00 AM • 1 Comments
Check out this nice primer of population genetics by Anya Plutynski and Warren Ewens from the Philosophy of Science Encyclopedia. A lot of it deals with classical population genetics (Wright, Fisher, et al), and I especially like their description of...
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Posted on August 15, 2006 12:00 PM • 2 Comments
I am the youngest of the ScienceBlogs bloggers (about as old as the epidemic itself), and I cannot remember a world without AIDS. Aside from not going in without cover, how has the AIDS epidemic changed my behavior? The answer involves both a personal anecdote and some research in my field.
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Posted on August 13, 2006 10:00 AM • 0 Comments
I have mentioned before that at one point in my life I wanted to study conservation genetics. This field can be thought of a subdiscipline of molecular ecology -- wherein researchers use molecular markers to test hypotheses regarding demography in...
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Posted on July 31, 2006 08:00 AM • 0 Comments
Last September, Bruce Lahn and colleagues published a couple of papers on the evolution of two genes responsible for brain development in humans (ASPM and Microcephalin). A group led by Sally Otto published a criticism of the analysis performed by...
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Posted on July 17, 2006 09:00 AM • 0 Comments
Here is some light reading for your Sunday: Mosquitoes sing to each other by flapping their wings. This paper reports sexually dimorphic responses to wing beat patterns in mosquitoes (PZ Myers has a good review). This leads me to wonder...
Posted on July 16, 2006 09:00 AM • 0 Comments
Mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) is one of the most used markers in molecular ecology1. A good molecular marker for population level studies should be neutral, so that researchers can use it to infer things like: Population size and changes in population...
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Posted on July 3, 2006 11:00 AM • 1 Comments
What is evolution? Razib started it. John Hawks joined in. I offered my opinion in the comments on GNXP. But I felt obliged to say more, here. It seems like most of the readers in the ScienceBlogs universe don't understand...
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Posted on June 15, 2006 05:00 PM • 6 Comments
Andy Clark has written a review of comparative evolutionary genomics for Trends in Ecology and Evolution. His review deals with identifying functional regions of the genome and inference of both positively and negatively selected sequences. Clark is one of the...
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Posted on June 15, 2006 09:00 AM • 0 Comments
I present for you an example of inferring a bit too much from inappropriate data. This isn't quite the same as making claims about demography based on 100 nucleotides from 6 individuals. But it's not much better given that this...
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Posted on June 7, 2006 02:30 PM • 2 Comments
Billy D (no, not that Billy Dee) is pimping an anti-evolution book by John Sanford. I refuse to link to outright liars, but you can find a link to Bill's blog here. More after the jump....
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Posted on June 4, 2006 10:00 AM • 8 Comments
...or how a learned to stop worrying and love evo-devo. As my mind gets a chance to process some of the stuff I heard and talked about at the meeting I just returned from, I'll post some thoughts that will...
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Posted on May 31, 2006 08:15 AM • 3 Comments
Don't expect much from me in terms of substantial posting. I'm getting prepared for the SMBE meeting, and devoting most of my time to finishing up some data analysis and putting together my talk. If you want to read about...
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Posted on May 16, 2006 10:00 AM • 0 Comments
Not all beneficial alleles come with deleterious side effects, in case I gave that impression. Of course, not all beneficial alleles come from mutations either. Hybridization between closely related species can lead to advantageous alleles introgressing into a population from...
Posted on May 10, 2006 08:32 PM • 3 Comments
I'm trying to emerge from hibernation, and I'll hopefully have some good blogging material up in the next few days. In lieu of my own ideas, I'm going to link to what other people have written. Read them, because I...
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Posted on May 2, 2006 09:57 PM • 0 Comments
If you read evolgen, you've probably been following the race riots that Wilkins started. It's pretty much died down now, and it was more a debate about semantics rather than an actual scientific disagreement. This is usually the case in...
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Posted on April 24, 2006 09:00 AM • 5 Comments
We talk about molecular population and evolutionary GENETICS and GENOMICS. You know, the caliper measurement of a gene's evolvability in moles.
