General Bio:
My last post was rather negative, and I tried my damnedest to not come across as an asshole. I think it's important to realize, however, that as cool as evo-devo is, it won't revolutionize evolutionary biology until it can be...
Posted on September 13, 2006 01:00 PM • 0 Comments
As I was working on my computer (in my office) this afternoon, a small critter was flying around my head. Based on my current location (in a building housing at least 3 Drosophila labs) and my previous whereabouts (our lab's...
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Posted on September 5, 2006 08:00 PM • 2 Comments
I got all excited when I read the following article title in the week's issue of PNAS: Abnormal sex ratios in human populations: Causes and consequences I hoped the authors would discuss meiotic drive and segregation distortion. It turns out...
Posted on September 5, 2006 03:00 PM • 0 Comments
To be filed under: "Every dude who's gone swimming in a cold pool in the Hamptons could have told you that." Polar bear genitals are shrinking: The icecap may not be the only thing shrinking in the Arctic. The genitals...
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Posted on August 23, 2006 01:00 PM • 3 Comments
Once is an accident, twice is a coincidence, but three times is a trend. The manatee in the Hudson River was an accident -- the Christopher Columbus of manatees if you will. The manatee in Rhode Island is a...
Posted on August 22, 2006 12:00 PM • 2 Comments
During the early part of the twentieth century, biological research was somewhat disjointed. Naturalists studied organisms and populations in the wild; geneticists were working out the mechanisms of heredity; and other researchers were figuring out how animals develop from a...
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Posted on August 21, 2006 01:00 PM • 2 Comments
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 interview with Penn State football coach Joe Paterno: On the fragility of life: "I do a lot of walking, and every once in a while, I step on an ant. And I say to myself, 'You know,...
Posted on August 16, 2006 04:00 PM • 0 Comments
Given the expected frequency of a certain outcome of a replicate in an experiment, we can estimate the expected variance around that mean (either by deriving it or performing simulations). I have heard that laboratory experiments tend to have greater...
Posted on August 15, 2006 12:30 PM • 0 Comments
I can't speak for each and every one of the other biologist types in the house here at ScienceBlogs, but one comment on Chad's post on highfalutin particle physicists struck a chord with me. It all starts with this quote...
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Posted on August 14, 2006 08:00 AM • 10 Comments
I am housed in a biology department. Wow, that came out a lot more impersonal than I intended. Let me try that again: My advisor's appointment is to the Biology Department at my university (not much better...eh). Being in a...
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Posted on August 3, 2006 01:47 PM • 4 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
I'm in the process of exhuming myself from under a mountain of work, that's why the posting's been ultra-light. My last link to cool pictures of bugs went over well, so I'm giving you a few more pictures. These come...
Posted on July 27, 2006 09:00 AM • 2 Comments
Check out these pictures of tiny little critters up close. Wow! Thanks to Neil for pointing this out....
Posted on July 23, 2006 12:00 PM • 3 Comments
A few months ago I promised that I would publish some original research on this blog. I managed to churn out some background, but I still haven't gotten around to presenting any results. Even though I wasn't able to get...
Posted on July 20, 2006 08:00 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
We talk about molecular population and evolutionary GENETICS and GENOMICS. You know, the caliper measurement of a gene's evolvability in moles.
