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evolgen
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Posts by this author
September 1, 2006
Reminder: Today is the last day to submit a post for the upcoming edition of Mendel's Garden. Either email me (evolgen [at] yahoo [dot] com) or use the Blog Carnival submission page.
August 29, 2006
The Panda's Thumb is compiling a chapter by chapter rebuttal of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. This book is part of a series of shoddy academic endeavors that includes The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History; they could remove the word "politically…
August 28, 2006
This is a reminder that I will be hosting the fifth edition of Mendel's Garden. Mendel's Garden is a blog carnival devoted to genetics. If you have written a genetics related entry on your blog and would like it to be included in the carnival, either email me (evolgen [at] yahoo [dot] com) or use…
August 25, 2006
As a fledgling scientist, I am not privy to the process of grant view. It may as well occur behind a green curtain, and all I get to see is the hologram of the intimidating wizard in the form of an email announcing that I did or did not get the tiny morsel of cash I so politely requested (sorry for…
August 25, 2006
Last week's Phylogeny Friday introduced the three domains of life: bacteria, archaea, and eukaryotes. The bacteria and archaea are commonly referred to as prokaryotes, although that creates a paraphyletic taxon. Today, we will focus on the eukaryotes (organisms with nuclei and organelles). This…
August 24, 2006
A couple of people are talking about this Wall Street Journal article which claims that Republicans are popping out more babies that Democrats, and this disparity will lead to an relative increase in the frequency of Republicans. It's been pointed out that the statistics and logic behind this…
August 24, 2006
The Chronicle of Higher Education reported earlier this week that the U.S. Department of Education neglected to include "Evolutionary Biology" in it's list of eligible majors for the new Smart Grant program (the NYTimes and New Scientist also report on this, as does the NCSE). This drew extra…
August 24, 2006
In last week's edition of Phylogeny Fridays, I mentioned an essay that argued that biologists should refrain from using the term "prokaryote" because its definition is entirely negative. The author, Norman Pace, writes, "no one can define what is a prokaryote, only what it is not." Furthermore, I…
August 24, 2006
Jim Crow has published a perspective in Genetics on his favorite reviewers from 1952-1956 when he was associate editor of the journal. He prefaces it by writing:
As far as I can ascertain, the editorial correspondence from that period is lost, so I am writing this from memory. Naturally, my…
August 23, 2006
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 of polar bears in east Greenland are apparently dwindling in size due to…
August 23, 2006
I gave Lawrence Krauss some shit regarding his double standard towards the tolerance of willful ignorance. He's cool with calling intelligent design proponents ignorant, but won't go all the way and say all religion is anti-knowledge. Judging by the letters in the NYTimes, there are some people who…
August 23, 2006
This week's Ask A ScienceBlogger is about the rainforest:
The destruction of the rainforest was a hot-button topic in the early '90s, but I haven't heard anything about it in ages. Are the rainforests still being destroyed wholesale? Are they all gone? Is it still important? Is the coffee I drink…
August 22, 2006
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 coincidence. I blame it on the grad student from our lab who moved to Florida to study…
August 22, 2006
Mr. Thoughts from Kansas, Josh Rosenau, has joined the ScienceBlogs conglomerate operated by Seed Media Group. That gives us two blogs involved in thinking (Wilkins the philosopher has the other one), to go with our three evolution blogs (Evolution Blog, Evolving Thoughts, and evolgen). Josh is a…
August 21, 2006
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 fertilized egg to an…
August 21, 2006
I will be hosting the fifth edition of Mendel's Garden, the blog carnival devoted to genetics. If you would like to contribute something you have written, either email me (evolgen [at] yahoo [dot] com) or use the Blog Carnival submission page. You may submit entries relating to quantitative…
August 20, 2006
Pharyngula tells us that Francis "Human Genome" Collins is scheduled to appear in a TV special entitled Darwin's Deadly Legacy. You may remember Frank from such stories as humans have stopped evolving. The extremist religious zealots behind the program claim that "Francis Collins, Director of the…
August 19, 2006
Ask and ye shall receive. The fourth edition of Mendel's Garden has been posted at the Inoculated Mind. Take a journey through the organic garden.
August 18, 2006
Nature Reviews Genetics has published a terrible review of genetics blogging. And it's not just because they don't link to yours truly. The author links to Alex and Paul Zed, which means she knows about the ScienceBlogs empire network. I guess she didn't poke around long enough to find evolgen or…
August 18, 2006
The Dinos hit the proverbial nail on the proverbial head with this proverbial strip:
August 18, 2006
I get a kick out of people who share the same name. Whether it be football players with the same name as musical legends or physicists and biologists causing confusion because of their names, I can't get enough. Thanks to Doc Hawks I can add another name to my list. It's population geneticist David…
August 18, 2006
Janet tagged everyone with the Random Quotes meme.
The rules: "Go here and look through random quotes until you find 5 that you think reflect who you are or what you believe."
I've added a comment for each of my selections, but that's not required.
It is even harder for the average ape to believe…
August 18, 2006
Phylogeny Friday is back, bitches! Katherine's gotta add me to her list ASAP. In the glorious return of PhyFridays, I give you the root of the tree of life. In the upcoming editions we'll zoom in on a few parts of the tree to illustrate the diversity of certain taxa of interest. It'll be kind of…
August 17, 2006
Is it possible to have a news item about college football, with people whose names remind you of musical legends, washed up rockers, and supporting actors in a Peter North movie? Could this be the perfect intersection of sports, pop culture, and dirty jokes? This story reads like a casting call for…
August 17, 2006
David at the World's Fair wants to know what makes a good viral campaign:
Essentially, as scientific types who tend to analyse, over-analyse, supra-analyse things, and who like to categorize and follow empirical trends, I'm interesting in hearing what you think it is that sparks these viral…
August 17, 2006
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 out of 118 between chimpanzees and chickens, and 18 out of…
August 16, 2006
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, we ain't nothing but ants.' "
I wonder if JoePa has ever looked at the back of a dollar bill . . . on…
August 16, 2006
You all (or y'all or yins or whatever) know about the article in Science that says Americans are dumber than everyone on Earth except the Turkish (see the concise version from the NYTimes if you don't have access to Science). It's because we don't know jack shit about evolution. And we don't know…
August 16, 2006
There is a good biography of Ernst Mayr in the upcoming issue of Theoretical Population Biology. The author, Eviatar Nevo, provides both a summary of Mayr's work and distills his contributions into categories. I especially like how he explains Mayr's understanding of evolution (which he calls…