evolgen
Posts by this author
July 18, 2006
Joe Morgan is a Hall of Fame baseball player and a former member of the Cincinnati's Big Red Machine. He is also a commentator for ESPN and a strong opponent of all the new fangled baseball statistics. Anyone who has listened to an ESPN broadcast of Major League Baseball has heard Morgan criticize…
July 17, 2006
Click here to send an e-mail to your Senator telling him or her to support biomedical research by voting YES on H.R. 810.
July 17, 2006
Besides coming up with catchy titles or getting the facts, terminology and statistics wrong? Apparently obtaining crappy Excel graphs is pretty tough according to a survey of science reporters. Am I too hard on science reporters? There are some really good ones (this one comes to mind), but there…
July 17, 2006
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 Lahn's group in last week's issue of Science (JP…
July 17, 2006
I haven't posted any comic strips in over a month, so I figured I was due for one. This one comes from the poorly drawn, but always insightful, Toothpaste for Dinner:
July 16, 2006
Via Genetics and Health comes this cartoon movie of DNA replication. If you've never taken a molecular genetics course, this may be new to you.
July 16, 2006
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 whether we can study intra- and inter-specific differences…
July 13, 2006
At one point in my life, I wanted to study conservation genetics. Now, I just make fun of molecular ecologists and their flawed data. The most recent installment of Ask A ScienceBlogger takes me back to the days before I discovered the wonders of genomics:
Is every species of living thing on the…
July 13, 2006
The Scientist is linking to an imaginary1 article from PNAS in which researchers compare the cost of sequencing microbial (I'm guessing they mean bacteria) genomes using the traditional Sanger method and the hot new technology developed by 454. Not so surprisingly, they find that a hybrid method…
July 12, 2006
The genome encodes all of the RNAs and contains sequences responsible for the transcription of those RNAs and the proper folding and wrapping of the cromosomes. The RNAs encoded by the genome are collectively known as the transcriptome. The transcripts that are translated into proteins represent…
July 10, 2006
I've missed the last two Ask A ScienceBlogger questions. My lack of answers were due to a combination of being busy and apathy toward the questions -- more busy with the science education question and apathy for the science policy question. But this week's question is on cloning, so I kind of feel…
July 6, 2006
Hsien Lei is continuing her interview series at Genetics and Health. Interview #6 is with Psychologist Deborah Serani. When asked how genetics figured into her education, Dr. Serani replied:
My family was very science-based given that my dad was a Chiropractor.
I have a hard time following her…
July 6, 2006
The Nature Genetics blog, Free Association, links to evolgen (at the old URL -- update your links dudes). We've pointed this out before. It's nothing new. Now Nature, the big dog of science publishers, is ranking science blogs. Here is the story. Pee Zed is numero uno (big surprise), but the entire…
July 5, 2006
France's diminutive goalkeeper Fabien Barthez and Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford:
July 3, 2006
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 size (expansions and bottlenecks);
Population…
July 3, 2006
Thank you to everyone who donated to the evolgen Donors Choose Blogger's Challenge. We have reached our goal of $500, which means Donors Choose will chip in an extra 10% for every dollar contributed. Everyone who forwarded their confirmation email to this address will be entered in a drawing to win…
July 2, 2006
Imagine being both a science dork and computer nerd. We call those people bioinformaticians and beg them to debug our pitiful little programs for us. If we're lucky, one of them has already written a program that performs the exact data analysis that we need. That saves us feeble bad programmers…
July 2, 2006
The second edition of Mendel's Garden has been posted at Genetics and Health. Go get your genetics on.
June 29, 2006
The ScienceBlogs Donor's Choose Blogger Challenge is nearing completion. You have until July 1 to donate to the evolgen challenge and forward your confirmation email to this address if you want to win any of the awesome prizes.
If we reach our goal of $500, Donors Choose will kick in an extra 10%…
June 29, 2006
They showed us the movie Flock of Dodos at the Evolution Meeting. Randy Olson (the director) was also there to field questions. So was Eugenie Scott. Someone asked about scientists boycotting the Kansas Kangaroo Court. Olson thought it was a bad idea because it made it look like the scientists…
June 28, 2006
I got back from the Evolution Meeting late last night. The first thing on my docket was clearing flies so I could collect virgins this morning. The rest of this week will be spent getting myself back up to speed. I had some fruitful discussions at the meeting, attended some interesting talks, and…
June 26, 2006
I said, "You probably won't see any new posts until later next week." Well, today is later this week than yesterday. Also, this post hardly counts as anything new. As you will see, it's a link to all the evolgen content you should have already read. If you haven't, read it. It's good. We like it,…
June 25, 2006
Blogging's been light recently. I spent the last week frantically preparing my talk for the Evolution Meeting. I was analyzing data until late Thursday evening. Then, I still needed to finish putting together my talk. We spent Friday driving to the meeting, and I gave my talk yesterday morning (…
June 22, 2006
Hsien Lei will be hosting the second edition of Mendel's Garden at Genetics and Health. Submission information is available here.
June 20, 2006
In case you forgot, the evolgen DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge is still going on. My great readers have donated $135 towards public science education (as of 8:00am on June 20). That's 27% of the way towards our goal of $500. There are still many proposals left to be funded, and I don't think anyone…
June 20, 2006
Two months ago, I wrote about Teri Markow resigning as President of the Society for the Study of Evolution in protest of the appointment of the new Editor in Chief. Long story short, Markow was unhappy that women were not considered for the editorship of the Society's journal, Evolution. Don Waller…
June 19, 2006
Humans have been genetically engineering agricultural crops ever since plants were domesticated. Notice the difference between maize and teosinte. Or how about what we have done to create modern
wheat. By either imposing an artificial selection pressure on a few important loci (in the case of maize…
June 19, 2006
The Physicians and Surgeons for Scientific Integrity [sic] (aka, Doctors Doubting Darwin) are planning to Resolve the Conflict between Darwin and Design. Something tells me the conflict will not be resolved using rational discourse, but rather apologetics and obfuscation. I have reproduced a list…
June 18, 2006
The first ever edition of Mendel's Garden, a blog carnival devoted to genetics, has been posted at The force that through... If you would like to contribute to the next edition, you can find information here.
June 18, 2006
Alan Packer at Free Association, the Nature Genetics blog, reports that Kossack Wesley Clark was once a fly pusher. During the Cold War (aka, before my time), gifted students were taught genetics in an accelerated course. They got to perform experiments using irradiated Drosophila melanogaster. As…