evolgen
Posts by this author
June 4, 2006
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.
From what I can gather, the author postulates that the human genome is deteriorating, and this is evidence…
June 3, 2006
I had heard that the local high school had one the National Science Bowl. This sort of news spreads quickly when a faculty member's son is on the winning team. What I didn't realize was my alma mater came in third. I don't think we even had a team back when I was there -- I was a pretty big dork,…
June 3, 2006
The Los Angeles Lakers will be holding a fan vote to name their new D-League (minor league) affiliate. The options:
D-Dogs
D-Fenders
L.A. Caliente
L.A. Breakers
L.A. Next
L.A. Sensation
L.A. Buss
L.A. Evolution
I like the last option -- it beats the L.A. Designers. Given that they may be playing in…
June 3, 2006
This post is a bitch-fest. Don't read any further if you have no interest in hearing me complain. The only reason I'm posting this is because I figure some of the people who read this blog find themselves in the same boat as me.
This summer, I will be attending the Society for the Study of…
June 3, 2006
John Hawks' really needs to permit comments on his blog. I mean, without comments, is it really a blog? I bring this up because this post really belongs in the (non-existent) comments of this post from Hawks. Hawks discusses this article on human gut flora fauna microbes.
According to the article,…
June 2, 2006
I wrote about the possibility of gene trees and species trees giving conflicting information in a previous Phylogeny Friday. In that example, the discordance was due to balancing selection maintaining multiple alleles across species boundaries. But can incongruities between genetic data and species…
June 2, 2006
The Colorado Rockies have found the lord-uh, Jesus Christ. According one of their owners:
"We had to go to hell and back to know where the Holy Grail is. We went through a tough time and took a lot of arrows," says Rockies chairman and CEO Charlie Monfort, one of the original owners.
Monfort did,…
June 1, 2006
Addendum: Older women who drink are smarter. Question is, are they MILFs or Cougars?
Scanning a few blogs that I rarely ever read, I came across a link to this post from this blog. The post is on Crooked Timber, and the link comes from the awesomely named Lawyers, Guns, and Money. The post starts…
June 1, 2006
The non-deterministic blog has posted a roundup of our responses to their question about justifying science funding to the public.
On a related note, I recently received an update on the status of funding for biomedical research in the United States. In my last report, I pointed out that the House…
May 31, 2006
...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 help me organize my ideas (hopefully better organized than that last sentence). This is the…
May 30, 2006
I should be working instead of dicking around on the ole' blog. But, give me a break, I just washed 600 vials. I needed a break.
After letting the new ugly banner and stupid name hang around for a week, I've decided it's time for an update. We're going back to being called evolgen (although you can…
May 30, 2006
Another week, another question from the Seeders. This week they ask us:
Since they're funded by taxpayer dollars (through the NIH, NSF, and so on), should scientists have to justify their research agendas to the public, rather than just grant-making bodies?
My answer is below the fold.
It all…
May 29, 2006
The meeting went pretty well (I may have more to say later once I've had time to digest everything). When I got to the airport on Sunday, I found out my flight was one hour late. I live in the middle of nowhere, so it's impossible to get a direct flight from the western or southern US. Long story…
May 24, 2006
If all has gone well, this post should appear as I'm on my way across the country to John Lynch's neck of the woods. The warmth of the desert should cause quite a shock to my system coming from the frigid north east. I may not have much access to the internets until next week, and I haven't…
May 23, 2006
Given the inability of certain people to differentiate between evolgen and Evolution Blog, we're changing our name. This isn't like the last time we tried to rename ourselves. This is for real . . . and 4 eva. We are no longer evolgen. We aren't Evolution Blog, either, but we never claimed to be…
May 23, 2006
Carl Zimmer has an article in the NYTimes Science section on how humans can interfere with diverging populations, increasing the frequency of hybrids and preventing speciation. He give two examples: three-spine sticklebacks in British Columbia, Canada and ground finches in the Galapagos. The…
May 23, 2006
While procrastinating (I should be analyzing data for a talk I'm giving on Friday), I stumbled upon this site (via EDSBS, not StumbleUpon). I tried to bypass registration (using BugMeNot), but none of the cheat passwords worked. If you want to play around with the gadget, you may need to register…
May 20, 2006
This week, the SEED kings are asking us:
"If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be?"
This is the first thing that comes to mind, and the scientific method is a good answer as well. I'm going to take a step back and say the public should understand…
May 19, 2006
As I mentioned previously, I'm busy preparing some data for a meeting next week. I don't have much time to devote to Phylogeny Friday, so I'll be sharing some of my own data with you. This data is nothing special; it just happens to be the data I finished analyzing a few minutes ago. It's open, I…
May 19, 2006
My advisor once told me that the best way to get your paper into a high profile journal like Science or Nature is to find the biggest of something, the smallest of something, or something that fucks funny. It turns out doing research on drugs doesn't get you in. No, not those drugs. These drugs.…
May 18, 2006
President Bush's FY2007 budget included no increase in funding for the NIH. Scientists have been lobbying Congress to amend the budget to at least increase the NIH budget to keep even with inflation. You can follow the story in these posts:
Lobbying the Senate
Amendment passes in the Senate…
May 18, 2006
Albinos The pigmentally challenged are up in arms over the Da Vinci Code. They say it's unfair that, once again, an albino portrays a villain on screen:
Michael McGowan, an albino who heads the National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation, said "The Da Vinci Code" will be the 68th…
May 17, 2006
John Hawks reads the papers so that I don't have to. Here is Hawks's reply to the human-chimp speciation paper I mentioned in the previous post. The basic conclusion that Hawks reaches: Don't believe the hype. The data analysis in the paper is sound, but the conclusions the authors draw are…
May 17, 2006
Humans and chimps did not undergo a speciation event. Some pair of species (one an ancestor of humans, the other of chimps) speciated. It was thought that this event occurred approximately 6.5-7.4 million years ago, based on fossil evidence. A new paper coming out in the week's issue of Nature,…
May 17, 2006
PLoS Biology has an article with data that supports the hypothesis that open access articles receive more citations than articles hidden behind a toll (summary available here). The author compared open access and non-open access articles in PNAS, controlling for any confounding variable he could…
May 16, 2006
SEED is asking us the following question:
"Will the "human" race be around in 100 years?"
Considering: (1) the entire universe is just an artifact of my imagination; (2) when I die everything in the universe (including humans) will disappear; and (3) I doubt that I will live 100 more years. I'd…
May 16, 2006
Michael Ashburner has written a book. No, not that book. This one's a bit smaller, less expensive, and about the sequencing of the Drosophila melanogaster genome. You can read a review of the book here and buy it from here. It's not The Genome War; Matt Ridley describes it as Ashburner's "…
May 16, 2006
I remember watching this movie (WARNING: link to a large file) during my sophomore year of college. It now appears that some folks at Kenyon College plan to do a remake. For those of you too lazy to follow the links, the movie depicts protein synthesis using people acting out the roles of mRNA,…
May 16, 2006
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 some evolutionary genetics research, here are some links:
Check out this…
May 14, 2006
Bad science reporting is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. LabLit has an article on the death of the science section in the Grauniad.