evolgen
Posts by this author
May 13, 2006
The Wannabe Biologists are bragging about all the expensive toys physicists get to play with . . . and break. Philip scratched a 2.5" diameter gold mirror. I guess glass isn't expensive enough for physicists. I don't think I've ever broken anything really expensive. Sure, I cracked some…
May 12, 2006
I've been busy this past week (and I'll be busy in the next couple of weeks to come), so I don't have much time to post to evolgen. For this reason this week's Phylogeny Friday is a recycled post from the old site. Check out the comments on the original entry for some remarks from one of the…
May 11, 2006
Bad Astronomy has a rant up on Tony Snow (the new White House Press Secretary) and his creationist tendencies. I won't linger on the political implications of having an anti-science advocates in our government, but one quote from Snow is so ridiculous it needs to be pointed out:
These little…
May 10, 2006
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 another species.…
May 10, 2006
Twelve Drosophila species from the picture wing clade are now protected under the Endangered Species Act, according to this LiveScience article. The picture wing flies are endemic to Hawaii and characterized by their colorful wings. They are also larger than most other Drosophilids. D. grimshawi…
May 10, 2006
Razib linked to some press surrounding an unpublished (although presented at a conference) finding that an allele that causes deafness in homozygotes may allow wounds to heal better in heterozygotes. This appears to be another example of an allele simultaneously under balancing selection (due to…
May 10, 2006
Tangled Bank 53 has been posted at Science Notes. Go get your science on.
May 9, 2006
The NYTimes has an article on bartenders using some science tricks. I have a new favorite drink:
For the martini, they blend olive juice, vermouth and gin with xanthan gum and calcium chloride and drop it into a sodium alginate and water solution to form stable olive-shaped blobs. It is served as a…
May 8, 2006
So we're fusing two crappy mid-90s movies here -- Bio-Dome and Hot Shots! Part Deux -- but bear with me, this has nothing to do with the cinema. Inspired by Chad's attempt to come up with a Mount Rushmore for all of science, I decided to narrow the scope and create a Mount Biodome (limited to the…
May 6, 2006
Grrl Scientist got a complementary copy of the Daily Kos science e-book. She's got a review of it here. Does reality have a liberal bias? Anyway, she also got into a screening of Flock of Dodos. She doesn't have a review up, but she did post some comments here. Apparently Randy Olson is familiar…
May 5, 2006
The grand overlords behind ScienceBlogs are asking us:
If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?
That's simple, atomic weapons. Not only for the damage they have cause, but for the perpetual state of fear they put us in…
May 5, 2006
Is it possible that you are more closely related to a chimpanzee than to another human? Ok, that's a bit of a loaded question. It depends on how we define 'related', or, more specifically, what we are measuring. If, for instance, you compared the anatomy or physiology of a human and a chimp, the…
May 4, 2006
Chad and I both listen to ESPN's Mike and Mike in the mornings. The last couple of days they've been trying to figure out what four athletes belong on the Mount Rushmore of sports (they settled on Muhammed Ali, Babe Ruth, Michael Jordan, and Wayne Gretzky). While I was sitting around wondering…
May 4, 2006
Via EurekAlert comes this news release on research into error checking during DNA polymerization. I'm not judging the science; I'm judging the reporting, which includes the following statement:
Everyone knows mutations - genetic mistakes in DNA, the material of heredity - are bad: The more…
May 3, 2006
When the earth shook and the San Francisco Bay Area trembled, a statue fell off the Zoology building at Stanford. That statue was of the paleontologist Louis Agassiz. Agassiz, a contemporary of Charles Darwin and staunch critic of his theory of evolution, got his due. Kevin calls it irony; I say…
May 3, 2006
At least I didn't accuse Carl Zimmer of doing this. As Rebecca Skloot points out, we shouldn't blame the science writers for this. It's those damn editors that don't understand science. By the way, I hate the creators of X-Men for damaging the public's understanding of genetic mutations.
May 3, 2006
The Journal of Clinical Investigation has published an open access article calling all scientists to step up and defend science in American schools. The article focuses mostly on combating the anti-evolution movement, but the themes can be extended to all of science. Apparently the last time the…
May 3, 2006
Carl Zimmer (one of the best general audience science writers) has a post on his blog on how the human immune system differs from that of other primates and even other apes. It's a good example of why biomedical researchers need to understand evolutionary biology (and why dumb shits like this…
May 2, 2006
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 ain't saying much right now. The list can be found below the fold.
Neil Saunders…
April 28, 2006
Over at my old site, I lamented the apparent death of distance based tree building algorithms. Just as all of life on earth can be divided into three domains, phylogenetic methods can be split into three groups: distance based, maximum parsimony, and maximum likelihood. Distance and parsimony…
April 28, 2006
Via Janet comes the ABC meme. To learn a bit about me, click through to below the fold.
Accent: None that I can detect. Of course, no one thinks they have an accent.
Booze: It depends on my mood -- I'll drink pretty much anything. Sometimes I'm in the mood for a good IPA, sometimes a thick stout…
April 26, 2006
Ian Musgrave has a good summary of genes appearing from non-coding DNA (ORFans) on the Panda's Thumb. I have written about ORFans here and here (dude's gotta link to himself sometimes). Ian's post is targeted at some claims made by the creationist Paul Nelson, but he focuses more on the science…
April 26, 2006
If you know anything about bioinformatics, you know that programmers love to come up with clever names for their applications. NCBI's BLAST (Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) programs are some of the most used tools, but behind every successful program is a stupid acronym or cute name. Do the…
April 25, 2006
Via BioCurious comes this article on ten "science question[s] every high school graduate should be able to answer." Read the list -- most of the questions are bullshit. Ok, they aren't bullshit, but they are trivia. "What percentage of the earth is covered by water?" "What sorts of signals does…
April 25, 2006
Bora has been pushing the idea of publishing original research (hypotheses, data, etc) on science blogs. This post is part of a series exploring the evolution of a duplicated gene in the genus Drosophila. Links to the previous posts can be found below. Part 2 of this series (The Backstory) can…
April 24, 2006
Bora has been pushing the idea of publishing original research (hypotheses, data, etc) on science blogs. As a responsible researcher, I would need to obtain permission from any collaborators (including my advisor) before published anything we have been working on together. But what about small…
April 24, 2006
Via nodalpoint comes this UPGMA tree of sequence alignment algorithms from this paper. The first thing that comes to mind is that there are way too many sequence alignment methods. The second, it's kinda cool to see one method used to understand another. And Nucleic Acids Research gets mad props…
April 24, 2006
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 evolutionary biology -- take, for example, the neutralist-…
April 23, 2006
Otherwise known as a choloroplast:
The Chloroplast You scored 46 Industriousness, 54 Centrality, and 23 Causticity!
You're the Chloroplast!
Most of the Earth's energy comes from the chloroplast's ability to capture the energy of the sun and fix cabon dioxide for conversion to starch. Like the…
April 21, 2006
Janet has a post up on communications between students and faculty. My opinion -- as both a student who must communicate with faculty members and a teaching assistant with whom students must communicate -- is that it's most important to be clear, concise, respectful, and polite. You should always…