evolgen
Posts by this author
March 22, 2006
Take a look at the unfortunate name NASA has given to its small satellites used to study the earth's magnetic fields:
March 21, 2006
The Specter-Harkin Amendment passed the Senate, but this does not guarantee an increase to the NIH budged. The House must still vote on it and it must be reflected in House and Senate Appropriations Committees' allocation for the Labor-Health and Human Services Appropriations Committee. (Don't…
March 20, 2006
Japan has jumped out to an early lead over Cuba in the World Baseball Classic championship game. Why do I mention this? Not only have Japanese researchers made great contributions to evolutionary genetics, but the emperor of Japan has actually actively studied evolutionary biology. Also, the…
March 20, 2006
Robert Skipper took issue with Dick Lewontin's definition of natural selection. Skipper did not like how Lewontin removed the struggle for existence and interaction with the environment from the requirements for evolution by natural selection. John Hawks points out that the environment…
March 20, 2006
Rounds one and two are over, and the rubble has settled. The fakers have been exposed, and the Cinderfellas have emerged. So, how good are the ScienceBloggers at picking college basketball games? Kevin Vranes (I think) is currently sitting in first place, but two of his final four teams (Kansas…
March 19, 2006
The human Y, that is. The Science Creative Quarterly has a very thorough (ie, make sure you have some time to spare) review of the mammalian Y chromosome (focusing on the human Y). The article covers the origin and evolution of the mammalian Y and what the degeneration of the Y means for the…
March 17, 2006
PLoS Computational Biology has an article in the pipeline on detecting natural selection in humans in chimps. The authors looked for genes evolving at unequal rates between the two species and genes with signals of positive selection. I have not read the entire article, but it looks like a good…
March 17, 2006
Today marks the anniversary of the death of St. Patrick -- the dude who ridded Ireland of its non-existent snakes (some folks claim it was a metaphor for pagans). In honor of this great feat, people around the world drink green beer and pretend to be Irish. What does that have to do with double…
March 16, 2006
Seven year old Autum Ashante read a poem she had written to middle- and high-school students in Peekskill, NY.
"Black lands taken from your hands, by vampires with no remorse," the aspiring actress and poet wrote. "They took the gold, the wisdom and all the storytellers. They took the black women,…
March 16, 2006
Do you want a quick and dirty guide to DNA replication without any of the fancy pictures or cumbersome terminology commonly found in text books? David Ng has published such a guide at The Science Creative Quarterly. It's a good read even if you already know that stuff.
March 15, 2006
Hey, Myers, two can play at this game. An article in the Journal of Molecular Evolution presents structural and sequence analysis of hemocyanin (an oxygen carrying protein) from the cephalopod, Nautilus pomilius (shown at the left). They also compared the sequence to another cephalopod, Octopus…
March 15, 2006
Randy Olson has been taking his film Flock of Dodos around the United States, showing free screenings at a bunch of universities. The list of places he's visited reads like the lyrics to a Johnny Cash song: Kansas City, Boston, New Haven, Houston. . . (if you have more places to add to the list,…
March 15, 2006
The Genetics Society of America is requesting that its members contact their Senators to ask them to support an amendment to increase the 2007 NIH budget proposed by President Bush. As it current stands, the proposed 2007 budget is equal to the 2006 budget (without even a correction for inflation…
March 15, 2006
Tangled Bank #49 has been posted at Living the Scientific Life. Go get your science on.
March 14, 2006
PLoS Biology (the people that brought you the recent paper from Jonathan Pritchard on detecting selection in the human genome and George Zhang's paper on selection on human pseudogenes) has published an editorial on detecting natural selection. It is a good follow up to my series on detecting…
March 12, 2006
Dave Munger of Cognitive Daily has started an NCAA tournament pool for the ScienceBlogs community. If all of those links were confusing, go here to get the details. If you have no idea what the NCAA basketball tournament is, you should definitely participate -- in these types of things, the less…
March 12, 2006
Hot on the heels of Chad's project to find the greatest physics experiment ever (see, also, his call for the greatest experiment or discovery in other fields), The Science Creative Quarterly settles the debate the only logical way possible: a single elimination cage match tournament.
March 10, 2006
I commented a couple of days ago on a news item about a journal article on the evolution of gene expression in primates that had yet to be published. Well, the article has been published, and I've read it (Nature has also published a news and views piece on the study by Rasmus Nielsen). I have a…
March 10, 2006
Today's evolgen Double Entendre Friday deals with the genetic phenomenon known as incomplete penetrance. Ok, maybe this one isn't a double entendre, but more of a pseudo-homonym (can you guess what it sounds like?). When students in an introductory biology course are taught about dominance they…
March 9, 2006
Today marks the birthday of our venerable godfather (er, atheist-father?) here at ScienceBlogs, PZ Myers. I am honored and grateful that I have been invited to PZ Myers's . . . birthday . . . on the day of PZ Myers's birthday. And I hope that his first post be a cephalopod post. In appreciation…
March 9, 2006
Orac has been reporting on the arson at the Holocaust History Project. He's asking as many people as possible to spread the news and draw attention to the Holocaust History Project as a way of getting back at the people who were trying to silence the Holocaust History Project.
On a more personal…
March 8, 2006
Kevin White (aka, Mr. Drosophila microarray data) has a paper coming out in tomorrow's issue of Nature. The paper (which is not available on the Nature website yet) compares the expression of over 1,000 genes from humans, chimpanzees, orangutans and rhesus monkeys. From a news write up of the…
March 7, 2006
I have been working from home today (mostly grading papers) and watching the World Baseball Classic. This is the first time I've been able to watch a complete game -- the previous games were in Tokyo, which meant they were shown live in the middle of the night. (Note to NBC, you can show sporting…
March 7, 2006
This paper is rather timely considering I just finished reviewing methods for detecting natural selection. Jonathan Pritchard's group has scanned SNP data from three populations (Europeans, East Asians, and Nigerians) for signatures of positive natural selection. The authors used measures of…
March 6, 2006
I have to say, it's kinda cool to have my opinion acknowledged and used to correct an error. It looks like I pull some weight around here (not as much as some folks, but the 100 or so page views a day mean something).
But I ain't done yet. In honor of my dedication to correcting errors in the…
March 6, 2006
If anyone thinks I have sold out to the Seed Gods, let this be my exhibit A against such opinions. Seed has published a review of Funk et al's ecological divergence and speciation PNAS paper. The scientific content is not all that bad, but it blows the implications of the study way out of…
March 6, 2006
A very pretty picture (click on the image to make it larger):
Go read what Carl Zimmer and Rhosgobel have to say. For more on the Tree of Life, go here.
March 6, 2006
Dan Ely sounds a lot like Phil Skell. They both go to the evolutionary biologists at their respective universities and ask them ill-informed questions. They then misinterpret the answers and spread their misnomers throughout the anti-evolution community.
March 5, 2006
Polymorphism and Divergence
This is the eighth of multiple postings I plan to write about detecting natural selection using molecular data (ie, DNA sequences). The introduction can be found here. The first post described the organization of the genome, and the second described the organization of…
March 4, 2006
All of the ScienceBloggers are taking the quiz to determine which science fiction spaceship on which they belong. The quiz has 48 questions, so I'm not taking it on principle. Also, I don't particularly like sci-fi (or SF, or whatever the hell it goes by these days) . . . and I haven't heard of…