evolgen
Posts by this author
April 12, 2007
Because everyone else is commenting on it, I must as well. After all, I'd jump off of a bridge if everyone else were doing it.
I don't read science fiction. Sure, I've read a couple of the classics (ie, Ender's Game). And I was really into Stephen King for a couple of years, starting in fifth grade…
April 12, 2007
Sex chromosomes are cool. Because they're cool, I've written about them before. It's cool to trace the origins of sex chromosomes. It's cool to study how they evolve. And it's cool to compare similarities and differences of sex chromosomes within and between taxa. In organisms that use sex…
April 11, 2007
Those of us who work on non-human systems often grumble about the total disregard human geneticists (that's geneticists who study humans, not humans who are geneticists) have toward non-human research (that's research on non-humans, not non-humans doing research). I get the feeling that plant…
April 11, 2007
Tara has posted a brand new Tangled Bank at Aetiology. Head on over to her place for the best science blogging of the past two weeks.
April 11, 2007
Not all regions of the genome are equal in the eyes of evolution. For example, natural selection is more effective on genes in regions of higher recombination. We have known this for a while. The connection between recombination rate and natural selection was nicely refined when it was shown that…
April 9, 2007
Manatees may be reclassified as threatened; they are currently listed as endangered. Any good patriot will recognize this as a smart move to defend our safety. If we can stop them before they reach the northeast United States, some of us may be able to maintain our way of life.
Shelley disagrees.…
April 8, 2007
Matt Nisbet and Chris Mooney are arguing that science education is so fucked up and the press are so piss poor that scientists need to go swift boat vets in order win the public debates against anti-science types. According to Nisbet and Mooney, the general public are too stupid to understand the…
April 6, 2007
Jonathan Eisen reveals the real motivations behind Craig Venter's ocean metagenomics project.
It was just a few years ago that Dr. Venter announced that the human genome sequenced by Celera Genomics was in fact, mostly his own. And now, Venter has revealed a second twist in his genomic self-…
April 6, 2007
GAME PREVIEW | PRESS CENTER
Yesterday's game between Corporate and Charles Darwin was a battle between free market capitalism and the greatest naturalist of all time. The Corporate team is loaded with the world's top pharmaceutical and chemical companies. Darwin is the author of important works…
April 5, 2007
A recent flurry of papers (reviewed here) have presented evidence for homoploid hybrid speciation in insects -- one in Rhagoletis (a fruit fly) and two in butterflies (one in Heliconius and one in Lycaeides). The Rhagoletis paper showed that a hybrid species formed from two other species -- one…
April 3, 2007
GAME PREVIEW | PRESS CENTER
We are merely (a) day(s) away from the game between Corporate and Darwin (we're not sure whether the game will happen tomorrow or the next day due to some scheduling conflicts at Ivory Tower Arena), and the Corporate team has made a stunning revelation: Darwin did it for…
April 2, 2007
Alex has posted the (lucky) thirteenth edition of Mendel's Garden at the Daily Transcript. It's (not) an April Fools Day edition, but it would have been if it had come out yesterday. And there's a theme of magic fish flakes for you favorite model organism, but I don't think they're safe to…
April 2, 2007
Pedro has posted the ninth edition of Bio::Blogs with the best bioinformatics blogging of the past month. Pedro even made up a nifty pdf of all the posts, which you can print out and read while taking a bath.
March 30, 2007
PRESS CENTER | UPDATED BRACKET
Early next week, the amorphous, indefinable entity that is Corporate will take on a man named Charles Robert Darwin in the third round of the Science Spring Showdown. That's right, we're down to sixteen teams, including the eleven seed Corporate and the seven seed…
March 30, 2007
Mammals did not rapidly radiate after the K/T boundary.
That's the punch line of a paper published in this week's issue of Nature. This has been all over the news, including the New York Times twice (#1 and #2). You see, there's this idea that when the dinosaurs (technically, the non-avian…
March 29, 2007
URGENT: We have a new update from the War Against Manatees.
The Bad Reporter has a dispatch from the great manatee migration. While the enviro-terrorists are claiming global warming is to blame, we patriots know what's up. It's not warm northern waters that are drawing the sea cows north. They're…
March 29, 2007
Janet pointed me to a post at the Philosopher's Playground about doing away with laboratory courses in the science curriculum. Steve Gimbel, the philosopher doing the playing, teaches at Gettysburg College. He argues that the lab portions of science classes cause non-science majors to avoid those…
March 29, 2007
Last week, I linked to an article in Seed about synonymous mutations with deleterious effects in humans. It's heavy with errors, but I didn't linger too much on them. Larry Moran, on the other hand, got a bit more riled up than I did, and John Logsdon (whose blog has the potential to be something…
March 28, 2007
PRESS CENTER | UPDATED BRACKET
The folks that brought you the Second Round of the Octopus Region of the Science Spring Showdown (part 1, part 2) will be bringing you one of the marquee match ups of the third round. Those folks are us, and the place is here at evolgen. We're down to sixteen teams (…
March 27, 2007
We've told you about the manatees making their move from the southeastern United States to the northeast. We warned you that the sea cows ain't as dumb as you thought they were. We took you inside their training camps. We showed you the future of the manatees.
But now, thanks to a patriotic group…
March 21, 2007
SECOND ROUND PREVIEW | PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS
Welcome back to our coverage of the second round of the Science Spring Showdown. We had two great games yesterday, and another one finished earlier today. The final game of the round, between HIV and Psychology, is just wrapping up now; we'…
March 21, 2007
SECOND ROUND PREVIEW | PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS
Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to our comprehensive coverage of the second round of the Science Spring Showdown. We had two great games yesterday, and we have two more match ups today. The game between Phylogenetics and Unipotent is just…
March 20, 2007
Darwinian evolution means different things to different people. To me, and many other population geneticists, it refers to positive selection. To Jeffrey Schwartz, an anthropologist at the University of Pittsburgh, Darwinian evolution means gradual change. By the way, Schwartz also thinks humans…
March 19, 2007
Both Carl Zimmer and Larry Moran have posts on the gene content in the human genome. Carl points out that the estimate of the total number of genes in the human genome is decreasing, but we still don't know what a whole bunch of those genes do (according to the one database he searched). Larry's…
March 19, 2007
In the comments of my dinosaur genome size post, Shelley asked:
So do ALL birds have equally small genomes or is there variation among species?
I don't think she was looking for a trite response along the lines of: "Of course there's variation among species." What she was asking, I presume, is how…
March 18, 2007
Dr. Wayne Grody is a molecular biologist at UCLA. But his part-time job sounds like a lot more fun: "technical advisor on a number of motion picture and television productions". He's the guy responsible for giving Eddie Murphy's Professor Klump character a ginormous research lab despite the fact…
March 17, 2007
1st ROUND RESULTS | PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS
After the excitement of the first round action in the Octopus region, we can only hope that the second round is half as dynamic. The big upset last round saw Unipotent knocking off Totipotent. There has also been an interesting twist, as…
March 17, 2007
Genome size can be measured in a variety of ways. Classically, the haploid content of a genome was measured in picograms and represented as the C-value. People began to realize that the C-value was not correlated with any measures of organismal complexity and seemed to vary unpredictably between…
March 16, 2007
1st ROUND RESULTS | PRESS CENTER | PRINTABLE BRACKETS
The results are in from the first round in the Octopus Region of the Science Spring Showdown hosted at the World's Fair. By seed, there were three upsets, but the nine seed Internal Medicine knocking off eight seed Surgery was hardly a surprise…
March 16, 2007
New Terms in Phylogenetics
I'm a cladist, and as a cladist I want all of my taxa monophyletic. That means anything given a name (animals, plants, vertebrates, insects, etc.) should include all the organisms that descend from the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) shared by the organisms you claim…