evolgen | April 12, 2007Because 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 (which seems just about right considering the level of his writing), but he's not really a science fiction author. Neither is Dean Koontz, whom I became infatuated with after I abandoned King (whom I think I was most interested in because of all the sex in his stories).
But here's where I'm going…
evolgen | April 12, 2007Sex 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 chromosomes to determine sex (eg, mammals, Drosophila, and birds), there is a big honking chromosome that looks like most autosomes and a piddly little chromosome that doesn't even recombine. In some organisms, males have one copy of the dinky chromosome (which we call a Y chromosome) and one copy of the…
evolgen | April 11, 2007Those 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 biologists have the same attitude toward non-plant researchers, and I imagine there is some unwritten chain of superiority wherein you must pay respect to the researchers working on a system "above" you and ignore the research done on a system "beneath" yours -- and, yes, I realize the higher and lower…
evolgen | 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.
evolgen | April 11, 2007Not 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 DNA polymorphism is lower in regions of low recombination and higher in regions of high recombination (see Begun and Aquadro). This could be due to higher mutation rates in regions of high recombination (and vice versa), greater reach of selective sweeps in regions of low recombination (the…
evolgen | 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. She thinks the state of Florida needs to protect these anti-American beasts. I think Shelley is living in the state of denial, along with Jacob. Florida must do everything to ensure to manatees remain down there. Because we're fighting them down there so that we don't have to fight them up here. If…
evolgen | April 8, 2007Matt 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 real science, so scientists need to dumb it down. And we can't rely on the press (which everyone calls "the media") to accurately communicate science, so we need to give them catch phrases and slogans. Scientists need ad wizards to convince the public that the earth is more than 10,000 years old,…
evolgen | April 6, 2007Jonathan 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-examination. Venter was discussing his Global Ocean Voyage, in which he used his personal yacht to collect ocean water samples from around the world. He then used large filtration units to collect microbes from the water samples which were then brought back to his high tech lab in Rockville, MD where he…
evolgen | April 6, 2007GAME 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 such as On the Origin of Species and The Descent of Man. To find out who came out on top, click through below the fold.
Everyone expected Darwin to start out with a heavy dose of the Origin. And if he didn't come heavy with that, he'd bring The Descent of Man. But Chuck use neither in the opening…
evolgen | 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 that feeds on snowberries and one that feeds on blueberries -- native to North America. The hybrid species feeds on an invasive honeysuckle that was introduced from Asia within the last couple of centuries.
The paper on Heliconius butterflies described a hybrid between H. melpomene and H. cydno which…
evolgen | April 3, 2007GAME 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 the money, not the love of the game. This is quite a surprising turn of events. Chuck D was financial secure for his entire life, and it was long thought that his pursuit of science came from a quest to understand the world around him.
Not so fast, says Corporate team spokesman B. Roe Crat. The…
evolgen | 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 incorporate into my fly food. What are you still doing reading this? Get over to Alex's place and read about genetics.
evolgen | 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.
evolgen | March 30, 2007PRESS 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 Darwin. This match up of Chair Region powerhouses will be presented on evolgen. A preview of this potentially epic battle can be found below.
Some may say that Charles Darwin was a tentative man. They base this claim on the fact that Chuck waited twenty years from his first ideas on evolution by…
evolgen | March 30, 2007Mammals 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 dinosaurs) disappeared, mammals quickly filled in the vacated niches. That means there should have been a rapid radiation of mammalian lineages following the dinosaur mass extinction -- marked by the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods (known as the K/T boundary).
The new study reveals that…
evolgen | March 29, 2007URGENT: 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 out to undermine our way of life.
That's right -- they're on their way to Massachusetts (aka, the Gay State) for some dirty man-on-man action. And maybe some woman-on-woman action. But definitely man-on-man. Hot, steamy, man-manatee-on-man-manatee action. DIRTY!!!
Because you can't get that kind of…
evolgen | March 29, 2007Janet 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 courses and not enroll in any science class not required for graduation. If science courses consisted of more theory and less labs (by theory he means lecture, and, by choosing that word, he indicates he doesn't have much experience in non-physics science courses where the lectures consist of more…
evolgen | March 29, 2007Last 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 cool) agrees with Larry. And I agree with both of them.
The issue here is with the neutral theory, which Larry describes quite well (see also the coverage in this primer to population genetics). Many people misinterpret the neutral theory and think that it claims that all mutations in some class (non…
evolgen | March 28, 2007PRESS 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 (some would even call this collection of teams "sweet"), which means there are eight games that will be played on the internets over the course of the next week.
We'll be playing host to a game from the Chair Region between Darwin and Corporate. That's right, we're delving into the Philosophy of…
evolgen | March 27, 2007We'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 of researchers, we have information on the organization of the manatee genome -- an important first step in preventing the manatee invasion. The researchers, from the University of Florida and the National Cancer Institute, conclude that the closest living relatives of the manatees, dugongs, and…