evolgen | June 9, 2006If all has gone according to planned*, the new version of the ScienceBlogs homepage should be up and running. Along with the new homepage comes a whole slew of new bloggers. Go on over and check it out. It should be totally awesome**.
* This is a scheduled post, so all may have not gone according to planned.
** I cannot guarantee awesomeness because I have yet to see the new page or many of the new blogs.
evolgen | June 9, 2006
You may have thought that Orin Scrivello was the worst dentist ever. Well, have I got a story for you. This dentist isn't a sadist, and his follies were far from intentional. But the implications of his conduct greatly affected the lives of at least five of his patients. This week's Phylogeny Friday is story fit for CSI. Learn about the dentist, the virus, and his patients below the fold.
The story revolves around Dr. David Acer, a Florida dentist who died in 1990 from complications of AIDS. Dr. Acer's death would have been far from remarkable at the time -- the AIDS epidemic was quite…
evolgen | June 9, 2006
A poll of 1,200 undergrads at 100 colleges in the United States found that 73% of the students think iPods are "in". One tenth of all old people know that "in" means "hip". Half of all old people think "hip" means "the thing I just got replaced". Drinking beer and stalking Facebook tied for second most "in" thing -- scoring affirmative amongst "71%" of the students. Sorry, got a little bit too aggressive with the quotes; I promise it won't happen again. Given my infatuation with alcohol, I figured this problem needed to be addressed. By problem, I mean the 29% who don't think beer is the…
evolgen | June 8, 2006For the past few weeks, I have allowed commenters to post using their TypeKey account. I didn't want to require commenters to register with TypeKey if they did not want to, so I still allowed comments from unregistered readers. TypeKey allows me to authorize comments much faster, as I do not need to worry about spam coming from registered commenters. I can also tell the publishing software to trust commenters if they have a TypeKey account. I get an email notification for every comment, and I must manual approve all non-TypeKey comments. That's why non-TypeKey comments may take longer to…
evolgen | June 8, 2006Hsien at Genetics and Health decided it would be interesting to interview some idiot and post the answers online. The idiot tried his best to answer the five questions (no, not those five questions) posed to him, and you can either berate him for his answers at Genetics and Health or right here in the comments section.
evolgen | June 7, 2006I present for you an example of inferring a bit too much from inappropriate data. This isn't quite the same as making claims about demography based on 100 nucleotides from 6 individuals. But it's not much better given that this example is from a study of extant organisms. Abstracts to clarify what the hell I'm talking about are below the fold.
Exhibit A comes from a paper on human demography and mitochondrial DNA. Here is the abstract:
Human mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) studies have entered a new phase since the blossoming of complete genome analyses. Sequencing complete mtDNAs is more expensive…
evolgen | June 6, 2006The New York Times has a science blog. A science blog that I cannot access because I am not subscribed to TimesSelect. The Times wants readers to pay to read a blog. This is worse than a blog without comments.
(Via Complex Medium.)
evolgen | June 6, 2006I've learned that writing about alcohol is great for the ol' site meter. Even the teetotalers got active in the comments. Despite the rampant sobriety that seems to be spreading amongst sciency types, I still believe that alcohol is the lubricant that greases the scientific process.
But scientists -- being scientists -- aren't just interesting in drinking the alcohol; they also want to know where the critters that make it come from and how it gets produced. Of course, alcohol on its own isn't very enjoyable. That's why beer makers add things like hops to their brew, and wine makers try to…
evolgen | June 5, 2006No, Dr. Mayr did not dislike the beach. That's just how all the kids are saying, "You ain't down with the shit I'm doing." Anyway, read this post attacking the physicists for calling us stamp collectors on a blog with a very cumbersome name. MissPrism puts a throw-away link at the end of the post to Roger Lewin's 1982 interview with Mayr (available here if you have a subscription to JSTOR). I actually like MissPrism's post better than Lewin's article, so you're not missing much if you can't get access to the Mayr interview. I have some quotes from Mayr, and my responses, below the fold.
Both…
evolgen | June 4, 2006The Lehigh University Department of Biological Sciences was awarded $1.8 million by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute to fund undergraduate education. No word if Michael Behe will use any of the money to fund his gigantic research program in intelligent design.
evolgen | June 4, 2006Billy 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 against Darwinian evolution. This is another argument -- in a long line of many others -- that basically amounts to the same bullshit: natural selection cannot explain the diversity of life on earth.
Interestingly, Michael Lynch used a similar argument (albeit without supernatural forces) in describing…
evolgen | June 3, 2006I 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, so I would have heard about it. Go Vikings!
evolgen | June 3, 2006The 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 Anaheim, maybe they should go with "Los Angeles de Anaheim". After all, that's what these guys should have done rather than the more cumbersome "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim". Redundancy like that is only equaled by "The La Brea Tar Pits" (translated entirely into English, it reads "The The Tar…
evolgen | June 3, 2006This 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 Evolution annual meeting for the first time. I figured the meeting is in Long Island, New York so I may as well check it out when it's in my neck of the woods (last year it was in Alaska and next year it will be in New Zealand). The Evolution Meeting has a reputation of being less work and more play than…
evolgen | June 3, 2006John 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, we are superorganisms that depend on our gut microbes to assist us in digesting food, much like these guys. We get a lot of our intestinal buddies when we pass through the birth canal, and we pick up others throughout life (see here for more on intestinal microbes). The worms that are attached to…
evolgen | June 2, 2006I 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 history arise via entirely neutral processes? The answer is implied in the setup, but check out some of the details below the fold.
Humans and chimpanzees share HLA alleles that have been maintained by selection. These loci are far from ideal for constructing evolutionary relationships between…
evolgen | June 2, 2006The 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, too. He says that after years of partying, including 18 months' probation for driving while impaired, he became a Christian three years ago. It influenced how he wanted to run the club, he says.
Another holier than thou born again Christian. How fun. If I were on this team I'd stage an orgy in the…
evolgen | June 1, 2006Addendum: 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 out with some stuff about the falling birth rate in Europe, but then digresses into a discussion of drunkenness (which is carried on in the comments). It turns out there are people who have never been drunk. Ever. I do not know these people.
I'm wondering what fraction of my readership are members…
evolgen | June 1, 2006The 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 of Representatives approved a $600 million increase for the NIH FY2007 budget. The Senate passed an amendment to provide an additional $7 billion for health, education and labor programs. President Cuckoo Bananas' original budget kept the funding for health programs flat (without even an increase…
evolgen | 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 first (of perhaps few, perhaps many) of those (possibly incoherent) ramblings -- interrupted by as few paranthetical remarks as possible.
In this post, I'll try to tie together:
A talk by Sean Carrol on the evolution of wing pigmentation.
A talk by Peter Andolfatto on the evolution of Drosophila non…