evolgen | 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 glassware in freshman chemlab -- which I had to pay for at the end of the semester. I've broken my share of vials, and I've even broken a few bottles. But none of those things are very expensive.
The only real expensive thing we have in our lab is an automated sequencer. I've never done any damage to the…
evolgen | May 12, 2006I'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 authors of the paper I discuss. I'll try to get some original content up here, but blogging may be slow until the end of the month.
Now that we have entered the post-genomics era, with the genomes of most model organisms completely sequenced (as well as the human genome), it is up to genome centers,…
evolgen | May 11, 2006Bad 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 insights give us the basis for admitting both views into the educational system. Evolutionary theory, like ID, isn't verifiable or testable. It's pure hypothesis -- like ID -- although very popular in the scientific community. Its limits help illuminate the fact that hypotheses are only as durable as the…
evolgen | May 10, 2006Not 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. Loren Rieseberg, who has been studying hybridization between sunflower species for some time, has an article in the upcoming issue of the American Naturalist (press release here) on the introgression of an advantageous allele from one species to another. This is probably quite common and may have…
evolgen | 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 (pictured above) is the lone picture wing fly in the Drosophila genomes project.
evolgen | May 10, 2006Razib 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 overdominance) and purifying selection. Other such examples include the sickle cell allele and the cystic fibrosis allele (despite some initial skepticism, I now admit that the evidence for selection maintaining the CF allele in European populations is quite convincing). I discuss another potential…
evolgen | May 9, 2006The 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 lone olive in an empty glass; it reverts to a liquid state when popped into the mouth.
evolgen | May 8, 2006So 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 life sciences). My three suggestions for sure locks were Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and Thomas Hunt Morgan. Darwin and Mendel will make everyone's list, but my nomination of Morgan did not go over so well (as I suspected). Some more nominations can be found below the fold...
If we ignore…
evolgen | May 6, 2006Grrl 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 with blogs about science (ie, Carl Zimmer's site), but he doesn't know about blogs written by scientists. If Olson does read ScienceBlogs, here's a message: have a screening in Pennsylvania.
evolgen | May 5, 2006The 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 because of the morons responsible for making the decisions regarding their use.
evolgen | May 5, 2006Is 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 conclusion would be obvious: all humans are more closely related to each other than any human is to a chimp. The same goes for a comparison of the entire genome. But what if we look at a small portion of the genome? This week's evolgen Phylogeny Friday deals with this question. More after the jump.…
evolgen | 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 if they would even mention Pele, Chad thought it would be cool to come up with a Mount Rushmore of Science. I'm not going to tackle such a broad topic. Instead, I ask who belongs on a Mount Rushmore of Biology, which I'd like to call Mount Biodome. My suggestions are below the fold -- and, no,…
evolgen | May 4, 2006Via 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 mutations in the cell's DNA, the higher the risk of cancer developing.
In case the syntax in the title is unfamiliar to you, lemme spell it out for you: MUTATIONS ARE NOT NECESSARILY BAD. Sure, genetic mutations are responsible for diseases such as cancers, but they are also the raw material upon with all…
evolgen | May 3, 2006When 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 it's symbolic of the end of the anti-evolution movement. Everything since then has been dedicated towards resurrecting ghosts. The picture is below the fold.
evolgen | May 3, 2006At 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.
evolgen | May 3, 2006The 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 JCI published an article dealing with intelligent design they received quite a few letters asking why a legitimate scientific publication should deal with pseudoscience. This time, the publishers included a pre-emptive statement justifying their actions.
If you care about the state of science…
evolgen | 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 should not be trusted with the lives of their patients). That said, I've got a little nit to pick with Carl. He wrote:
The scientists decided to compare human T cells directly to those of apes. It turns out that unlike humans apes produce a lot of Siglecs on their T cells.
C'mon, Carl, you know…
evolgen | May 2, 2006I'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 points us to this article from the BBC on a new function for "junk DNA". I hope Neil is right: "one day the term 'junk DNA' will fall into disuse."
John Hawks has a good discussion of a recent paper on inferring population size using mtDNA. Apparently cytoplasmic DNA is under selection, and that,…
evolgen | April 28, 2006Over 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 based approaches have been around for a while (and were used prior to the availability of molecular data). The combination of molecular data and more powerful computers allowed large molecular datasets to be analyzed using parsimony methods. Our great computing power has also allowed for the advent…