evolgen | February 4, 2006It has always bothered me when certain scientific publications get a lot of popular press despite the fact that the results are not that revolutionary. But the general public probably does not care to learn about a discovery in some esoteric discipline, so I understand that bias. What irks me more is the bias in high impact journals to publish sexy publications even if the science is limited. A correspondence to Nature addresses this issue:
"The broad audience of Nature forces its editors to pre-screen papers according to how appealing they will be for its readers, even if appeal and…
evolgen | February 3, 2006Free Association (the Nature Genetics blog) has published a commentary from Laura Ranum, the senior author on the recent Abraham Lincoln ataxia paper. It begins:
In 1992 I received a phone call from a neurologist with an ataxia patient that had a strong family history of the disease. Impressed upon hearing there were at least eight affected family members, I asked if I could contact the patient directly. After talking to this woman about her family history she paused and said "but you know, you really ought to talk to my mother...I think she knows of some more cousins"; the SCA5 odyssey…
evolgen | February 3, 2006Now that George W. Bush has proclaimed himself the Oil President War President Building Secular Democracies President Anti-Oil Pro-Science President we can all look forward to an increase in funding. Whether or not any of this money will go toward basic research (pretty please) is unclear. If you can find any way to link your research to bioterrorism, cancer, or biomedicine there's quite a bit of money out there to be obtained. If you're just out to increase the knowledge base, you're a dog begging for scraps from the table.
Apparently this increase in funding will come with a few strings…
evolgen | February 3, 2006If you read this site through a newsreader, I have an (important) announcement for you. There are two site feeds available: an RSS feed and an Atom feed. If you would like to receive the full site feed, subscribe to the Atom feed. If you would rather subscribe to partial entries (only the first few paragraphs of a post), use the RSS feed.
evolgen | February 2, 2006There are quite a few articles sitting around on my desktop waiting for me to write about them. It's gotten to the point where I just need to unload them on the blogosphere. Click through below the fold for some cool stuff from the scientific literature.
More on Neutrality from Laurence Hurst and Colleagues -- I just wrote about the nearly neutral theory, and here is an analysis of selection on silent sites in the human genome. Is this a coincidence or was this article subconsciously on my mind? From the abstract:
"At least in species with large populations, even synonymous mutations in…
evolgen | February 2, 2006What is the 'string theory' of your field?
Following the success of Chad's last two memes I've decided to pose my own question. From the outside, it looks like string theory is a legitimate research area that is controversial amongst non-string-theorists. It appears to be misunderstood or unappreciated. Some physicists (yeah, I hate the way I phrased that . . . I'm sorry) do not think there is anything worth learning from string theory. Just to clarify, intelligent design is not the string theory of evolutionary biology -- no one takes it seriously. Maybe something like evolutionary…
evolgen | February 2, 2006I wrote previously about a couple of misconceptions in evolutionary genetics (random mutation and natural selection and decoding genomes). Razib and John Hawks have been rapping on genetic drift and neutrality. Razib thinks it's important to distinguish between molecular evolution and phenotypic evolution -- I agree, by the way, but drawing the line can be difficult. As John pointed out in another post on misconceptions, the one gene, one protein model is greatly flawed. However, there is a relationship between the genotype and the phenotype, and if much of molecular evolution can be…
evolgen | February 1, 2006As I mentioned before, you should definitely check out the Tangled Bank. This bi-week's issue is quite diverse (and all the astronomers seem to be talking about the "earth-like" planet). One entry comes from an extremely opinionated anthropologist who calls out quantitative geneticists:
Chimps More Like Humans Than Apes??? What does it mean to be human? And why quantitative geneticists should stick to their jobs.
Retarded Geneticists With No Understanding of the Word 'Phenotype' Mouth Off
[link]
More after the jump...
Well, I gotta say something about this, right?? I mean, I'm a retarded…
evolgen | February 1, 2006
Tangled Bank Polytechnic Institute has released the course catalogue for the spring semester. Go check it out. By the way, we need to come up with a shorter name for our beloved alma mater. Here are some suggestions:
TBPI
TB Tech . . . um, the connotations with TB may not be good for recruitment
Tangled Tech
TBank Tech
Tank Tech
Vote in the comments
evolgen | January 31, 2006This blog doesn't seem to want to write itself. I've got a few posts in the pipeline (including the next on detecting natural selection), but I can't seem to finish them. I'm in this writing funk where I start to lay some words onto paper (well, text editor, actually), and then I can't organize all my thoughts or just can't finish writing the post (do I have an undiagnosed case of ADD?).
Luckily for me, I have Chad at Uncertain Principles to inspire me, as he's already done once before. This time he's asking people about their least favorite misconception in their field. One commentor…
evolgen | January 29, 2006I am a big fan of The Science Creative Quarterly. I especially like how they integrate science with humor -- sort of like the Onion, but focused on science. Now they are getting into science education.
If you know nothing about phylogenetics and systematics, this introduction to phylogenetics from the SCQ will be quite informative. Of course, if you're reading evolgen, you probably know something about phylogenetics -- and if you don't, read it and evolgen will make more sense.
The treatment of phylogenetics isn't wrong, it's just not quite right. Take, for example, their distinction…
evolgen | January 27, 2006I may not be the oldest of the ScienceBlogs cohort (that's an understatement, by the way), but I do remember the Challenger disaster. I don't remember watching it on TV. I don't remember seeing the explosion on the news. I don't think I even knew what news was or how I could watch it. I was in kindergarten. Among the few things I remember from that first year of school were wetting my pants and hearing that a spaceship exploded and a teacher was on board. I didn't realize that there were other teachers besides mine. I knew my teacher was not dead, and this confused me. This is among…
evolgen | January 26, 2006To be filed under: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
My name is not Inigo Montoya. You did not kill my father. And I couldn't care less if you died or not. But give me a god damn break here people. If you want to ask a question, then ask the question. There is no reason to not ask the question.
What question am I talking about? As Chris and John have pointed out, the Brits ain't down with evolution. According to the BBC:
"More than half the British population does not accept the theory of evolution, according to a survey.
"Furthermore, more…
evolgen | January 24, 2006If you have not read it, go check out Nicholas Wade's article on doctored images in scientific publications. This is especially pertinent given the recent Hwang Woo Suk stem cell debacle. There is nothing all that revolutionary, but Wade gives a nice review and introduces us to some of the editors who are trying to catch the cheaters. In commenting on the article, John Hawks brings up a good point regarding Photoshop:
"I don't worry too much about Photoshopping illustrations of fossils. Instead I worry about two things.
"One is picture selection. It is easy to choose pictures that…
evolgen | January 22, 2006Are There Disagreements Between the Fossil Record and Molecular Data?
Molecular biologists have a tradition of reworking a lot of the evolutionary relationships and timescales that morphologists and paleontologists worked so hard to figure out. This can really piss off the non-molecular folks, but I prefer to think of it as a cooperative relationship. The molecular clock, for example, would not be possible without calibration from the fossil record. It is important to note that molecular and morphological data tell two different stories, which I outline below the fold . . .
When I wrote…
evolgen | January 20, 2006According to Ken Maclean in a letter to Nature, patients don't like it when clever geneticists name genes after cartoon characters, video game characters, and Monty Python characters (see here if you don't follow). I'm not sure if I can reproduce the letter or if it's under copyright protection (now that I'm working for the man, I don't wanna be breaking no laws), but it's available here. The gist of it is, if you're ill (not like the Beastie Boys, but like dying from cancer), you don't wanna be told that your Pokemon or Sonic hedgehog gene is all fucked up.
Update: Here is some more on…
evolgen | January 20, 2006The first thing I think when I read the title to this post is, "Man, that's a long friggen title, and it's not at all catchy." The next thing I think is, "I thought I said I wasn't going to write about ecology." Well, I actually wrote:
"I am in no way, shape, or form an organismal biologist nor am I an ecologist, and if you catch me out of my element, by all means, please set me straight."
So, I invite you to put me in place if I'm talking out of my ass. But why would I write about an ecological concept like interspecific competition? This actually stems from a course that I am TAing…
evolgen | January 20, 2006Just don't let Elaine draw in your eyebrows.
The New York Times has an article profiling the advertising side of ScienceBlogs (you know, the thing that allows Seed to provide us with bandwidth so that we can spew our ivory tower propaganda far and wide). Anyway, they refer to the type of people who like to read about science in their spare time as "Leonardos". And all this time I thought we were just dorks, dweebs, and nerds -- but not geeks (they bite the heads off of live chickens). To learn more about your bad-ass-Renaissance-man selves, check out the Seed guide to Leonardos.
I also…
evolgen | January 18, 2006Everyone else it advertising it, I might as well:
Tangled Bank #45 has been posted at GreyThumb. Nothing else to see here, move along . . .
evolgen | January 17, 2006Chad at Uncertain Principles, one of my ScienceBlogs siblings, is requesting his co-bloggers suggest the most important experiment or discovery in their field. There are a disproportionate amount of "bio-bloggers" -- though we each have our own niche -- and he's asking us to nominate "the most important experiment or observation in biology". I'm expecting that because of our diverse interests, you'll see some differences in how we interpret "important". This leads me to wonder why we have so many life-sciences types at ScienceBlogs and so few math/physics/chemistry types, but that's a…