Welcome. I suspect most of you have come via the previous iteration of this weblog. That variant continues, but I consider this weblog under the aegis of Seed a derived state which will offer up a different flavor. Alas, the launching of Science Blogs has caught me on vacation, so I haven't posted. That won't last long, but, for those of you who don't know me from my previous weblog, let me introduce myself. You know the pithy summary of my bio, as you see it on the right. Basically, I have a non-trivial, though not an exceptional (i.e., I'm not a doctor!) science education, and pay the bills with database and web development, while I continue to self-educate myself in the realm of genetics and population biology, especially in its intersection with evolution and genomics.
I hope to make everyone who reads this blog familiar with the old men of evolutionary genetics, like R.A. Fisher, Sewall Wright or J.B.S. Haldane. I believe that too often these individuals are simply stock background characters, while more verbally adroit thinkers like Ernst Mayr tend to receive more attention in the public space, despite the reality that men like Mayr to some extent were less central to the Neo-Darwinian Synthesis than men like Fisher or Wright (Mayr was in many ways the grand popularizer of Wright's population genetic models along with Theodosius Dobzhansky). You can see my biases on display in this post. I think the post-genomic era is relevant to evolutionary genetics because it offers up the possibility of exploration of analytic models decades old via computational techniques + molecular biology. Additionally, there has been a lot of talk about evolution recently, but I think a deeper understanding by those with basic mathematical aptitudes (some high school algebra) of the processes which drive microevolution will really firm up the acceptance of evolution in a broader more general sense.
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