The Dark Side of DNA is a review of Genes in Conflict, Austin Burt and Robert Triver's magisterial survey of the extant literature of 'selfish genetic elements.' Do you know what the killer 't-haplotype' is? You should, it is pretty bizarre.
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Below I mentioned the doyen of living population geneticists, James Crow, yeah, Jim Crow. Collaborater with Motoo Kimura of Neutral Theory fame, Crow is still an active member of the biological community. Recently he reviewed Genes in Conflict : The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements by Bob…
The November 30th edition of the London Review of Books has a review by John Whitfield of Burt & Trivers' Genes in Conflict: The Biology of Selfish Genetic Elements (which has been on my shelf unread for awhile now). Here's a nice quote:
[R]eading [the book] did help me work out why…
The conventional Mendelian
model for diploid organisms assumes that the expression of an autosomal
allele within an individual should be invariant of its sex of origin,
that is, whether it is inherited from the father or the mother.
This model is incorrect for a subset of alleles across many taxa…
The human genome (like all mammalian genomes) is loaded with sequences that don't perform any known function. And many of these sequences are junk. And it's not just mammals -- many animal genomes are loaded with junk, as are those of other eukaryotes. That's not to say that some of the sequences…
I like this one.