Academics
pharyngula | March 29, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
I'm out of town! Class is canceled today! But still, my cold grip extends across the Cascades, over the Palouse, the Rockies, the Dakota badlands, the old homeland of the American bison, the the great farms of the midwestern heartland, to a small town in western Minnesota,…
pharyngula | March 25, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
We've been talking about flies nonstop for the last month — it's been nothing but developmental genetics and epistasis and gene regulation in weird ol' Drosophila — so I'm changing things up a bit, starting today. We talked about vertebrates in a general way, giving an…
pharyngula | March 13, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
Hard to believe, I know, but this class actually hangs together and has a plan. A while back, we talked about the whole cis vs. trans debate, and on Monday we went through another prolonged exercise in epistatic analysis in which the students wondered why we don't just do…
pharyngula | March 11, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
A good portion of what I've been teaching so far uses Drosophila as a model system — it's the baseline for modern molecular genetics. Unfortunately, it's also a really weird animal: highly derived, specialized for rapid, robust development, and as we've learned more about it…
pharyngula | March 4, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
Today we talked about gap genes and a little bit about pair rule genes in flies, and to introduce the topic I summarized genetic epistasis. Epistasis is a fancy word for the interactions between genes, and we've already discussed it on the simplest level. You can imagine…
pharyngula | February 27, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
My students get a full exposure to the Sean Carroll perspective in his book, Endless Forms Most Beautiful, and I'm generally pro-evo devo throughout my course. I do try to make them aware of the bigger picture, though, so today we had an in-class discussion/'debate' (nothing…
pharyngula | February 25, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
You know I teach the 8am courses every term, right? Every semester for years I get my oddball classes that weren't present in the curriculum 13 years ago (when I started here) stuffed into the cracks of the schedule. I'm slowly getting to be a little pushier and am gradually…
pharyngula | February 18, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
Today was the due date for the take-home exam, which meant everything started a bit late — apparently there was a flurry of last-minute printing and so students straggled in. But we at last had a quorum and I threw worms and maggots at them.
The lab today involves starting…
pharyngula | February 15, 2013Nothing at all! I gave the students an exam instead! While I got a plane and left ice-bound Morris to fly to Fort Lauderdale, Florida! Bwahahahahahaha!
Sometimes it is so good to be the professor. And if ever you wonder why my students hate me with a seething hot anger, it's because I'm such an evil bastard.
Here's what they have to answer.
Developmental Biology Exam #1
This is a take-home exam. You are free and even encouraged to discuss these questions with your fellow students, but please write your answers independently -- I want to hear your voice in your essays. Also note that you are…
pharyngula | February 14, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
On Wednesdays, I try to break away from the lecture format and prompt the students to talk about the science of development. We're working our way through Sean Carroll's Endless Forms Most Beautiful, and yesterday we talked about chapters 3 and 4.
Chapter 3 has an overview…
pharyngula | February 13, 2013The latest issue of Priscum, the newsletter of the Paleontological Society (pdf), has an interesting focus: where are the women in paleontology? They have a problem, in that only 23% of their membership are women, and I hate to say it, but the stereotype of a paleontologist is Roy Chapman Andrews — most people don't imagine a woman when they hear the word paleontologist (unjustly, I know!)
On the other hand, 37% of the paleontology presentations at the GSA were by women. They're there, but they aren't getting far up the ladder of success. They're not achieving high status positions within…
pharyngula | February 4, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
We began today with chocolate. Always a good thing at 8am, I think — so I brought a candy bar to class. Then I told the students that I loved and respected them all equally and that they all had equal potential, but that I was going to mark just one person as special by…
pharyngula | January 30, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Biology~
You really can't teach a class by lecturing at them…especially not an 8am class. But sometimes there is just such a dense amount of information that I have to get across before the students know what to ask that I have to just tell them some answers. My compromise to deal…
pharyngula | January 28, 2013
My students are also blogging here:
My undergrad encounters
Developmental Biology
Miles' Devo Blog
Tavis Grorud’s Blog for Developmental Biology
Thang’s Blog
Heidi’s blog for Developmental Biology
Chelsae blog
Stacy’s Strange World of Developmental Biology
Thoughts of Developmental Biology
Today was more context and a bit of a caution for my developmental biology course. I warned them that we'd be primarily talking about animals and plants (and mostly animals at that), but that actually, all of the general processes we're describing are found in bacteria and other single…
pharyngula | January 23, 2013I was bad. I didn't post my summary last week, so this is actually what I taught a week ago and what I taught today.
Previously, I'd given an overview of the foundations of modern developmental biology in embryology and anatomy. I gave them more history last week, only not so ancient: what led to the modern focus on patterns of gene expression? In the early 20th century, it was all Entwicklungsmechanick, the experimental manipulation of embryos and analysis of morphology in order to infer mechanisms of transformation (that's a bit of an oversimplification: we were also interested in…
pharyngula | June 22, 2012The European Commission is trying to get more women involved in science, which is good, except…look at their Science: It's a Girl Thing campaign. Jesus wept.
Serious man sits at microscope. Fashionable, slender girls slink in on ridiculous high heels and vogue to shots of bubbling flasks, splashes of makeup, twirling skirts, and giggling hot chicks. Seriously, this is not how you get women excited about science, by masquerading it as an exercise shallow catwalking. This is a campaign that perpetuates myths about women's preferences. The lab is not a place where you strut in 3" heels.
How…
pharyngula | June 20, 2012Oh, boy — Bobby Jindal's new program to open up state funds to support all kinds of random nonsense in schools is going to have some interesting (that is, horrifying) effects. They are going to be throwing money at A Beka Books and Bob Jones University texts, and Accelerated Christian Education. What kinds of things will Louisiana kids be learning?
Science Proves Homosexuality is a Learned Behavior
The Second Law of Thermodynamics Disproves Evolution
No Transitional Fossils Exist
Humans and Dinosaurs CoExisted
Evolution Has Been Disproved
A Japanese Whaling Boat Found a Dinosaur
Solar…
pharyngula | June 12, 2012Both Andrew Sullivan and Kevin Drum are wrong, but I think Drum is infuriatingly wrong.
They're arguing over a statistic, the observation that about 46% of Americans believe the earth is 6000 years old and that a god created human beings complete and perfect as they are ex nihilo. Andrew Sullivan sees this as a consequence of the divisiveness of American politics, that they're using it as a signifier for red vs. blue.
I'm not sure how many of the 46 percent actually believe the story of 10,000 years ago. Surely some of them know it's less empirically supported than Bigfoot. My fear is that…
pharyngula | June 7, 2012This is a rather chilling story of academic freedom getting trampled. A whole pile of documentation is available at that link, I'll try to simplify it down a lot.
UC Davis was sponsoring a public seminar on prostate cancer; specifically, they were actively promoting the prostate specific antigen (PSA) test. One professor, Michael Wilkes, objected — the PSA test is now discouraged as worse than useless. Wilkes is a specialist in prostate cancer; he knew this. Heck, I knew this, and my local MD knows this. He explained to the department that was sponsoring the seminar that it was wrong, and he…
pharyngula | May 11, 2012Meet Jeff Flake from Arizona. His number one goal is the destruction of the federal government, one piece at a time. His first target: the National Science Foundation. The NSF funds a big chunk of the country's basic research to the tune of about $7 billion/year, and Flake proposed cutting it by a billion dollars.
He didn't get what he wanted, fortunately.
But now he's fallen back on the tricks of anti-science demagogues everywhere, falling back on using his ignorance to justify gutting programs, one by one. He's managed to block funding of all political science research through NSF, because…