genetics
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…
razib | January 19, 2006We are all aware of Darwin, but the men who were instrumental in the rise of the Modern Synthesis and the banishment of the Eclipse of Darwinism are not figures who loom large in the public imagination. In the domain of population genetics they would be R.A Fisher, J.B.S. Haldane and Sewall Wright. R.A. Fisher's daughter wrote a good biography that chronicles his private and public life, Life of a Scientist. Statistically oriented people will be particularly interested his conflict with Jerzy Neyman. Will Provine's Sewall Wright and Evolutionary Biology is probably the most…
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…
razib | January 17, 2006Via RPM I see that Chad at Uncertain Principles is asking about seminal discoveries and experiments in biology. This is a enormous field and I'm not really good at "lists." But here are a few off the top of my head....
In the 19th century - As far as theory goes it I think Darwin's idea of natural selection upon heritable variation as the motive force behind the process of evolution is the bomb. If you read Origin of Species and Descent of Man you see just how fertile Darwin's mind was, and some of his ideas like sexual selection have only recently become the focus of research again.…
evolgen | January 17, 2006PZ Myers is reposting some of his greatest hits from the old Pharyngula website to his new digs at ScienceBlogs. In one post he gets into the deficiencies of modern evolutionary theory using West-Eberhard's book as a guide. I agree with most of the thing he says (and I'll get into how I agree with him below), but first I need to scratch a pet-peeve itch:
"You can see this in any textbook of population genetics: the effect of selection is to impose a gradual shift in the mode of a pattern of continuous variation. Stabilizing selection chops off both tails of the distribution, directional…
razib | January 16, 2006Heredity has two free reviews up, Quantitative genetics: Small but not forgotten, and Evolutionary genetics: Fight or flinch? New fields like genomics and evo-devo get a lot of press, and deservedly so, but I believe that the swarm of data generated by these disciplines is going to revitalize quantitative (biometry) and evolutionary genetics. Ultimately the natural sciences are fundamentally a unity. Even though quantum chemistry, molecular biology and ecology have their own domains of study and tools of the trade, there is a common ontological assumption, that of the physical world around…
razib | January 16, 2006I've made a few comments about inclusive fitness/kin selection that have expressed caution recently, but this paper in Molecular Ecology points in the other direction and reaffirms the power of W.D. Hamilton's theoretical framework. But one must remember that some of the review literature suggests that kin selection might have been a sufficient condition for the initial evolution of eusociality enabled by haplodiploidy, it may not be a necessary one for its persistence. The ideal model holds that since males are haploid, the coefficient of relatedness between sisters who share a father and…
evolgen | January 14, 2006Nucleotide Polymorphism and Selection
This is the seventh of multiple postings I plan to write about detecting natural selection using molecular data (ie, DNA sequences). The introduction can be found here. The first post described the organization of the genome, and the second described the organization of genes. The third post described codon based models for detecting selection, and the fourth detailed how relative rates can be used to detect changes in selective pressure. The fifth post dealt with classical population genetics methods for detecting selection using allele and genotype…
evolgen | January 12, 2006I have been describing some recently published worked on polymorphic deletions (see here and here for the previous two posts) on the old site. I will conclude that series here at ScienceBlogs with a discussion of linkage disequilibrium and deletions.
In the previous two posts I outlined two different approaches for identifying polymorphic deletions using single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). I also described some of the analysis performed on that data set, which revealed that many of the deletions resulted in the elimination of at least a portion of a gene (some removed complete genes,…