evolgen | May 30, 2006I should be working instead of dicking around on the ole' blog. But, give me a break, I just washed 600 vials. I needed a break.
After letting the new ugly banner and stupid name hang around for a week, I've decided it's time for an update. We're going back to being called evolgen (although you can still refer to us as Throatwarbler Mangrove). The slogan (or nickname, or catchphrase, or stupid saying that goes under the blog title), however, is...
You're gonna have to click through below the fold for that. This type of announcement doesn't get sent out over the RSS feed.
AT THE CONVERGENCE OF…
evolgen | May 30, 2006Another week, another question from the Seeders. This week they ask us:
Since they're funded by taxpayer dollars (through the NIH, NSF, and so on), should scientists have to justify their research agendas to the public, rather than just grant-making bodies?
My answer is below the fold.
It all depends on how one defines "the public". If you're asking me whether a school teacher, a construction worker, and a street vendor should be evaluating grant proposals and making funding decisions, I say no. It's not that the general public shouldn't have an influence on what research gets funded. They…
evolgen | May 29, 2006The meeting went pretty well (I may have more to say later once I've had time to digest everything). When I got to the airport on Sunday, I found out my flight was one hour late. I live in the middle of nowhere, so it's impossible to get a direct flight from the western or southern US. Long story short, I missed my connecting flight by about 5 minutes. These assholes wouldn't hold my plane for me -- they figured it was better to waste their money to put me up in a hotel and give me money for food than go a few minutes behind schedule. They also gave me a coupon for $100 dollars off my next…
evolgen | May 24, 2006If all has gone well, this post should appear as I'm on my way across the country to John Lynch's neck of the woods. The warmth of the desert should cause quite a shock to my system coming from the frigid north east. I may not have much access to the internets until next week, and I haven't scheduled any other posts. Evolgen is going dark for the next few days. If you have the urge to post a comment (on one of the old posts, I guess), log in with Type Key so that it can appear without my moderation.
While I'm gone, make sure the Frinkers don't steal any of my my jokes.
evolgen | May 23, 2006Given the inability of certain people to differentiate between evolgen and Evolution Blog, we're changing our name. This isn't like the last time we tried to rename ourselves. This is for real . . . and 4 eva. We are no longer evolgen. We aren't Evolution Blog, either, but we never claimed to be Evolution Blog (and we never claimed to know anything about evolution or blogging for that matter). I'm not sure who "we" are. It's always just been little old me. This name change is giving us quite a complex.
What's our new name? Well, if you're reading this through a newsreader or some other…
evolgen | May 23, 2006Carl Zimmer has an article in the NYTimes Science section on how humans can interfere with diverging populations, increasing the frequency of hybrids and preventing speciation. He give two examples: three-spine sticklebacks in British Columbia, Canada and ground finches in the Galapagos. The sticklebacks colonized lakes on Victoria Island from the Pacific Ocean and became specialized populations in the new environment. Hybrids between different ecomorphs were selected against because of their intermediate phenotype. Zimmer reports that there are an excess of hybrids in recent samples taken…
evolgen | May 23, 2006While procrastinating (I should be analyzing data for a talk I'm giving on Friday), I stumbled upon this site (via EDSBS, not StumbleUpon). I tried to bypass registration (using BugMeNot), but none of the cheat passwords worked. If you want to play around with the gadget, you may need to register, but you can use a fake email address (they don't require you confirm your registration).
What's this fun website? Well, you upload a headshot, and it returns a list of celebrities you resemble. I uploaded three different photos. To find out who I look like, click through below the fold.
Photo…
evolgen | May 20, 2006This week, the SEED kings are asking us:
"If you could shake the public and make them understand one scientific idea, what would it be?"
This is the first thing that comes to mind, and the scientific method is a good answer as well. I'm going to take a step back and say the public should understand what science is. That way they can tell the difference between this and science. From there, an understanding of evolution should come naturally.
Answers to last weeks question can be found here.
evolgen | May 19, 2006As I mentioned previously, I'm busy preparing some data for a meeting next week. I don't have much time to devote to Phylogeny Friday, so I'll be sharing some of my own data with you. This data is nothing special; it just happens to be the data I finished analyzing a few minutes ago. It's open, I could build a tree, and I'll show you that tree below the fold.
This tree contains a scant three sequences. The two closely related sequences both come from Drosophila pseudoobscura and the outgroup is a gene from D. melanogaster. This gene was duplicated along the D. pseudoobscura lineage. In the…
evolgen | May 19, 2006My advisor once told me that the best way to get your paper into a high profile journal like Science or Nature is to find the biggest of something, the smallest of something, or something that fucks funny. It turns out doing research on drugs doesn't get you in. No, not those drugs. These drugs.
Researchers in Japan have identified a molecular marker that distinguishes strains of Cannabis sativa with high Δ-9-tetrahydrocannainolic acid (THCA) content from those without. For those of you not hip with the lingo, they have developed an easy test to tell the difference between the weed that gets…
evolgen | May 18, 2006President Bush's FY2007 budget included no increase in funding for the NIH. Scientists have been lobbying Congress to amend the budget to at least increase the NIH budget to keep even with inflation. You can follow the story in these posts:
Lobbying the Senate
Amendment passes in the Senate
Lobbying the House of Representatives
Amendment fails to pass in the House Budget Committee
I just got word that the House of Representatives passed the FY2007 Budget Resolution which includes an amendment that ensures that all programs within the Labor, Health and Human Services and Education…
evolgen | May 18, 2006
Albinos The pigmentally challenged are up in arms over the Da Vinci Code. They say it's unfair that, once again, an albino portrays a villain on screen:
Michael McGowan, an albino who heads the National Organization for Albinism and Hypopigmentation, said "The Da Vinci Code" will be the 68th movie since 1960 to feature an evil albino.
"Silas is just the latest in a long string," McGowan said. "The problem is there has been no balance. There are no realistic, sympathetic or heroic characters with albinism that you can find in movies or popular culture."
Excuse me, but what about Powder?…
evolgen | May 17, 2006
John Hawks reads the papers so that I don't have to. Here is Hawks's reply to the human-chimp speciation paper I mentioned in the previous post. The basic conclusion that Hawks reaches: Don't believe the hype. The data analysis in the paper is sound, but the conclusions the authors draw are designed explicitly for the sake of generating publicity. It's like Chuck D doing the data analysis, then Flavor Flav gettin' all janky with his big ol' clock around his neck screaming "Hybridization!" Hawks claims that there is no need to invoke the hybridization model to explain the data. He presents…
evolgen | May 17, 2006Humans and chimps did not undergo a speciation event. Some pair of species (one an ancestor of humans, the other of chimps) speciated. It was thought that this event occurred approximately 6.5-7.4 million years ago, based on fossil evidence. A new paper coming out in the week's issue of Nature, however, suggests that the speciation event was sloppy. The authors argue, based on differing amounts of divergence between humans and chimps in different parts of the genome, that there was some hybridization and the speciation event extended until 5.4 million years ago. You can read about the study…
evolgen | May 17, 2006PLoS Biology has an article with data that supports the hypothesis that open access articles receive more citations than articles hidden behind a toll (summary available here). The author compared open access and non-open access articles in PNAS, controlling for any confounding variable he could think of. The article is open access, of course, so you should check it out.
My own exercise in open access -- publishing some original research on this blog -- has been put on the back burner as I take care of some other research. You can read the background here. The next step involves a bit of…
evolgen | May 16, 2006SEED is asking us the following question:
"Will the "human" race be around in 100 years?"
Considering: (1) the entire universe is just an artifact of my imagination; (2) when I die everything in the universe (including humans) will disappear; and (3) I doubt that I will live 100 more years. I'd say, "NO, the human race will not be around in 100 years." These questions are so much easier when you don't constrain yourself within the bounds of reality.
evolgen | May 16, 2006Michael Ashburner has written a book. No, not that book. This one's a bit smaller, less expensive, and about the sequencing of the Drosophila melanogaster genome. You can read a review of the book here and buy it from here. It's not The Genome War; Matt Ridley describes it as Ashburner's "immediate reactions, mostly committed to paper at the time -- an idiosyncratic, gonzo romp through the crazy days of 1998-99."
In his review, Ridley describes Ashburner's dislikes, joys, and vices:
Being a scientist, Ashburner hates hotels (especially Marriotts), Microsoft, bad coffee and suits -- the…
evolgen | May 16, 2006I remember watching this movie (WARNING: link to a large file) during my sophomore year of college. It now appears that some folks at Kenyon College plan to do a remake. For those of you too lazy to follow the links, the movie depicts protein synthesis using people acting out the roles of mRNA, tRNA, amino acids, ribosomes, and other assorted players. And it was made in 1971. And it involved interpretive dance. And hippies. Good shit, yo.
(Via Neil Saunders.)
evolgen | May 16, 2006Don't expect much from me in terms of substantial posting. I'm getting prepared for the SMBE meeting, and devoting most of my time to finishing up some data analysis and putting together my talk. If you want to read about some evolutionary genetics research, here are some links:
Check out this report on genome duplications in angiosperms from Claude dePamphilis's lab (Indian Cowboy has more here).
I'm pretty interested in copy number variation, so I definitely need to read this article comparing copy number polymorphisms in humans and chimps (news release here). From the snippets I've…
evolgen | May 14, 2006Bad science reporting is a bit of a pet peeve of mine. LabLit has an article on the death of the science section in the Grauniad.