evolgen | February 26, 2006When ScienceBlogs first started out, it was sending out some bad cookies. If you're having trouble commenting on evolgen, delete all of your ScienceBlogs cookies so that you can get the new ones.
evolgen | February 25, 2006I have always been disappointed by the EvoWiki -- I found that I could get better information on evolutionary biology from the regular Wikipedia. Now some folks have organized the evolution content on Wikipedia into navigation templates. I have not examined the content of the entries listed in these templates, but this seems like a cool idea.
Evolution: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Evolution
Population genetics: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Popgen
Development of phenotype (or "genetic architecture", its original name): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Genarch…
evolgen | February 24, 2006My apologies for the utter lack of posting over the past week. I've got stuff sitting around waiting to be written about, and I just haven't been writing. I'm not going to make excuses; I just haven't been managing my time well. While you wait for me to post again (soon, I promise), I give you this article on "intelligently designing" promiscuous enzymes to perform specific functions. Here's a quote from the write up:
According to the theory of divergent molecular evolution, primordial enzymes and other proteins started out as "promiscuous" so that primitive organisms would be better able…
evolgen | February 16, 2006Apparently, you can fall down in figure skating and still win a silver medal. Imagine if this happened in a real sport. Say, for example, one of the Italian hockey players falls to the ice and a Canadian player scores a goal. Does the Italian team get a do over? I don't know what I hate more, figure skating or tape delay.
My favorite drunk skier, Bode Miller, was DQ'd after straddling a post. I'm guessing that post won't be the only think straddled in the Olympic village. My second favorite drunk skier is this guy. I'm especially fond of this description of his experiment on drunk…
evolgen | February 16, 2006Fans of the American version of The Office know that the show glorifies the intersection of I-81 and I-84, also known as Scranton, PA. They also know that Jim Halpert moonlights as the quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers, but that's for another day. What they may not know is that Scranton has been named the worst city for asthma in the United States. This does not mean that asthma has a difficult time living in Scranton (I hear he likes it quite a bit there), but that if you have asthma you do not want to live in Scranton. Can we blame this on Michael?
evolgen | February 15, 2006I was sitting in a small seminar today (about 20 people in a conference room) when someone walked in about 10 minutes late for the talk. This didn't bother the presenter, and I'm not even sure if everyone saw this person walk in (I was sitting particularly close to the door). It wasn't that she was walking into the seminar late that bothered me -- we all get caught up doing things only to realize that we nearly missed an appointment -- but how she walked in. I'm sure everyone has walked into a talk after it has begun, and, depending on whether it's a lab meeting, departmental seminar, or…
evolgen | February 14, 2006Stew from Flags and Lollipops has begun a new life science blog aggregator, postgenomic. Here is how he describes it:
Postgenomic aggregates posts from life science blogs and then does useful and interesting things with that data.
For example, it allows you to get an instant picture of what news stories are being heavily linked to by researchers in the medical sciences, or which papers are being cited or reviewed most often, or which buzzwords are being used the most frequently.
It's sort of like a hot papers meeting with the entire biomed blogging community.
Sort of.
He asks that you add…
evolgen | February 13, 2006Nick Anthis points us to the best satire of Valentine's Day: Valinetine's Day. The holiday is named after the amino acid valine, and is celebrated with nerdy, yet sexy, poetry. Nick offers up some examples of valinetine poems, such as this one to the theme of tumor suppressor genes:
You've wounded me, dear;
And how can it be?
You've reached in and disabled
My p53.
Something is growing,
You've heard the rumour
Love grows in my heart
And it isn't a tumor.
--Josh Siepel
I don't have any poetry to offer you, but Nick has posted a bunch on his site. I'm surprised no one incorporated cleavage…
evolgen | February 13, 2006One of the most important developments in evolutionary biology in the past few decades has come without much fanfare outside of a small circle of population geneticists. The early models of population genetics were limited when it came to analyzing the nucleotide sequence polymorphism data that began to appear in the 1980s. New statistical techniques were developed to analyze this data, and they all fell under the umbrella of coalescent theory. If you want to understand the evolution of populations, you're missing a lot if you do not understand the coalescent.
When I wrote about the best…
evolgen | February 13, 2006One of my favorite non-Science Blogs science bloggers has moved over to Science Blogs. If you don't know Orac, go check out his new site for a little Respectful Insolence.
evolgen | February 12, 2006The Virginia Quarterly Review has published an essay by Niles Eldredge on its website, entitled "Confessions of Darwinist". I have no problem with Eldredge referring to himself as a Darwinist, as he is not misusing the term. Eldredge's essay explains how punctuated equilibrium (the theory that earned him fame) does not conflict with Darwinian evolution (ie, his model is not anti-natural selection). He also gives us some good history on Darwin to read on this Darwin day. I have reproduced a short passage below the fold.
This passage contains a quote from George Gaylord Simpson that I find…
evolgen | February 12, 2006Do you know of any sporting event, besides the Olympics, that is not shown live? This is not 1975. We have the internet and 24 hour sports news channels -- you can't turn on the TV, surf the net, or walk out your front door without hearing the results of any of the major events. Even though NBC has multiple networks telecasting the games, they still insist on showing almost anything anyone would be interested in watching on a ridiculous tape delay. If ESPN/ABC had the rights, everything would be available live on ESPN, ESPN2, ESPNEWS, ESPNU, and ESPN Classic, with all of the major events…
evolgen | February 11, 2006There's lots of cool stuff coming out in the speciation literature. The Questionable Authority has posted on two recent studies on sympatric speciation (see here and here). Nature, which published the two sympatric speciation papers, has a summary available here. I am of the opinion that most examples of sympatric speciation are actually allopatry with reinforcement (for more on this, see here). That is not to say that sympatric speciation is impossible, just extremely rare. In the end, some reproductive isolation is a requirement for speciation in sexually reproducing organisms (whether…
evolgen | February 10, 2006A few weeks ago Cell published a commentary by Paul Nurse, president of Rockefeller University, on US biomedical research under siege from people with political motivations. Nurse's intentions were noble, but his language was sloppy. The issue of Cell published today has a commentary by Eugenie Scott, executive director of the National Center for Science Education. Scott's article provides an excellent review of American policy, education, and the anti-evolution movement -- if you're lucky enough to have access to Cell, go read the entire thing. If you don't have access, I have a few…
evolgen | February 9, 2006If you like sports (specifically hockey) and you like statistics, two posts from Tom Benjamin's NHL Blog are must reads (available here and here). With help from Dave Savit, a math professor at the University of Arizona, Tom describes how hockey can be modeled using a Poisson distribution. There are also Poisson Standings for the NHL season. Some have called this Moneyball for hockey. More stuff below the fold.
The idea of the model is that goals can be considered Poisson random variables. You can calculate the expected number of goals scored by a team in a single game using the number…
evolgen | February 9, 2006The first ever edition of the Animalcules blog carnival has been posted at Aetiology. Go read about those wee little things that you can't see with you naked eye.
evolgen | February 8, 2006The Scientist has a good review of genome sequencing (coming from a more biomedical perspective). I tend to present genomics from an evolutionary angle (rather than functional). This is a good read if you're not too familiar with the field, and all you know about genomics is what I've told you.
evolgen | February 7, 2006A friend of mine passed along this article from Inside Higher Ed (it's a couple of months old, so you may have seen it already) entitled "What They Don't Teach You in Graduate School". Depending on where you are in your academic career, you can either take it as advice on what you should do, advice on what you should have done, or as totally bogus because you know better. The article is aimed at graduate students, but there are insights to be gained by post-docs and junior faculty, as well. I particularly like this nugget:
"Remember that a Ph.D. is primarily an indication of survivorship…