PZ 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…
I'm still getting used to the Movable Type interface that ScienceBlogs is using (it's a bit different than Blogger), and some of the changes may be noticible to you, my readers. For one, I've been dividing my posts into the "Entry Body" (which you can read on the evolgen front page) and the "Extended Entry" (which you must click "Read on" in order to see). I am doing this so that the front page is not filled up with a particularly long entry, and it's easier to scan for an individual entry. The drawback of this is that only the Entry Body makes it into the RSS feed, which means you can no…
I previously remarked that I would be posting my series "Detecting Natural Selection" over at the old site. Well, as the title of this post indicates, I changed my mind. The newest installment of "Detecting Natural Selection" has been posted at ScienceBlogs.
Nucleotide 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…
Paul Nurse, president of Rockefeller University, has a commentary (I believe it requires a subscription) in this week's issue of Cell. Within his essay he lays out some of the impediments to biomedical research in America. He starts by explaining current funding problems and suggests that smaller research groups may be able to deal with budget cuts. Larger groups could be form through collaborations between the smaller groups when projects demand such interdisciplinary approaches. He also discusses problems with science education and the reluctance of researchers to communicate with the…
I 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,…
Apparently, not much known about the genetic diversity of bacterial populations -- or so I've heard. As a eukaryotic geneticist, I can say that we know a whole bunch about multicellular organisms -- mostly because they're a lot easier to see and catch, and they're more like us than are prokaryotic relatives. A paper in the PNAS pipeline provides a meta-analysis (I think that's the first time I've ever used that word) of bacterial diversity in different environments (see here for a short review). More after the jump . . . The authors found that the usual predictors of plant and animal…
Hello again to my long time evolgen readers, and nice to meet you to the first timers who have found the new site. For my regular readers, this, for all intents and purposes, is the new evolgen. The old site is still around and will act as an archive of my previous evolgen posts, but if you happen to visit it you will notice some changes. It is now known as "Clash, Culture and Science" and this new incarnation of evolgen at ScienceBlogs will act as the new CONVERGENCE OF EVOLUTION AND GENETICS. Read my "farewell post" for more details. As for my new readers that have discovered me via…