evolgen
Posts by this author
July 17, 2008
The Creation Museum is located in northern Kentucky, just across the Ohio border from Cincinnati. Answers in Genesis, the folks behind the so-called "museum", claim that their "museum" is within a 6 hour drive of 2/3 of the US population. This is not true -- Kentucky is in the middle of bumfuck…
July 17, 2008
Olivia Judson says Darwinism is dead. She's right. Anyone who talks about "Darwinism" or "evolutionists" gets my attention. That's not to say that any use of those terms is incorrect. But they are often used as framing devices by creationists, and those frames get carried over into the lay…
July 1, 2008
Wired Magazine has published an article by Chris Anderson arguing that theory is dead (The End of Theory: The Data Deluge Makes the Scientific Method Obsolete). The argument: with our ability to generate vast amounts of data, there is no need for theory. Now, it's hard to parse what Anderson means…
June 30, 2008
There's a post up at Pharyngula describing the concept of synteny in comparative genomics (Basics: Synteny). The definition given by PZ Myers will sound pretty familiar to those of you who have read some of the genomics literature. The problem: it's not quite correct. It's actually the definition…
June 27, 2008
Phylogeny Friday -- 27 June 2008
I haven't done a Phylogeny Friday in about a month, but a recent paper reporting a "phylogenomic study of birds" was worth mentioning (doi:10.1126/science.1157704). Now, this isn't phylogenomics as Jonathan Eisen defined it. The bird evolution paper describes…
June 27, 2008
PLoS Genetics has published an interview with Jenny Graves. Graves is one of the leaders in monotreme and marsupial genetics, and has been involved in some of the recent mammalian genome projects, including the platypus genome project (doi:10.1038/nature06936). She is also an expert in the…
June 23, 2008
Dak at Fire Joe Morgan asks:
I've been watching a fair amount of SportsCenter / BBTN today, and every two minutes someone mentions that there are "seven teams going for a sweep in an interleague series!", as if this is some sort of big deal. There are fourteen interleague series this weekend. If…
June 18, 2008
John Hawks has an interesting post on what it means to be human in which he argues that our "human-ness" (humanity?) is our shared evolutionary history. I like it. But Hawks also writes the following:
It is our history that connects us to our distant relatives, not our genes. Even with a close…
June 15, 2008
If you check the archives of this blog (which I know all of you do on a fairly regular basis), you'll see that I haven't posted anything in over two weeks. Those kind of blog hiatuses can't be good for traffic, but I have a legitimate excuse: I was out of the country. Readers with a keen eye for…
May 30, 2008
Phylogeny Friday -- 30 May 2008
Research on animals in under attack throughout the world. Animal rights activists not only stage rallies against animal testing, but they also engage in criminal behavior. They vandalize property, sabotage experiments, and terrorize researchers. How can scientists…
May 28, 2008
Francis Collins, head of the National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), will be stepping down from that position in August. Collins has overseen the sequencing of the human genome, the HapMap project, the ENCODE project, and many other large advances in genomics. The NHGRI has had a major…
May 28, 2008
Chad's in town for the DAMOP meeting. What that means isn't all that important in the grand scheme of things. But it did give us a chance to have a blogger meet-up. So, I grabbed Professor Steve Steve and Kevin (of Deep Sea Nudes and the Unimportant 95%), and we met Chad for some dinner and beers…
May 27, 2008
In his classic book from 1976, The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins introduced the concept of the meme. Basically, a meme can be thought of as a cultural gene -- an idea that is transmitted in a population.
This being Dawkins, memetics has a certain adaptationist flavor to it. The Selfish Gene…
May 22, 2008
On Tuesday night, the National Basketball Association (NBA) held their annual draft lottery. In the draft, each team is given the opportunity to select a few players that have declared themselves eligible for the draft (either after completing at least one year of college in the United States or…
May 21, 2008
I recently chastised Harold Varmus for equating open-access publishing with pay-to-publish. While open-access journals do tend to have higher author charges than pay-access journals, many journals make money from both author charges and subscriber charges. That is, they are pay to publish and pay…
May 20, 2008
My advisor has recently got me listening to Whad'ya Know. My first reaction: It's like Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! Only not as funny, not as interesting, and not as good. I've been downloading the podcasts for the past couple of weeks, and I'm not sure whether I'll keep subscribing in iTunes.
I'm…
May 14, 2008
I can officially claim myself as a member of the ivory tower elite. At least, that's what they tell me.
May 4, 2008
Kevin has posted the newest Circus of the Spineless at Deep See Nudes News. Go get your monthly fix of inverts.
April 25, 2008
Duh! That's Obvious, Edition
Take a look at this mastodon skeleton:
Does it look like anything you recognize? Perhaps a large terrestrial mammal with big tusks. If you said "elephant" you win. The prize: nothing.
That is half of the conclusion from a recent paper in Science (doi:10.1126/science…
April 23, 2008
Brian Charlesworth wrote a review of Mike Lynch's The Origins of Genome Architecture, in which Charlesworth argues that sexual reproduction can explain many of the features Lynch claims evolved under nearly neutral processes (doi:10.1016/j.cub.2008.01.008). Not to be left out of the party, Deborah…
April 22, 2008
The Drosophila genus is paraphyletic. That means there are species nested within the phylogeny of the genus that belong to other genera. Or, in other words, there are species descended from the most recent common ancestor (MRCA) of all Drosophila species that belong to different genera. If that…
April 21, 2008
Someone was asked something along these lines by a member of some legislative body:
How will your research help protect this country?
That someone replied with something like this:
It won't, but it will keep this country worth protecting.
The exact wording in those quotes probably differ from…
April 21, 2008
The creationist movie that everyone* is talking about came out was released this weekend. Early reports have Expelled coming in 9th nationally in weekend gross, with about $3 million. That's a lot of money, and you can color Randy Olson freakin' impressed. However, put in the context of what the…
April 20, 2008
Last year, Craig Venter became the first single person to have his genome sequence published (doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050254). That genome was sequenced using the old-school Sanger technique. It marked the second time the complete human genome had been published (which led to some discussion as…
April 19, 2008
It's funny because some people think both groups are wrong:
Originally from Tom the Dancing Bug.
April 14, 2008
I think I'm cursed. Or I have bad luck. Or conference organizers think I'm a morning person. Alright, so maybe I really am a morning person. But that's besides the point. Because it sucks to give a talk on a Saturday morning. Saturday mornings should be reserved for things like Belgian waffles,…
April 13, 2008
Harold Varmus is one of the most high profile advocates of open access to biomedical research. As one of the cofounders of the Public Library of Science (PLoS), he has played an important role in making published results freely available to all. And he's a Nobel Laureate, which ain't too shaby…
April 11, 2008
Drosophila Are Not Fruit Flies Edition
As I have mentioned before, Drosophila are not fruit flies. Tephritids are fruit flies. Drosophila feed on rotting fruit, while true fruit flies feed on fresh fruit. That makes true fruit flies agricultural pests. Drosophila, on the other hand, are…
April 9, 2008
PLoS Biology's press releases have taken another step toward being dismissed as "crap" by people who know jack shit about evolution, thanks to a new press release published last week.
It starts off like so:
Evolution has taken another step away from being dismissed as "a theory" in the classroom,…
April 8, 2008
Us dudes are always accused of thinking with our dicks. Perhaps it's because the genes expressed in our brains are similar to those expressed in our 'nads:
Among the 17 tissues, the highest similarity in gene expression patterns was between human brain and testis, based on DDD and clustering…