evolgen
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It has always bothered me when certain scientific publications get a lot of popular press despite the fact that the results are not that revolutionary. But the general public probably does not care to learn about a discovery in some esoteric discipline, so I understand that bias. What irks me…
Free Association (the Nature Genetics blog) has published a commentary from Laura Ranum, the senior author on the recent Abraham Lincoln ataxia paper. It begins:
In 1992 I received a phone call from a neurologist with an ataxia patient that had a strong family history of the disease. Impressed…
Now that George W. Bush has proclaimed himself the Oil President War President Building Secular Democracies President Anti-Oil Pro-Science President we can all look forward to an increase in funding. Whether or not any of this money will go toward basic research (pretty please) is unclear. If you…
If you read this site through a newsreader, I have an (important) announcement for you. There are two site feeds available: an RSS feed and an Atom feed. If you would like to receive the full site feed, subscribe to the Atom feed. If you would rather subscribe to partial entries (only the first…
There are quite a few articles sitting around on my desktop waiting for me to write about them. It's gotten to the point where I just need to unload them on the blogosphere. Click through below the fold for some cool stuff from the scientific literature.
More on Neutrality from Laurence Hurst…
What is the 'string theory' of your field?
Following the success of Chad's last two memes I've decided to pose my own question. From the outside, it looks like string theory is a legitimate research area that is controversial amongst non-string-theorists. It appears to be misunderstood or…
I wrote previously about a couple of misconceptions in evolutionary genetics (random mutation and natural selection and decoding genomes). Razib and John Hawks have been rapping on genetic drift and neutrality. Razib thinks it's important to distinguish between molecular evolution and phenotypic…
As I mentioned before, you should definitely check out the Tangled Bank. This bi-week's issue is quite diverse (and all the astronomers seem to be talking about the "earth-like" planet). One entry comes from an extremely opinionated anthropologist who calls out quantitative geneticists:
Chimps…
Tangled Bank Polytechnic Institute has released the course catalogue for the spring semester. Go check it out. By the way, we need to come up with a shorter name for our beloved alma mater. Here are some suggestions:
TBPI
TB Tech . . . um, the connotations with TB may not be good for…
This blog doesn't seem to want to write itself. I've got a few posts in the pipeline (including the next on detecting natural selection), but I can't seem to finish them. I'm in this writing funk where I start to lay some words onto paper (well, text editor, actually), and then I can't organize…
I am a big fan of The Science Creative Quarterly. I especially like how they integrate science with humor -- sort of like the Onion, but focused on science. Now they are getting into science education.
If you know nothing about phylogenetics and systematics, this introduction to phylogenetics…
I may not be the oldest of the ScienceBlogs cohort (that's an understatement, by the way), but I do remember the Challenger disaster. I don't remember watching it on TV. I don't remember seeing the explosion on the news. I don't think I even knew what news was or how I could watch it. I was in…
To be filed under: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
My name is not Inigo Montoya. You did not kill my father. And I couldn't care less if you died or not. But give me a god damn break here people. If you want to ask a question, then ask the question.…
If you have not read it, go check out Nicholas Wade's article on doctored images in scientific publications. This is especially pertinent given the recent Hwang Woo Suk stem cell debacle. There is nothing all that revolutionary, but Wade gives a nice review and introduces us to some of the…
Are There Disagreements Between the Fossil Record and Molecular Data?
Molecular biologists have a tradition of reworking a lot of the evolutionary relationships and timescales that morphologists and paleontologists worked so hard to figure out. This can really piss off the non-molecular folks, but…
According 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 (…
The first thing I think when I read the title to this post is, "Man, that's a long friggen title, and it's not at all catchy." The next thing I think is, "I thought I said I wasn't going to write about ecology." Well, I actually wrote:
"I am in no way, shape, or form an organismal biologist nor…
Just don't let Elaine draw in your eyebrows.
The New York Times has an article profiling the advertising side of ScienceBlogs (you know, the thing that allows Seed to provide us with bandwidth so that we can spew our ivory tower propaganda far and wide). Anyway, they refer to the type of people…
Everyone else it advertising it, I might as well:
Tangled Bank #45 has been posted at GreyThumb. Nothing else to see here, move along . . .
Chad 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…
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…
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 "…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…