evolgen
Posts by this author
December 14, 2007
For those of you interested in recent adaptive evolution in some insignificant bipedal primate, John Hawks and pals have published a paper in PNAS describing something you'll find interesting. Of course, if you're interested in such things, you already know that. Here are some links related to…
December 10, 2007
Are you bothered by the total disregard for science shown by some US presidential candidates? Mike Huckabee does not heart evolution. Other candidates aren't saying much. Would you like to see where the candidates stand on various science and technology issues?
Sheril and Chris at the Intersection…
December 9, 2007
The Scientist blog reports that a representative of the National Science Foundation (NSF) was at the annual meeting of the America Society for Cell Biology (ASCB). The NSF representative pointed out a couple of things things:
If your proposal describes research designed to find a cure for some…
December 5, 2007
There are two recent genetics related posts on other blogs that evolgen readers might find interesting:
First, check out Query Gene (via ScienceRoll). This web-ap allows you to couple a nucleotide blast search with a Google search for a term related to your blast query. Here is how the creators…
December 4, 2007
I previously described where in a genome we would expect to find sexually antagonistic genes. Briefly, depending on whether a gene is male-biased or female-biased and whether beneficial mutations are dominant or recessive, we can predict whether these sexually antagonistic genes will be on X…
December 3, 2007
Not all animals must have sex with another individual to produce perfectly viable offspring. And neither do humans, thanks to technological breakthroughs in artificial insemination. But what about those critters that do not require masturbation and meat basters to produce babies sans contact with…
December 2, 2007
BioMed Central advertises itself as "The Open Access Publisher" (see their logo floating next to this text). They publish a lot of journals, but I think the Public Library of Science (PLoS) has the lead when it comes to being THE open access publisher. That's because everything published by PLoS…
November 29, 2007
PLoS ONE has recently published a paper entitled "Beyond the Gene" by Evelyn Fox Keller and David Harel, in which the authors take a stab at the long standing question: What is a Gene? Because this is such a big picture question, the appropriate discussion of the paper would involve a synthesis of…
November 28, 2007
John Hawks linked to a wiki with information on cultural anthropology job searches. If you poke around the website, you'll find a list of such wikis for many different academic disciplines. Of interest to evolgen are the Biology Jobs Wiki and the Ecology/Evolution Jobs Wiki. If you're currently on…
November 27, 2007
I came across two press releases yesterday, entitled:
Entire Yeast Genome Sequenced
and
University of Toronto scientists map entire yeast genome
Upon reading the first, I thought, hasn't the entire genome of Saccharomyces cerevisiae already been sequenced? And haven't other yeast genomes been…
November 26, 2007
In a list of the most overrated things, we're the Churchills of popular science:
Popular science: ScienceBlogs. Politics gets more hits than science, so ScienceBlogs recruits screamers rather than interesting popularizers or important scientists.
More here.
November 26, 2007
So, I missed the three year anniversary of evolgen (it was last Wednesday for those of you keeping score). What does that have to do with police dogs and civil rights protesters in Alabama in the 1960s? Absolutely nothing. But I'm combining two unrelated topics into a single post -- neither of…
November 23, 2007
Brian at Laelaps has written a post entitled "What's good for the gander isn't always good for the goose", in which he describes some examples of sexual dimorphism in charismatic vertebrates. Studying the phenotypes of these traits is interesting, but what's happening on the genomic level? That is…
November 21, 2007
I hate vanity posts -- who the fuck outside my mom cares how I'm doing, and she don't read this -- but I feel somewhat obliged to explain the lack of activity on this unread blog. This is especially important in case my Seed overlords stop by and notice a stark absence of any recent posts and a…
November 13, 2007
Is it just me or does every analysis that looks for over-represented gene ontology (GO) terms turn up transcription factors? It doesn't matter if the study is looking for genes under positive selection or something else. It just seems like transcription factors are enriched in every dataset.
November 8, 2007
Chad asked a fun question last week, and I just got around to finding it yesterday:
What items should be on the list for a scavenger hunt through an academic physics department?
Let's now ask: what items should be on a list for a scavenger hunt through a biology department? Taking some hints from…
November 7, 2007
What happens when I mention a paper describing two more Drosophila genomes? Well, I get a comment telling me that the 12 Genomes Papers have gone live over at Nature. They have provided a nifty 12 Genomes Portal for us to navigate the articles published by Nature based on data from the 12 Genomes…
November 7, 2007
The world of genomics is changing. It was initially about sequencing the genome a single representative individual from a particular species. Now, there's a large focus on polymorphism -- that is, sequencing multiple individuals from a single species to study the genomic variation in that species.…
November 7, 2007
He's not an atheist! He's found god! This atheist is no more! He has ceased to be (an atheist)! He's found god on his way to meet his maker! He's a deist! Bereft of doubt, he thinks no more! If you hadn't written his book for him, he'd be wandering around a nursing home dribbling spit! His…
November 6, 2007
During my first semester of college I took an introductory chemistry class from a poet, playwright, and Nobel laureate -- that's all one guy, not three. His Nobel Prize is in chemistry, which made him more than qualified to teach us about acids, transition metals, and the other basics of chemistry…
October 24, 2007
Peer-to-Peer, one of Nature's many blogs, has a post on pseudoscience on preprint servers. The post is in response to a post from another blog (creationists using nature precedings to pre-publish junk science) that pointed out a potentially pseudoscientific article on Nature's preprint server,…
October 24, 2007
Too funny to pass up:
Seeking NIH Geneticist as early (paid) reader of Science/Adventure Novel
I'm looking for a one or more readers to vet the science and NIH-specific details of a science/adventure novel. This is a "hard science" book along the lines of Carl Sagan's "Contact," but with certain…
October 16, 2007
I want to highlight two excellent items related to scientific communication:
The first is a post by Tim Lamber on Deltoid in which he reproduces a comment by John Mashey. Mashey provides a very nice description of how scientists should deal with members of the media. Rather than merely berating bad…
October 16, 2007
Previous entries:
Part 1 - Introduction
Part 2 - The Backstory
Part 3 - Obtaining Sequences
Part 4 - Obtaining More Sequences
Part 5 - Examining the Outgroups
This post is part of a series exploring the evolution of a duplicated gene in the genus Drosophila. Links to the previous posts are above…
October 12, 2007
Previous entries:
Part 1 - Introduction
Part 2 - The Backstory
Part 3 - Obtaining Sequences
Part 4 - Obtaining More Sequences
This post is part of a series exploring the evolution of a duplicated gene in the genus Drosophila. Links to the previous posts are above. Part 5 of this series (Examining…
October 11, 2007
Remember those prizes I promised if you donated to any of the ScienceBlogs DonorsChoose.org challenges? I described the prize for one lucky donor to the evolgen challenge. Now Seed has revealed what they're giving away to a few lucky contributors to any of the ScienceBlogs challenges. Janet has the…
October 10, 2007
Please God, don't let it happen. Please don't let Franky Collins win this stupid award. I don't usually make pleas to you, but, given that this is a matter regarding a man of faithTM, I figured it's a good time to plea to the sky fairy. So, do whatever you can to prevent Congress from awarding…
October 9, 2007
There are two exciting pieces of news about the DonorsChoose.org ScienceBlogs Challenge. First of all, Seed has offered to match all donations by ScienceBlogs readers for the second year in a row. Last year, Seed matched donations up to $10,000, but this year they're willing to match up to $15,…