evolgen
Posts by this author
May 3, 2007
Here's some interesting science:
A commonly used medicinal leach may have been misidentified as the wrong species.
Here is a description of the Human Variome Project, which seems more focused on mapping disease genes than doing cool population genetics. That's too bad.
Science has an article on the…
May 3, 2007
Sorry, dude, but it has to be said. In a feature from the March issue of Seed Magazine (one that doesn't appear to be available online), Jonah Lehrer profiles six young scientists dubbed "The Truth Seekers". In his description of Pardis Sabeti, Jonah makes the common error of conflating evolution…
May 2, 2007
The Savannah River Ecology Laboratory (SREL) is experiencing a financial crisis. They have received financial support from the Department of Energy (DOE) for over fifty years. The DOE has cut funding, which may force SREL to close down. SREL operates as a unit of the University of Georgia, but…
May 2, 2007
Spring is in the air. The obvious signs are everywhere: the temperature is rising, the flowers are blooming, and everyone's writing about boners. There's this post from Darren Naish on turtle gonads, and Carl Zimmer has an article on duck phalluses (don't call them penises, as Darren explains) in…
April 30, 2007
Dr. Doris Haggis-on-Whey and her husband Benny, as part of their H-O-W series of books, have produced an absolutely dispensable piece of misinformation, the third in a series of we can only hope not too many, ineloquently titled Animals of the Ocean: In Particular the Giant Squid. They claim that…
April 29, 2007
A few articles have come out recently dealing with sex chromosomes in a variety of taxa. Here are some links to those articles, in list form:
Given all we know about vertebrate sex chromosomes, it's surprising that we don't know how sex determination works in many fish, including the pufferfish…
April 28, 2007
In a round-up of some of the coverage of Shelley's run-in with Wiley, Scientific American's Nikhil Swaminathan wrote the following:
Anyway, on Tuesday, over at the ScienceBlog Retrospectacle, neuroscience PhD student Shelley Batts (who based on her pictures alone seems to be both attractive and…
April 27, 2007
The most recent issue of the Journal of Heredity contains a bunch of articles from a symposium on the "Genetics of Speciation" organized by Loren Rieseberg. Included in the collection is an article by Allen Orr and two of his students on speciation in Drosophila, which discusses mapping speciation…
April 27, 2007
This week's phylogeny comes from this paper on molecular dating of speciation events. I won't be addressing molecular dating per se, but I will be dealing with what molecular clocks tell us. Like, do they actually reveal the speciation time of a pair of species?
The divergence date of a pair of…
April 26, 2007
Ever wonder what biobloggers are blogging about on their blogs? Here's what:
Razib posts part of a paper by Jerry Coyne and others (which I can't seem to track down) which questions the role cis regulatory elements play in adaptive phenotypic evolution. This all part of Coyne's war on evo-devo.…
April 26, 2007
The recent Scientific American article on junk DNA (discussed here) has instigated a quite a furor in the bioblogosphere. Here is a collection of links:
ERV linked with a tone of disgust.
I restated my frustration with the term junk DNA.
JR Minkel, the author of the Scientific American article,…
April 24, 2007
Would I write about junk DNA? No. Never. Not me. Not even when Scientific American publishes sub par articles on junk DNA. Well, they're at it again.
The most recent junk DNA article describes a study by Gill Bejerano of Stanford University which I can't find published anywhere (neither can ERV).…
April 23, 2007
Because my browser consists of a growing forest of tabs containing stuff waiting to be blogged, and there is no way I can write a complete entry on each one, and I want to at least link to the relevant sites so that I can close those tabs, I give you a link dump with maximal run-on sentences:…
April 23, 2007
...that appears to do absolutely nothing (link). Usually they do something mundane in a really complex manner. But all this one does is open the curtains so that the credits can run. The device pictured below is different from the one linked above, but I figured this post needed something to fill…
April 21, 2007
Over at GNXP, Razib has posted a few links to papers concerning adaptive evolution (aka, positive selection or Darwinian selection) in humans and chimps. He's been following the coverage of this paper from George Zhang's group which provides evidence that more genes have been under positive…
April 20, 2007
The boys at Deep Sea News are wrapping up their Megavertebrate Week in which they profile various charismatic animals with backbones that live in the sea (including seals). Go check out their site for other cool pictures and stories about swimming with sharks. For those of you who like spotting…
April 20, 2007
It seems like everything is coming in twos the past couple of days. Yesterday we mentioned two books on the evolution of genomes and two stories involving either Wolbachia or sex determination. Today, we have two stories involving criticisms of scientific papers. One deals with the evolution of the…
April 19, 2007
There are two cool articles on two related topics, but the articles themselves don't deal with the area in which these topic overlap. Confused? Here's a quick description of the two articles:
One article is on the change in fecundity cost of Wolbachia infections in a population of Drosophila…
April 19, 2007
Oxford University Press will be releasing a new book in June entitled Darwinian Detectives: Revealing the Natural History of Genes and Genomes. From the OUP description of the book:
Molecular scientists exploring newly sequenced genomes have stumbled upon quite a few surprises, including that only…
April 19, 2007
On yesterday's episode of Mythbusters they tested the myth that birds in a trailer decrease the weight of the trailer when the birds take flight. The 'busters put a bunch of birds into a trailer, weighed the trailer + birds, and then allowed the birds to fly in the trailer, measuring the weight…
April 18, 2007
Dan Hartl was inducted into the National Academy of Sciences of the USA in 2005 for his contributions to the field of evolutionary genetics. His inaugural article as an Academy member was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, pronounce pee-nas, hehe).…
April 18, 2007
Two unemployed stem cell researchers have performed a pilot study indicating that the chief researcher's dog likes beer (reported here). They noticed that erratic behavior tended to increase with beer consumption, but his tolerance did increase over the course of the experiment. The dog also…
April 17, 2007
A lot of interesting evolutionary genetics research gets published, and I don't have time to write an insightful commentary on all of it (some may argue that I have never written an insightful commentary on anything). Here's a brief overview of the stuff I have missed in the past few weeks:
A…
April 17, 2007
Two recent papers have been published that both deal with chromosomal aberrations and autism. One paper reports de novo copy number mutations associated with some cases of autism. These are copy number polymorphisms not present in either parent; the mutation arises in the parental germ line,…
April 14, 2007
As you've probably already heard, George Allen's favorite primate has had its genome sequenced. I promised to blog on the article, but this is not the post. Instead, this post is to kvetch about the coverage of this story in the popular press. It's another adventure in bad science reporting!
Here…
April 13, 2007
Science has published two papers on Tyrannosaurus rex proteins (are we in the golden age of dino molecular biology?). In one paper, the authors report that they extracted proteins from T. rex soft tissue that was preserved for millions of years. In the other paper, some of the same researchers…
April 13, 2007
Today's password is coevolution.
First of all, here is a pair of phylogenies. The one on the left shows the relationships of a bunch of dove species, and the one on the right shows a bunch of lice that parasitize the doves. The lines connecting doves and lice indicate lice that parasitize each dove…
April 13, 2007
According to Physorg.com, this study on epigenetic inheritance in chickens "shake[s] Darwin's foundation". Who knew inheritance in a flightless bird could induce an earthquake in northern Australia? That's not what they're referring to? They're not claiming that a neo-Lamarckian process could…
April 12, 2007
In addition to the paper on adaptive evolution in the Drosophila melanogaster genome (reviewed here yesterday), Chung-I Wu is also senior author on a sort-of companion paper studying adaptive evolution in the human genome. Yeah, I know, who really cares about the human genome, human evolution, or…