Tim posts on the recent PLOS paper Gene Losses during Human Origins published by the Wang et al. If that gets you all excited, check out The Origin of Subfunctions and Modular Gene Regulation and Preservation of Duplicate Genes by Complementary, Degenerative Mutations. I might lionize the contributions of R.A. Fisher, Sewall Wright and J.B.S. Haldane to evolutionary biology, but as I posted before, tools need tasks, and the mass of data being unveiled by genomics is uncovering many surprises. Science isn't about a priori inference, it is about venturing into the wilds, and by the grace of god we live in an Age of Discovery (the post-genomic era).
More like this
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:
Targeted discovery of novel human exons by comparative genomics:
There was a time not that long ago when sequencing a single gene would be hailed as a scientific milestone.
I'll have to check those out...this is a subject area I'm still learning about