p-ter points out that selection of model organisms can shape the path of scientific research because of the very nature of model organisms. Normative considerations in science are pretty obvious when you look at the set of disciplines; there's a whole field of biological anthropology which studies one species. There is the rather well known case that doctoral research arcs are constrained to a relatively short period, which resulted in a focus short-lived organisms in zoological studies. Imagine trying to write up grant applications focusing on the life history of the tortoise.
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A paper in this week's issue of Nature and a commentary on Revkin's DotEarth blog reinf
The current forum discussion on PRI/BBC The World is Tackling the Global Organ Shortage. This week's guest is Dr.
We know they speak in dog-whistles. If you were wondering what Sarah Palin meant by dissing 'community organizers', she was not thinking about Jesus, or Martin Luther King Jr, or Mahathma Gandhi....just so you know who their base is....
Why don't *You* organize a conference?
Indeed, the short generation time of Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies) seems to have required a unique method of body axis determination and segmentation (simultaneous specification of segments rather than sequential) that is evolutionarily speaking a rather recent development unique to Dipterans (flies), not present in other arthropods. So even though the discovery of this body axis specification mechanism was a huge discovery for developmental biology, it is in some ways an artifact of having chosen a model organism for its 10-day generation time!