evolgen
Posts by this author
January 22, 2007
I got my motherboard replaced a couple of hours ago, so I now have my old forms of procrastination at my disposal -- blogging and blog reading.
I've got one link for you that is relevant to Gregg Easterbrook's anti-multi-author screed. This one comes from BioCurious; it's an article on attributing…
January 20, 2007
Three things:
A new edition of Mendel's Garden has been posted at Neurotopia. Go read the latest genetics blogging.
The anecdote at the beginning of my rant about elevator usage needs a slight correction: I think the grad student who took the elevator down has a bum knee (it's a new injury). I'…
January 18, 2007
Allow me to set the stage. I just emerged from the autoclave room with a cart full of hot, steamy, dirty vials and bottles of Drosophila media in tow (see image below the fold). The glassware had been the home for thousands of flies for a period of over a month. What started out as a mixture of…
January 17, 2007
Esquire runs a regular article called "Answer Fella" in which stupid questions get stupid answers. In this month's edition we find out whether cloned humans have souls, why South Dakota's badlands are called badlands, and how many potatoes make up a bag of chips. My favorite answer, however, is to…
January 17, 2007
Nature Genetics is asking:
What would you do if it became possible to sequence the equivalent of a full human genome for only $1,000?
George Church would repeat the Applera dataset for everyone on earth, sequencing every exon from every human being. Francis Collins would sequence people with…
January 17, 2007
Do you consider yourself a Science Blogger? You could be a hard blogging scientist, science journalist, student of science, or just a member of the general public with an interest in the scientific process. If you identify with any of these, I've got a challenge for you.
It boils down to this:…
January 17, 2007
Two science blogging carnivals have been posted in the past few days. The first edition of Oekologie (ecology and environmental science) is up at The Infinite Sphere, and Aardvarchaeology has the newest Four Stone Hearth (anthropology). Also, Evil Monkey is scheduled to post a fresh edition of…
January 17, 2007
Imagine you put grandma in a retirement home. One day, you and the kids head out to Shady Acres to pay a visit to grandma. You meet her in her room -- planning to hit up the 4pm dinner as her guest so she can show off the grandkids to the other retirees -- only to discover she's got an infant in…
January 16, 2007
Gregg Easterbrook -- good sportswriter, crappy at pretty much everything else he does -- likes to take pot-shots at scientific research in his ESPN column "Tuesday Morning Quarterback" (TMQ). In this week's edition he tells us how he doesn't think scientific papers should have multiple authors and…
January 16, 2007
Don't say I didn't warn you. We have irrefutable evidence that the manatees are attacking. We're only now gaining insights into their advance technology. Only a week ago did I say to Sandy:
And I'm obsessed with manatees, not chimeras. That is, unless the matatees devise some sort of manatee/…
January 16, 2007
To the uninitiated, chromosome number may appear to reflect genome size -- more chromosomes would mean a larger genome. This is not necessarily the case if we measure genome size by the number of base pairs in a genome. There are two primary ways to change chromosome number: chromosomal…
January 15, 2007
T-Rex thinks he's eliminated zombies with logic. The basic idea: Zombies depend on human brains to survive, but they also must bite humans (turning them into zombies) to create more zombies. If zombies were really good at catching humans and eating their brains, there would be no more humans and…
January 15, 2007
There are a lot of different ways for animals to determine which individuals develop into boys and which ones become girls. You're probably most familiar with the form of chromosomal sex determination that utilizes X and Y chromosomes -- males are XY and females are XX. There are others, including…
January 14, 2007
I'm a big fan of recycling. I try to recycle whatever I can -- paper, plastics, glass, aluminum -- whenever I can. I was under the impression that recycling produces less waste than dumping in landfills and is better for the environment in general. Because of this, I was willing to pay the extra…
January 14, 2007
Hang with me here on this one.
Marlowe's Cousin Shakespeare's Sister responds to a criticism of Nancy Pelosi with a little bit of feminist satire (reproduced below the fold): "No woman in the history of politics has used her womb like Nancy Pelosi.". Shakes (I think that's what the cool kids call…
January 13, 2007
Larry Moran has been writing about olfactory receptors (1, 2, 3). The last two focus on work that has come out of Masatoshi Nei's group on the evolution of gene families -- OR genes being a archetype of gene family evolution.
January 11, 2007
One year ago today the current incarnation of evolgen at ScienceBlogs was launched. A lot has happened in that year -- we junked DNA; we became terrified of manatees; we were voted the sexiest blog in all of scibloggistan by Nature; we were awarded the Nobel prizes for Physiology or Medicine, Peace…
January 11, 2007
The post from yesterday was inspired by the news coverage surrounding the paper describing gene expression differences (DOI) between human populations. The original article uses neither the term 'race' nor the term ''Caucasian''. Instead, what would normally be called 'races' are referred to as '…
January 10, 2007
The curtain has been drawn and the secrets to data analysis revealed. Do you have a data set sitting around in need of analysis? Read this and learn how to find significant results somewhere -- anywhere -- in your data. Because negative results won't get you published; and you won't get hired/…
January 10, 2007
Mutations are the fuel that drives the engine of evolution. Without mutations there would be no variation upon which natural selection and other evolutionary forces could act. Furthermore, much of the theoretical results regarding evolutionary genetics depend on estimates of mutation rates. For…
January 10, 2007
First of all, do you consider the terms "Caucasian" and "of European ancestry" synonyms? How about the use of those terms in the popular press? If the two terms are equivalent in the common vernacular, which one do you prefer?
What about the words "race" and "ethnicity"? Are they equivalent in the…
January 9, 2007
Imagine you have two races -- because calling them populations is just too damn PC -- that are fixed for different alleles. Additionally, at loci were there are no fixed differences, alleles are segregating at different frequencies between the two races. In order to keep each of the races pure we…
January 9, 2007
Via Snail's Tails comes this podcast (dated 05 January 2006 on this page) featuring E.O. Wilson. According to Aydin (I'm a blogger so I don't fact check my sources) Wilson lays out the two fundamental laws of biology:
All of the phenomena of biology are ultimately obedient to the laws of physics…
January 8, 2007
The NYTimes reports on the impending budget crunch at US science funding agencies. The last Congress only passed spending bills for the military and domestic security, leaving nine others at the same level as the previous year. If we take inflation into account, the stagnant budgets result in a…
January 8, 2007
I'm become quite obsessive about the false dichotomy between humans and animals, but that's what blogs are for. Anyway, you can probably guess why this gets under my skin:
January 8, 2007
Phenotypic differences between populations, species, or any other taxonomic classification can be attributed to genetic and environmental causes. The genetic differences can be divided into sequence divergence of transcribed regions, copy number divergence, and expression divergence. These…
January 7, 2007
After beating a dead centaur yesterday, Dictionary.com's word of the day for today seems quite appropriate:
chimerical \ky-MER-ih-kuhl; -MIR-; kih-\, adjective:
1. Merely imaginary; produced by or as if by a wildly fanciful imagination; fantastic; improbable or unrealistic.
2. Given to or indulging…
January 6, 2007
There is currently much debate over the ethics of chimeras -- organisms that are partially one species and partially another. This debate is especially heated when humans are one of the species involved. Nature has published an editorial on the controversy. I don't intend to comment on the…
January 5, 2007
We still have a chance to increase the NIH budget for this year. Go here to contact your US Senators and Representatives to request that they increase the NIH budget -- the last congress failed to vote on a budget for the NIH, resulting in a FY2007 budget identical to that of FY2006. From the…