evolgen
Posts by this author
September 17, 2006
The Disgruntled Chemist was in Minnesota last week. He went out to a few local bars, and wrote about his encounters. Check out this one where met a girl who had martini olives in her beer. She claimed the olives were a substitute for the salt she normally put in her beer. Yeah, salt. SALT! In her…
September 15, 2006
I've told you before that I once dreamt of becoming a conservation geneticist. I major turning point for me occurred after I had completed rotations during my first year of grad school. I had to decide between two different labs: in one I would use molecular markers to study the demography of a…
September 15, 2006
The sixth edition of Mendel's Garden has been posted at The Voltage Gate. Like Ice Cube, MC Ren, and Eazy-E, this one's straight outta Compton. Go check it out to see what NWA gots to do with genetics blogging. I know I'm pimpin' my Raiders hat over a Jheri curl right now.
September 15, 2006
A few weeks ago I introduced the tree of life, albeit to some criticisms. The following week I zoomed in on one branch of that tree, the eukaryotes. I pointed out that animals were a mere twig in the eukaryotic tree, yet they have been the focus of a large amount of biological research. This…
September 14, 2006
Read this (via The Panda's Thumb). Here's a taste:
TO THE CHAGRIN OF BAYLOR football fans, once steeped in the steady success of Grant Teaff during his Hall of Fame coaching career that concluded in 1992, their East-Central Texas school is now better known for its controversial role in the dubious…
September 14, 2006
This is old news, but I just heard about it. A microbiology graduate student at the University of Wisconsin has a blog. He finished his rotations and chose a lab. His to be advisor found out about the blog and read it. After concluding that the student did not really want to be in grad school, he…
September 13, 2006
My last post was rather negative, and I tried my damnedest to not come across as an asshole. I think it's important to realize, however, that as cool as evo-devo is, it won't revolutionize evolutionary biology until it can be extended beyond animal body plans. Carl Zimmer commented that studies on…
September 13, 2006
Doc Myers has another evo-devo post up; this one is on conserved dorsal-ventral patterning in the vertebrate and arthropod nervous systems. This stuff is fascinating, and Myers does a great job of explaining the research for a general audience. I'd imagine he's an amazing teacher, as well. The…
September 11, 2006
Seed has published an interview with Bruce Lahn. It's not all that interested, and, frankly, the boys at Gene Expression could have done much better. Given their obsession with Lahn, I wouldn't be surprised to see him show up in the 10 questions series.
The title of this post is both a play on the…
September 11, 2006
DonorsChoose is a non-profit organization that helps teachers in the United States get funding for in-class projects. ScienceBlogs readers and Seed Media Group raised over $30,000 to support educational programs through the DonorsChoose program earlier this year. DonorsChoose is now making a push…
September 10, 2006
Janet's little nerd meme is hot shit at ScienceBlogs. Everyone's bragging about their nerd score. Well, everyone but those of us that are that the bottom of the nerd totem-pole (like me).
All this nerd talk has gotten all the science dorks up in a tizzy -- so much so that they're getting sloppy…
September 9, 2006
You wanna know the best way to predict the quality of undergraduates at a college or university? It's not SAT scores or high school GPA. It's the quality of the school's ultimate team. From the press release:
A study (slated for release September 1) by Dr. Michael Norden shows that among all 86…
September 9, 2006
As I was rollin' down the street this morning (with my alma mater proudly displayed on my license plate holder) on the way to the ole' grocery store, an older couple pulled up alongside of me at a stop light. The husband was driving, and he busted out the "Pardon me, do you have any Grey Poupon"…
September 9, 2006
It's Saturday on the second weekend of the college football season. Tomorrow (Sunday) marks the opening of the NFL season (okay, the season really kicked off Thursday night). Also, we're hitting the home stretch of the major league baseball season, and the playoffs are just around the corner. With…
September 8, 2006
A few months ago I wrote the following:
I should point out that the mammalian Y chromosome is an anomaly in origin and sex determination. In fact, every single sex determination system and sex chromosome system that I know of differs from all of the others in some manner. It looks like I'm going to…
September 8, 2006
A letter to Nature published this week asks when journals will begin to allow multiple last, or senior, authors. The letter is short, sweet, and to the point:
The correspondence mentioned in this letter wonders how the author list should be organized:
I thought I understood the guidelines for…
September 8, 2006
And they're doing it open access style.
Jonathan Eisen and Michael Eisen have each published papers in the PLoS journals using newly available genome sequence data. Jonathan is lead on author on the paper describing the genome sequence of the ciliate, Tetrahymena thermophila. He has blogged about…
September 7, 2006
Alfred Russel Wallace, the other guy who came up with the theory of natural selection, was quite the Renaissance man Victorian Era Superscientist. An essay in this week's issue of Nature reports the discovery of a letter from Wallace to William Talbot on a way to improve the mirrors used in…
September 7, 2006
Nobel Intent has an excellent summary of a paper in the PNAS pipeline on the origin of new exons in the human genome. The authors compared genes between humans and seven other vertebrates to identify newly arisen exons. They found that many new exons are composed of repeat sequences, such as…
September 7, 2006
Janet has a declared a nerd-off, and all the ScienceBlogs bloggers are bragging about their nerdiness. They're showing off scores on nerd quizzes. As you can see I'm not so nerdy (compared to the other bloggers here). My standing as a "Low-Rank Nerd" might qualify me for excommunication from the…
September 6, 2006
A lot of people at ScienceBlogs and around the blogosphere have been chattering about the death of Steve "Croc Hunter" Irwin, but here at evolgen we know who the real killer was:
We're on the ball like the Boulder District Attorney's Office. Now, we're off to arrest Kevin Vranes for sexually…
September 6, 2006
ABC News has an article by mathematician John Allen Paulos on how creationists misuse probability in their anti-science arguments. This article is inspired by the Science article on public acceptance of evolution. I especially like how he distinguishes between a priori and a posteri probabilities:…
September 5, 2006
As I was working on my computer (in my office) this afternoon, a small critter was flying around my head. Based on my current location (in a building housing at least 3 Drosophila labs) and my previous whereabouts (our lab's fly room), I surmised that this was most likely a member of genus…
September 5, 2006
I got all excited when I read the following article title in the week's issue of PNAS:
Abnormal sex ratios in human populations: Causes and consequences
I hoped the authors would discuss meiotic drive and segregation distortion. It turns out they're concerned with son preference and sex-selective…
September 5, 2006
Razib pointed out this blog article on theory in biology. The author deals with three, self defined, points:
Unifying theory in biology.
Theory vs. experimental biology.
Justification through medical applications.
His first point, that biology (or a given biological discipline) lacks a…
September 4, 2006
Stew, of Flags and Lollipops and Postgenomic, is compiling a new statistic for his blog aggregator: the hotness of science bloggers. Head on over to Flags and Lollipops to vote for the hottest science bloggers.
I scrolled through for a bit and could not find a picture for evolgen. I'm not sure…
September 4, 2006
Welcome to the fifth edition of Mendel's Garden -- the blog carnival devoted to all things genetical. In this edition, we have 17 articles from 14 blogs on biomedical research, evolutionary genetics, and molecular and cell biology. The entire collection can be found below the fold.
Biomedical…
September 3, 2006
In case you don't know why, check this out. Even Stephen thinks you better watch your back:
September 1, 2006
Bio::Blogs #3 has been posted at business|bytes|genes|molecules. Bio::Blogs is a blog carnival that deals with computational biology. Next month's edition will be hosted by Sandy. If you write something about computational biology this month, send a link to her.
September 1, 2006
I'm slowly turning into a cyclist. I currently own three bikes, but that number may change when I buy the fixed gear I've been longing for. I bought a mountain bike a couple of years ago for commuting to and from campus. It's a little over a mile from my front door to my building, but I lost the…