evolgen
Posts by this author
March 3, 2006
Today, I will begin a new tradition at evolgen. There are a lot of topics and terms in the biological sciences that sound like something else; many of these fall into the category of double entendre. I'm quite immature, so that kinda stuff really amuses me. Every Friday I'll try to come up with…
March 2, 2006
Dudes, here's some stuff around the blogosphere that has caught my eye:
Robert Skipper, a philosopher of biology, knows a whole lot about the history of population genetics. Is he the next Will Provine?
Another philosopher, John Wilkins joins the fight against taxomonic bias.
Razib wants you to…
March 2, 2006
I have posted on microbial diversity in the soil previously. Tara pointed out that even though we are just now learning about what ecological factors determine soil microbial diversity, we also have a lot to learn about microbial diversity within the human digestive tract. She asked:
I wonder…
March 2, 2006
Another molecular biologist has joined the ScienceBlogs army. Go over an say hello to Alex Palazzo at The Daily Transcript. He'll drop some central dogma on you.
February 28, 2006
The sixth edition of the Circus of the Spineless is up at Science and Politics. Get your fix of inverts now...
February 28, 2006
There's a fun article in Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology on what distinguishes a good scientific meeting from a not so good one. The author advocates attending small meetings or workshops (under 100 people), which is tough for a young scientist. Small workshops are usually either not well…
February 27, 2006
You, me, your pet dog, and any other animal with a backbone are deuterostomes. So are sea stars, sea urchins, and sea cucumbers. During early development you, me, and echinoderms (sea stars et al) are a round ball of cells. The ball of cells invaginates and that opening becomes our anus. This…
February 27, 2006
I have a little bit of an infatuation with copy number polymorphism (CNP), which describes the fact that individuals within a population can differ from each other in gene content. Some genes, such as olfactory receptors (ORs), have many different related variants in any animal genome. New copies…
February 26, 2006
The Frink Tank has jumped the shark and joined the ScienceBlogs evil empire. If you like your science with a dash of humor (and dick jokes) check them out.
Another blog, Stoat, has come on board. This one's new to me, but it looks like it deals with climate sciences (and no dick jokes).
February 26, 2006
My advisor received an email from a fairly prominent geneticist regarding some results published by Dobzhansky over fifty years ago. The geneticist had done some back of the envelope calculations and noticed some trends that had been overlooked for a half of a century. We happened to have the…
February 26, 2006
When ScienceBlogs first started out, it was sending out some bad cookies. If you're having trouble commenting on evolgen, delete all of your ScienceBlogs cookies so that you can get the new ones.
February 25, 2006
I have always been disappointed by the EvoWiki -- I found that I could get better information on evolutionary biology from the regular Wikipedia. Now some folks have organized the evolution content on Wikipedia into navigation templates. I have not examined the content of the entries listed in…
February 24, 2006
My apologies for the utter lack of posting over the past week. I've got stuff sitting around waiting to be written about, and I just haven't been writing. I'm not going to make excuses; I just haven't been managing my time well. While you wait for me to post again (soon, I promise), I give you…
February 16, 2006
Apparently, you can fall down in figure skating and still win a silver medal. Imagine if this happened in a real sport. Say, for example, one of the Italian hockey players falls to the ice and a Canadian player scores a goal. Does the Italian team get a do over? I don't know what I hate more,…
February 16, 2006
Fans of the American version of The Office know that the show glorifies the intersection of I-81 and I-84, also known as Scranton, PA. They also know that Jim Halpert moonlights as the quarterback of the Pittsburgh Steelers, but that's for another day. What they may not know is that Scranton has…
February 15, 2006
I was sitting in a small seminar today (about 20 people in a conference room) when someone walked in about 10 minutes late for the talk. This didn't bother the presenter, and I'm not even sure if everyone saw this person walk in (I was sitting particularly close to the door). It wasn't that she…
February 15, 2006
Tangled Bank #47 has been posted at Kete Were. Go get your science on.
February 14, 2006
Stew from Flags and Lollipops has begun a new life science blog aggregator, postgenomic. Here is how he describes it:
Postgenomic aggregates posts from life science blogs and then does useful and interesting things with that data.
For example, it allows you to get an instant picture of what news…
February 13, 2006
Nick Anthis points us to the best satire of Valentine's Day: Valinetine's Day. The holiday is named after the amino acid valine, and is celebrated with nerdy, yet sexy, poetry. Nick offers up some examples of valinetine poems, such as this one to the theme of tumor suppressor genes:
You've…
February 13, 2006
One of the most important developments in evolutionary biology in the past few decades has come without much fanfare outside of a small circle of population geneticists. The early models of population genetics were limited when it came to analyzing the nucleotide sequence polymorphism data that…
February 13, 2006
One of my favorite non-Science Blogs science bloggers has moved over to Science Blogs. If you don't know Orac, go check out his new site for a little Respectful Insolence.
February 12, 2006
The Virginia Quarterly Review has published an essay by Niles Eldredge on its website, entitled "Confessions of Darwinist". I have no problem with Eldredge referring to himself as a Darwinist, as he is not misusing the term. Eldredge's essay explains how punctuated equilibrium (the theory that…
February 12, 2006
Do you know of any sporting event, besides the Olympics, that is not shown live? This is not 1975. We have the internet and 24 hour sports news channels -- you can't turn on the TV, surf the net, or walk out your front door without hearing the results of any of the major events. Even though NBC…
February 11, 2006
There's lots of cool stuff coming out in the speciation literature. The Questionable Authority has posted on two recent studies on sympatric speciation (see here and here). Nature, which published the two sympatric speciation papers, has a summary available here. I am of the opinion that most…
February 10, 2006
A few weeks ago Cell published a commentary by Paul Nurse, president of Rockefeller University, on US biomedical research under siege from people with political motivations. Nurse's intentions were noble, but his language was sloppy. The issue of Cell published today has a commentary by Eugenie…
February 9, 2006
If you like sports (specifically hockey) and you like statistics, two posts from Tom Benjamin's NHL Blog are must reads (available here and here). With help from Dave Savit, a math professor at the University of Arizona, Tom describes how hockey can be modeled using a Poisson distribution. There…
February 9, 2006
The first ever edition of the Animalcules blog carnival has been posted at Aetiology. Go read about those wee little things that you can't see with you naked eye.
February 8, 2006
The Scientist has a good review of genome sequencing (coming from a more biomedical perspective). I tend to present genomics from an evolutionary angle (rather than functional). This is a good read if you're not too familiar with the field, and all you know about genomics is what I've told you.
February 7, 2006
A friend of mine passed along this article from Inside Higher Ed (it's a couple of months old, so you may have seen it already) entitled "What They Don't Teach You in Graduate School". Depending on where you are in your academic career, you can either take it as advice on what you should do,…