While doing some research on human evolution, I stumbled across the web site for a wonderful meeting that was held in March at San Diego to celebrate the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome. You can watch the lectures here. By comparing the chimp genome to the human genome, scientists are discovering exactly how we evolved into the peculiar species that we are. If you find yourself in an argument with someone who claims that evolution has nothing to do with cutting edge science, plunk them down in front of these talks. Without evolution, genomics is gibberish.
(Note--Oliver Baker informs me that this page won't work in Firefox. IE and Safari are fine.)
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From the archives, here's something about how we might be underestimating the strength of natural selection when we look at molecular data:
PZ Myers has a superb summary of a very interesting PLoS paper. In the paper, the authors identify those genes that have experienced strong selection, and thus…
...or it won't be much of a revolution. Yesterday, I discussed the difference between a DNA sequencing revolution and a genomics revolution, and how we have a long way to go before there's a genome sequencer in every pot (or something). But let's say, for argument's sake, these problems are…
Last week, we decided to compare a human mitochondrial DNA sequence with the mitochondrial sequences of our cousins, the apes, and find out how similar these sequences really are.
The answer is: really, really, similar.
And you can see that, in the BLAST graph, below the fold.
A quick glance…
Our intrepid creationist, William Gibbons, is back again. You might remember him from a year ago when I challenged him to explain the evidence from biostratigraphy, a challenge he has still not even attempted to meet. A couple weeks ago, he was back with a long reply of plagiarized and uncredited…
Use Internet Explorer or something other than Firefox if you want your browser to present that chimp link directly.
the kicker for me is their tool usage...