If the title of this post makes you cringe, then you belong to a minority of people who realize why the phrase “highly evolved” is so wrong. Unfortunately, “highly evolved” (as an absolute term) and “more evolved” (as a comparative term) seem to be used all-too frequently. They are uttered not only by non-scientists and […]
A small spike on my blog traffic yesterday led me to look for the source via Google Analytics. (If you are a blogger, you should really use this tool, lots of useful traffic information.) Seems like most of the traffic came from the page of a high school science teacher at Badin High School in […]
After hearing Jonathan Eisen and Nikos Kyripdes talk about GEBA in various meetings, it is great to see the paper finally come out, and under a CC license too. Good move for everyone. GEBA is the Genomic Encyclopedia of Bacteria and Archaea. The idea is simple: we have >1000 prokaryotic genomes in GenBank as of […]
The first bioinformatics meeting I went to was in 1996 at the Nachsholim resort, north of Tel Aviv. I received a fellowship for the duration, and shared a room with the brilliant Golan Yona, then a grad student at the Hebrew University. I was doing biochemistry at the time and knew next to nothing about […]
Stephen Colbert had an interesting lineup for the past two nights: Richard Dawkins on Sep 30, and Francis Collins last night. Enjoy the vids: The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
First, a short glossary. Homologous genes are descended from a common ancestral gene. There are two types of homology: Orthology is homology due to a speciation event. So if there is a gene A’ in humans and A” in mice, and they are obviously similar in sequence, we infer that they homologous. We usually also […]
I ranted in a previous post about the use of homology as a quantitative term, rather than a qualitative term. Ben Blackburne commented on that post introducing me to “micro homology”, a term I did not know existed. I ignored its existence, until I heard it spoken yesterday at a talk, which sort of rubbed […]
Quorum sensing Social behavior is not exactly the first term that comes to mind with relation to microbes. After all, we assume a certain amount of intelligence and an ability to implement a behavioral pattern in response to peer actions. Humans, yes. Apes, yes. Birds of a feather flock together… so birds, yes. Ants and […]
UPDATE: I submitted this post to the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center’s sponsored contest for a travel award to ScienceOnline2010. Let’s see how it goes… #scio10 In a previous post about Hatena we saw what might very well be the beginning of a (beautiful?) [:ttip=”symbiosis where one partner lives inside the cell of the other” id=”10″]endosymbiotic[:/ttip] […]
(Thanks to F.B. for the inspiration). Sigh… people don’t seem to learn. It’s been almost 22 years (yikes!) since a distinguished group of scientists published a letter in Cell calling for a responsible use of the word “homology”. If you were born when that letter was published, then in the US you can already drink […]
In the Hatena story about symbiosis, I posted the following picture drawn by Ernst Haeckel: Beautiful! In this day and age of imaging, high resolution photography, and molecular graphics, we forget that scientific drawing was a skill as necessary to life scientists as microscopic imaging, or molecular graphics is today. Indeed, biology was very much […]
The story of a predator that, upon eating a certain food, suddenly becomes a peaceful plant. Sort of. Free-living versus symbiotic A working definition for symbiosis is two or more species that live and interact. Mutualism means that each derives a certain benefit from the other, or at most causing no harm to each other. […]
Mass Extinctions and Genomics The geological signs for mass extinctions are very distinct: the photo shows the boundary of the Cretaceous-Tertiary KT extinction that happened ~65 million years ago (Mya), and killed some 70% of the species on Earth, most famously the dinosaurs. This was the last mass extinction, and its effects on Earth’s life […]
