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Should Evolution Be Taught In High School?
Microbiologist Carl Woese is well known as an iconoclast. Indeed, few biologists have so thoroughly shaken the tree of life as he did when he proposed that there are not two major branches --...
View ArticleDo You Understand Evolutionary Trees? (Part Two)
In the first installment of this series, we encountered the common misconception that the order of the terminal nodes ("tips") on an evolutionary tree reflects the actual relatedness among the species...
View ArticleNon-functional DNA: Non-functional Vs. Inconsequential
Each copy of the human genome consists of about 3,200,000,000 base pairs, and includes about 500,000 repeats of the LINE-1 transposable element (a LINE) and twice as many copies of Alu (a SINE), as...
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Phylogenetic Fallacies: Early Branching Must Mean Primitive
Evolutionary trees, or "phylogenies", are a major part of modern evolutionary science. They depict hypotheses regarding the relationships among taxa, and are therefore important in reconstructions of...
View ArticleGuide To Translating Scientific Papers Into Plain English
Believe it or not, scientists do not always take themselves too seriously. We can laugh at ourselves and the sometimes rigid conventions of our profession. Take, for example, this guide to translating...
View ArticleWhose Genome?
The term "genome" is oft-heard but seldom defined, and indeed has more than one meaning. Little wonder, then, that discussions about genome sequences and comparisons thereof can leave otherwise...
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Phylogenetic Fallacies: Branching From A Main Line
In Phylogenetic Fallacies: Early Branching Must Mean Primitive I focused on the misconception that an "early branching" lineage was necessarily "primitive" (i.e., very similar to a distant ancestor)....
View ArticlePlatypus Sex Chromosomes And Basal-Equals-Primitive
There has been considerable interest in the publication of the platypus genome, which is good. Unfortunately, much of the reporting has been distorted, which is bad. However, rather than picking on the...
View ArticleJunk DNA And The Onion Test
One copy of the human genome is more than 3 billion nucleotides in length, and weighs in at about 3.5 picograms (pg, or trillionths of a gram). Only about 1.5% of this is composed of our 20,000 or so...
View ArticleLearning Versus Evolution In Microbes.
One of my pet peeves is the common description in the media of bacteria "learning" to "outsmart" antibiotics. As anyone with a basic comprehension of evolution knows, learning has nothing to do with...
View ArticleMassive Moths! (Genomes, Not So Big)
Like several other insect orders, the Lepidoptera is staggeringly diverse -- there are about 180,000 described species in the order and an untold number that remain unknown to biologists. (For...
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Natural Selection Before Darwin
Charles Darwin (1809-1882) opened his first notebook about "the species question" in 1837, not long after his return from the voyage of the Beagle. By 1838, he had developed the basic outline of his...
View ArticleGecko Genome Size And Cell Size
One of the many aggravations I encounter when reviewing manuscripts is that some authors greatly overstate the applicability of statistically significant patterns they report. For example, a...
View ArticleA Pronounced Affection For Parasites
According to Peter Olson of the Natural History Museum in London, "All free-living organisms host one or more parasites." This can be taken two ways, both of them generally true: a) that each...
View ArticleEvolution: Education And Outreach Special Issue - Eye Evolution
I was planning to wait until the issue was actually in print, or at least until all the articles were available in preprint, but there is already some buzz starting so here it is. The upcoming issue of...
View ArticleSmall Genomes In Pterosaurs Too.
My colleagues Chris Organ and Andrew Shedlock, who provided evidence that theropod dinosaurs already had (somewhat) reduced genome sizes prior to the evolution of birds (Organ et al. 2007) have...
View ArticleBreaking News: Evidence For Evolution Found!
One of Doug Futuyma's great quotes is this one:"...no biologist today would think of publishing a paper on ‘new evidence for evolution’... it simply hasn’t been an issue in scientific circles for more...
View ArticleAre We Descended From Monkeys?
Today I gave my lecture on mammal diversity and evolution in the 4th year vertebrate course. We have been talking a fair bit about paraphyletic groups, common vs. scientific names, and so on. Within...
View ArticleDoes Evolutionary Biology Make Predictions?
A commenter on a previous post seems to have objected to the claim that evolutionary science makes predictions.gimme 5 examples of predictions, i mean real predictions: not fit the model...
View ArticleOmnigenomics
Sometimes it is helpful to have a catchy word to describe one's type of research. I think that's why "omics" words are so popular -- they encapsulate a complex combination of approaches (usually...
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