I’ve written before about the evolution of the eye (here & here for example. Now there’s a whole issue of the most excellent science education journal Evolution: education & outreach devoted to this very topic – & it’s free on-line right here! So if you’re interested in following up on some of the latest work on this […]
Continue readingTag: genetics
more on copy-number variations in chimps & humans
A little while ago now I wrote about the creationist take on a recent paper looking at chimp/human genetics – more specifically, copy-number variations in particular gene sequences. I intended to read the original paper & blog about it, because the Sensuous Curmudgeon made it sound so interesting. So you may imagine that I was just […]
Continue readingshades of jurassic park
A couple of nights ago I caught the end of a TV ‘news’ item about mammoths. Molecular biologists have managed to sequence the mammoth genome – the next thing, said the reporter breathlessly, will be bringing mammoths back to life…
Continue readingtwo-headed kitties & embryonic development
A few posts back Heraclides referred to a kitten born with two heads – you may well have seen it on TV news the other night. (If you google ‘two-headed kitten’ you’ll find this wasn’t a unique birth. I remember we had a two-headed calf in the zoology museum at Massey, when I was a […]
Continue readinga vaccine for AIDS?
I’m supposed to be finishing writing a paper for a conference right now, so I was casting around for something short & sweet to write. Fortunately for me, ERV has just written an interesting post examining claims about a possible new treatment for AIDS. It involves souping up the patient’s killer T cells (part of the […]
Continue readingdiscovering biology in a digital world
I’ve just found another neat blog: Discovering biology in a digital world. It was recommended on The Panda’s Thumb, & it’s written by Sandra Porter, a molecular biologist & science educator. There’s a whole range of stuff here, but the bit that first caught my eye was a post on the RNA world that many […]
Continue readingare humans evolving faster? a counter to steve jones
A little while back I put up a brief post about Steve Jones’ hypothesis that human evolution is slowing. At the time this proposal was on the receiving end of a fair bit of critical discussion on various science blogs. Now here’s an article by Benjamin Phelan, in Seed magazine, that suggests that the reverse is true […]
Continue readingmating systems in takahe
Takahe (Porphyrio hochstetteri) are one of the world’s most endangered birds. There are only around 120 still surviving in Fiordland, although a few more now live on predator-free islands off the New Zealand coast. (If you go to Tiritiri Matangi Island in the Hauraki Gulf you’ll be bound to see them.) But while the birds […]
Continue readingfish fingers, anyone?
Fish with fingers, whales with legs – the sub-title of Carl Zimmer’s 1998 book on the evolution of amphibians & whales – seems even more apt with the announcement of a new fossil find: a fish whose pectoral fins contained bones homologous to tetrapod fingers (Boisvert et al. 2008).
Continue readingkiwi conservation & ancient DNA
I think I first woke up to the potential of ancient DNA (aDNA) research when I was part of the team developing the Evolution for Teaching website. My friend Dave Lambert, who was then with the Allan Wilson Centre at Massey (Albany) was working with aDNA to study microevolution in Adelie penguins in Antarctica, and […]
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