At Scicon, Bernard Beckett talked about getting people excited about science by telling stories about cool science stuff. One of his examples was how he told one of his classes about what makes voles monogamous or promisuous. Racy stuff! I remember reading about this some years ago in a book by US author Natalie Angier, […]
Continue readingTag: genetics
a smelly story
At the moment I’m reading Neil Shubin’s book Your inner fish. It’s a wonderful walk through the evolution of life, taking various aspects of our own biology & tracing their evolutionary history. Over lunch I was reading the chapter on the sense of smell, & some of the ideas there really excited me & I […]
Continue readingthe tasmanian tiger’s evolutionary affinities
The (sadly extinct) Tasmanian Tiger and living wolves provide an excellent example of convergent evolution. They have the same ecological niche, with the Tiger filling the role of a top predator in Australia, while wolves are found throughout the northern hemisphere. But the Tiger is a marsupial, while wolves are placental mammals.
Continue readingdarwin’s tomatoes & the evolution of novel features
I was talking about evolution with some students the other day and one of them said, 'But to get new features in an organism you have to have new genes, and mutation can't do that." We talked a bit about transposons and other means of gene duplication, & I also pointed out that changes in […]
Continue readingthe thylacine – back from the dead?
Not quite (although that's implied in some of the rather breathless reporting of an extraordinary paper that was published on-line this month). Nevertheless, the real story describes a striking achievement: the cloning of DNA from the extinct thylacine, or Tasmanian tiger.
Continue readingrapid evolutionary change in lizards
This is another wonderful paper – the result of what may be a unique translocation experiment involving Italian wall lizards (Podarcis sicula: Herrel et al., 2008). (I do read other stuff – I might tell you about some of that next time.)
Continue readingneandertals in siberia
We know from fossil evidence that Neanderthals evolved in Europe around 400,000 years ago, and later (~150,000 years ago) spread into western Asia, before disappearing from all areas in their range about 30,000 years ago. However, it can sometimes be quite hard to be certain whether or not a fossil is from a Neanderthal, which […]
Continue readingmore forensic genetics – and the origins of multicellular animals
When I'm lecturing about animal diversity and the origins of the multicellular animals (aka metazoans), I point out the similarity between the single-celled protozoans called choanoflagellates and the choanocytes (or 'feeding cells') of sponges. The textbook interpretation is that choanoflagellates may have shared a common ancestor with metazoans, and there's an increasing amount of genetic […]
Continue readingscientifique kiwis
Gosh, we had a good Cafe Scientifique this week. My friend & colleague, Dave Lambert, was there to talk about his latest project – sequencing the kiwi genome. (That's kiwi bird, not kiwi people.) And he wants to get you involved!
Continue readingforensic genetics & an evolutionary puzzle
At the moment I'm lecturing to our first-year biology class about plants. In my lecture about algae, there were a couple of slides about malaria. You might well ask 'why'; I know my students were thinking that. Well, I did have a reason – & today I found a brief summary paper (Keeling, 2008) on just […]
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