Today is the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin’s birth. But hey, you already knew that. All the images going around seem to have Darwin with a big white beard. But lets not forget that his Beagle voyage and much of his scientific work was completed when he was a young man. So this is really…
Author: Dave Lunt
Big Trees in the NY Times
The New York Times has an article talking about constructing and especially visualizing the tree of life called “Crunching the Data for the Tree of Life“. Its interesting, especially since I think it touches on many issues concerning tree size that even phylogenetic biologists haven’t really considered. There are lots of talk of “big” trees,…
EvoPhylo’s Birthday
I started this blog one year ago. Its been a lot of fun and gone really fast. I’ve done approx 1 post per week on average, which is about as many as I anticipated. I intended I would blog mostly on research:- phylogenetics, bioinformatics etc but I’ve not done as much of that as I…
A tribute to Mike Majerus
Sadly, evolutionary biologist Michael Majerus died this week. I didn’t know Mike very well, we had chatted from time to time at conferences, and we talked when he came to give us a seminar a few months back, but he was a nice guy, good scientist and an amazingly energetic force for communicating evolutionary biology….
What Darwin Didn’t Know
Just watched “What Darwin Didn’t Know” with Armand Leroi as part of the BBC Darwin season. I was looking forward to it but it was a little disappointing. The tone was too sleepy and Victorian. There was some but not enough on what Darwin didn’t know, which was odd given the title. Modern evolutionary biology,…
Dry Store Room No 1
The other book I read over Christmas was “Dry Store Room No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural History Museum” by Richard Fortey. This is an interesting tour of some of the past and present personalities behind the Natural History Museum, London. I found it a really interesting light read. A good motto put…
Bad Science
Ben Goldacre is one of my favourite writers, I turn to his column in the Guardian each Saturday before anything else. I read his excellent book “Bad Science” over Christmas, and I really recommend it. He looks primarily at the reporting of science in the media but also about the science (lack of) in everyday…
Darwin Stamps
The British Royal Mail is issuing a set of Darwin stamps on Feb 12th (Darwin’s 200th birthday). I actually think there are 10 stamps this time, but could only find picture of these 6. Nice, although I can’t remember the last time I wrote an actual letter, maybe I can include the image in my…
Predicting crackpot evolution stories
2009 is Darwin year. Can we predict the crackpot evolution stories that we are certainly going to see? Stories invented by the press, artificial controversies, misinformation from anti-evolutionists. I thought it might be fun to make some predictions for 2009. Creationists will exploit PR better than scientists to get their stories into mainstream newspapers and…
New Year Resolutions
Just got back from a trip visiting family in Spain. Relying on my iPod touch for net access but I was unable to blog in any sensible way at all. Couldn’t create posts on Blogger for some reason I’m not quite sure of. I have a few posts I wrote anyway…My new year resolutions include……
EvoPhylo 