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,…
Category: Science
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…
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…
PopGroup42
Just before Christmas I went to the 42nd Population Genetics Group conference (“PopGroup”) in Cardiff. This is my favourite scientific meeting and is a real institution in the UK. Its not really population genetics as understood today, although it includes popgen, rather evolutionary genetics in a broad sense. I’ve always thought that this title just…
Research Culture- lessons from Google?
I just read a post at Mario’s Entangled Bank called “Running an Academic Lab Google Style“. Some interesting ideas that I was aware of but had kind of forgotten. When I was a postdoc I had lots of strong views on how research should be done and although I haven’t really changed my mind it…
Reading the story in DNA
I just received a copy of “Reading the story in DNA; a beginner’s guide to molecular evolution” by Lindell Bromham, OUP 2008, ISBN: 978-0-19-929091-8I have only looked at it quickly but it is very impressive. I like the writing style. It is well produced. Figures are excellent. The parts I have read are full of…
Inheritance of phylogenetic methods
I just scanned through a very interesting article in BMC Bioinformatics discussing the results of a data mining approach to describing phylogenetic methodology in published articles. Eales et al. Methodology capture: discriminating between the “best” and the rest of community practice. BMC Bioinformatics 2008, 9:359 doi:10.1186/1471-2105-9-359 They searched for “phylogen*” in titles and abstracts at…
EvoPhylo 