Link: Remembrance of Bryan Sykes
The British geneticist Bryan Sykes has died, and The Guardian has an obituary from Georgina Ferry: “Bryan Sykes obituary”.
The British geneticist Bryan Sykes has died, and The Guardian has an obituary from Georgina Ferry: “Bryan Sykes obituary”.
The Scientist this month has a nice short article by Joseph Keierleber that recounts some of the early history of scientific investigation of the sex chromos...
Chip Colwell writes in The Conversation about the questionable ethics involved in some ancient DNA sampling: “Rights of the dead and the living clash when sc...
Ancient DNA is following its Moore’s Law-like progression toward greater and greater sample sizes from past populations. Until this year, it may not have see...
Via Jay Shendure, who shared this ad on Twitter this weekend:
Theodosius Dobzhansky, in his essay, “On species and races of living and fossil man” (1944):
Michael Regnier has an article in Mosaic about the exceptional life and tragic end of George Price: “The man who gave himself away”.
An editorial by Stanley Fields in this month’s issue of Genetics asks, “Would Fred Sanger Get Funded Today?”. Sanger died last year at the age of 95.
Carl Zimmer reviews Svante Paabo’s new book, Neanderthal Man: In Search of Lost Genomes, in the New York Times: “Missing Links”. Zimmer gives a balanced revi...
Haldane’s Sieve has a great post by James Lee giving context to a new preprint from him and Carson Chow: “Our paper: The causal meaning of Fishers average ef...
In my last post (“Quote: Lederberg on Haldane”) I pointed to a 1999 article by Joshua Lederberg Lederberg:Haldane:1999. Later in the article, he considers an...
J. B. S. Haldane has typically been assigned credit for the first suggestion that human hemoglobinopathies are adaptations to malaria. In 1999, Joshua Lederb...
In a 1937 paper Haldane:fitness:1937, J. B. S. Haldane covered some aspects of the evolutionary process in a particularly clear way. Not everything in the fo...
Current Biology has published an interview of the esteemed Japanese population geneticist Tomoko Ohta Ohta:profile:2012.
Daniel Engber in Slate: “Test-Tube Piggies: How did the guinea pig become a symbol of science?”
A story by Susan Donaldson James of a unique genetic disorder and the social stigma of inbreeding in Appalachia: “Fugates of Kentucky: Skin Bluer than Lake L...
I received today the sad news that my friend and colleague James F. Crow has died, at the age of 95. Jim was a legend in the field of population genetics, wh...
Larry Moran muses on the recent death of Horace Judson, author of The Eighth Day of Creation: Makers of the Revolution in Biology. This excellent history is ...
Steve Jones writes in the BBC News on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Francis Galton’s death: “Francis Galton: The man who drew up the ‘ugly map...
John Timmer tells us “Ten years on: why a complete human genome mattered,” from the perspective first of a bench scientist, then later as a science writer:
A reader forwards the news that Morris Goodman has died. Goodman was among the first to demonstrate molecular similarity between humans and chimpanzees; he b...
Theodosius Dobzhansky, concluding a paper titled, “Evolution in the Tropics”, which considered the role of physical environment versus other factors as evolu...
While doing some other research, I ran across a remarkable short paper by James Spuhler, “On the number of genes in man,” printed in Science in 1948.
Courtesy of Jon Cohen in Science (“The Chimpanzee Genome Project’s Seedy Origins”), a detail that I hadn’t heard before:
From p. 37 of the Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (1930):
New Scientist has an article by Mark Buchanan discussing horizontal transfer as a mechanism for the evolution of early life: “Horizontal and vertical: The ev...
Many of us use sickle cell as an example in classes. I always do so while noting the progress that has been made in treating the condition in Westernized con...
Chapter 2 of R. A. Fisher’s Genetical Theory of Natural Selection is remarkable for many reasons. In it, he presents a model of selection in an age-structure...
Science this week features an article by Elizabeth Pennisi about the research of evolutionary biologist Hopi Hoekstra. She studies pigment variations in wild...
A new printing of a classic population genetics text has been issued this year: An Introduction to Population Genetics Theory, by James Crow and Motoo Kimura.
People often complain that R. A. Fisher wrote in a hard-to-read style; unnecessarily verbose and indirect. Either I don’t tend to mind, or I find that the st...
I'm coming late to this story, but it's still timely! The New York Times has an op-ed by Clive Wynne linking the inspiration for the original King Kong to S...