Sandwalk

The newsgroup talk.origins was created more than 30 years ago. It's been a moderated newsgroup for the past twenty years. The moderator...

Today is the Fête Nationale in France known also as "le quatorze juillet" or Bastille Day . This is the day in 1789 when French ci...

The genetic load argument is one of the oldest arguments for junk DNA and it's one of the most powerful arguments that most of our genom...

An article on Nature: INDEX reports on a recent survey of scientists: Cutting corners a bigger problem than research fraud . The subtitle s...

The discussion about philosophy continues on Facebook. One of my long-time Facebook friends, Jonathan Bernier, took up the challenge. Bernie...

I've been discussing the contributions of philosophy on Facebook. Somebody linked to a a post on the topic: What has philosophy contribu...

My last post was about confusion over the sizes of the human and mouse genomes based on a recent paper by Breschi et al. (2017). Their state...

The July 2017 issue of Nature Reviews: Genetics contains an interesting review of a topic that greatly interest me. Breschi, A., Gingeras,...

In Debating alternative splicing (Part III) I discussed a review published in the February 2017 issue of Trends in Biochemical Sciences . T...

Proponents of massive alternative splicing argue that most human genes produce many different protein isoforms. According to these scientist...

Mammalian genomes are very large. It looks like 90% of it is junk DNA. These genomes are pervasively transcribed, meaning that almost 90% of...

I recently had a chance to talk science with my old friend and colleague Jack Greenblatt . He has recently teamed up with some of my other c...

The ongoing debate over junk DNA often revolves around data collected by ENCODE and others. The idea that most of our genome is transcribed ...

Watch this video. It dates from this year. Almost everything Wells says is either false or misleading. Why? Is he incapable of learning abou...

Some of my former students were able to come to my retirement reception yesterday: Sean Blaine (left), Anna Gagliardi, Marc Perry.