Sandwalk

The human genome is pervasively transcribed. More than 80% of the genome is complementary to transcripts that have been detected in some tis...

I went to London last November to attend the Royal Society meeting on New trends in evolutionary biology: biological, philosophical and soci...

Lots of people misunderstand punctuated equilibria. It's a theory about small changes leading to speciation. In many cases the changes a...

You may not agree but you should at least know what some evolutionary biologists are thinking.

All available evidence suggests that about 90% of our genome is junk DNA. Many scientists are reluctant to accept this evidence—some of them...

Paul Draper is a philosopher at Purdue University (West Lafayette, Indiana, USA). He has just (Aug. 2, 2017) posted an article on Atheism a...

Now that I'm officially retired I've been cleaning out my office at the university and transferring all the important stuff to my ho...

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,...