Sandwalk

The Deflated Ego Problem refers to the fact that many scientists were very disappointed to learn we had less than 30,000 genes. Those scient...

I'm looking forward to Michael Behe's third book, which is due to be published in February. As most of you probably know, Michael Be...

I've known Yana Eglit for many years. She frequently posts comments on this blog but you won't recognize her name because she uses a...

Humans are just another animal. All animals share a core set of several thousand genes and all mammals have about the same number of homolog...

The importance of Neutral Theory and Nearly-Neutral Theory cannot be exaggerated. It has radically transformed the way experts think about e...

DNA Is Not Destiny: The Remarkable Completely Misunderstood Relationship between You and Your Genes by Steven J. Heine W.W. Norton & C...

I highly recommend this brief editorial by Naruya Saitou: "Chance, Finiteness, and History" (Saitou, 2018). Saitou is a strong pro...

John Mattick is the most prominent defender of the idea that the human genome is full of functional sequences. In fact, he is just about the...

I've been talking to philosophers lately about the true state of the junk DNA controversy. I imagine what it would be like to stage a g...

I just learned about a workshop scheduled for the end of this month. The topic is: Evolutionary Roles of Transposable Elements and Non-codin...

A friend has a neighbor who's in possession of a pamphlet from 1863 on the Owen vs Huxley debate. The text of the pamphlet is here: A Re...

The three main human databases (GENCODE/Ensembl, RefSeq, UniProtKB) contain a total of 22,210 protein-coding genes but only 19,446 of these ...

Nature is arguably the most prestigious science journal. Articles published in Nature are widely perceived to be correct, unbiased, and fa...

Several readers alerted me to a paper that was posted on bioRxiv a few weeks ago (May 28, 2018). The paper claimed that the human genome co...

Press releases have become a serious problem. I'm frequently upset whenever I read a press release covering a field I'm familiar wit...