Sandwalk

I think that about 90% of our genome is junk and I know lots of other scientists who feel the same way. I'm pretty sure that this view i...

Baker’s yeast ( Saccharomyces cerevisiae ) is one of the best studied eukaryotes. Its genome is just slightly larger than the largest bacter...

The Canadian Broadcastng Company (CBC) has a TV show called Marketplace that promotes itself as an advocate of consumers' rights. It ha...

Blogging was light last year because I was busy with other things and because the popularity of blogs is declining rapidly. The most popular...

I'm very impressed with the DNA test administered by Ancestry.com. They report that I have over 600 fourth cousins or closer but I have ...

I was looking at some of my posts from the past few years and wondered which ones were the most popular. I had previously identified the mos...

This is the latest update from Ancestry.com. Their algorithms are getting better and better. This corresponds very closely to what I know of...

The importance of alternative splicing is highly controversial. In the case of humans, the competing views are: (a) more than 90% of human p...

I'm convinced that widespread alternative splicing does not occur in humans or in any other species. It's true that the phenomenon e...

As most of you know, I'm interested in the problem of alternative splicing. I believe that the number of splice variants that have been ...

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...