Sandwalk

Charles Darwin , the greatest scientist who ever lived, was born on this day in 1809 [ Darwin still spurs tributes, debates ] [ Happy Darwin...

The term "Function Wars" refers to the debate over the meaning of 'function,' especially in the context of junk DNA. 1 Th...

A group of scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (Los Alamos, NM, USA) and their collaborators in Vienna (Austria) and Lethbridge...

The Three Domain Hypothesis died about twenty years ago but most people didn't notice. The original idea was promoted by Carl Woese an...

There are many junk DNA skeptics who claim that most of our genome is functional. Some of them have even questioned whether pseudogenes are ...

We learned back in 2012 that Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were going to transform higher education. People all over the world, especi...

There are many reasons for thinking that introns are mostly junk DNA. The size and sequence of introns in related species are not conserved...

Citrate synthase [ EC 2.3.3.1 ] is one of the key enzymes of the citric acid cycle. It catalyzes the joining of acetyl-CoA and oxaloacetate ...

I was browsing the table of contents of the latest issue of Cell and I came across this .... For decades, the miniscule protein-coding por...

De novo genes are new genes that arise spontaneously from junk DNA [ De novo gene birth ]. The frequency of de novo gene creation is impo...

It's difficult to know how many protein-coding genes there are in the human genome because there are several different ways of counting ...

This is the 2019 Killian lecture at MIT, delivered in April 2019 by Gerald Fink . Fink is an eminent scientist who has done excellent work o...

I'm a big fan of Richard Lenski's long-term evolution experiment (LTEE) and of Zachary Blount's work in particular. [ Strolling ...

Evolution by Accident v1.43 ©2006 Laurence A. Moran This essay has been transferred here from an old server that has been decommissioned. ...

A paper announcing the first complete sequence of a human chromosome has recently been posted on the bioRxiv server. Miga, K. H., Koren, S....