Sandwalk

In September 2012, the ENCODE researchers published a bunch of papers claiming to show that 80% of the human genome was functional. They hel...

I think there are no more than 5,000 noncoding genes but many scientists claim that there are tens of thousands of newly discovered noncodin...

This chapter describes gene families in the human genome. I explain how new genes are born by gene duplication and how they die by deletion ...

Here's a link to the summary of what's in Chapter 6. The important topics are the correct definition of "gene" and the num...

Here's a link to a summary of what's in Chapter 5. It lists the main components of the human genome and concludes that less than 10%...

Chapter 4: Why Don't Mutations Kill Us?

See Chapter 3: Repetitive DNA and Mobile Genetic Elements

If you are interested in learning more about junk DNA here's some links to relevant information. Prologue Chapter 1: Introducin...

It was 70 years ago today that the famous Watson and Crick paper was published in Nature along with papers by Franklin & Gosling and Wi...

I asked ChatGPT some questions about junk DNA and it made up a Francis Crick quotation and misrepresented the view of Susumu Ohno. We h...

The antarctic krill genome is the largest animal genome sequenced to date. Antarctic krill ( Euphausia superba ) is a species of smal...

I'm finding it increasingly difficult to understand the scientific literature even in subjects that I've been following for decades....

The endorsements for my book are in. One of the last steps in publishing a book is to collect endorsements—favorable statements from f...

The correct definition of a molecular gene isn't difficult but getting it recognized and accepted is a different story. When writi...

The initial measurement of the difference between the human and chimp genomes was based on aligning 2.4 billion base pairs in the two ...