Sandwalk

I'm sad because we now have almost a whole generation of young people who know very little about Stephen Jay Gould . (He died of cancer ...

A recent letter in Nature draws attention to a serious (?) problem in modern society; namely, the persecution of junior scientists by older...

This is a post about alternative splicing. I've avoided using that term in the title because it's very misleading. Alternative splic...

Sixty evolutionary biologists are going to meet next July in Salzburg (Austria)to discuss "a new paradigmatic understanding of genetic ...

There's solid evidence that 90% of your genome is junk. Most of it is transcribed at some time but the transcripts are transient and usu...

Some beating of dead horses may be ethical, where here and there they display unexpected twitches that look like life. Zuckerkandl and Pau...

I'm working (slowly) on a book called What's in Your Genome?: 90% of your genome is junk! The first chapter is an introduction to g...

One of the most interesting topics in my molecular evolution class was the discussion over the importance of sex. Most students seem to thin...

Kevin Laland has just published another critique of modern evolutionary theory. This one appears in Aeon [ Evolution unleashed ]. His criti...

Kat Arney has written a very good book on genes and gene expression. She covers all the important controversies in a thorough and thoughtful...

There are several ways to report a mutation rate. You can state it as the number of mutations per base pair per year in which case a typical...

Most mitochondrial genes have been transferred from the ancestral mitochondrial genome to the nuclear genome over the course of 1-2 billion ...

Lateral gene transfer (LGT), or horizontal gene transfer (HGT), is widespread in bacteria. It leads to the creation of pangenomes for many b...

The authors of the original draft of the human genome sequence claimed that hundreds of genes had been acquired from bacteria by lateral gen...

Theme Mutation -definition -mutation types -mutation rates -phylogeny -controversies Mutations are mostly due to errors in DNA repl...