Subscribe by email
Join 919 other subscribersMeta
Author Archives: Jeremy Yoder
Star Trek Discovery made a debunked genome sequence into a plot point — but that’s not nearly the worst biology goof in the franchise
Anyone who’s been anywhere near my Twitter feed in the last month knows I’m pretty darned happy with Star Trek: Discovery, the latest iteration of the five-decade-old science fiction franchise. Discovery manages to build something new with the key elements … Continue reading
Posted in bioinformatics, genomics, horizontal gene transfer
Tagged Star Trek, tardigrade
3 Comments
Population genomics finds veritas in the demographic history of vino
One of the more, hah, fruitful applications of genomic data has been in crop and livestock improvement. Biologists know that domesticating plants and animals for human use has involved powerful artificial selection — usually inadvertent at first, then intensive and … Continue reading
Friday Action Item: Help Puerto Rico, and Puerto Rican science
On Fridays while the current administration is in office we’re posting small, concrete things you can do to help make things better. Got a suggestion for an Action Item? E-mail us! If you’ve so much at glanced at the news … Continue reading
DNA sequence data shows that this "living fossil" isn't so fossilized after all
Living fossils are a tricky concept for evolutionary biology. In principle it seems simple: living organisms that closely resemble creatures seen in the fossil record going back millions of years. Usually they’re a single representative of a fossil record containing … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, species delimitation
Tagged Allonautilus, cryptic species, ddRADseq, Nautilus
Leave a comment
Of Of Mice and Men: High school English class lives on in scientific paper titles
Writing titles for scientific papers is hard. The title is the one element of the paper everyone reads if they so much as skim a journal’s table of contents e-mail. These days, you also want something that’ll fit in a … Continue reading
Posted in just for fun, methods, science publishing
Tagged Charles Dickens, George Orwell, Jane Austen, John Steinbeck, Jules Verne, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, Rudyard Kipling
3 Comments
Friday action item: Figure out how to support a grad student without DACA
On Fridays while the current administration is in office we’re posting small, concrete things you can do to help make things better. Got a suggestion for an Action Item? E-mail us! We haven’t done an Action Item in a while, … Continue reading
In the aftermath of fire, bluebird species boundaries may blur
One of the most clear-cut reasons that species evolve to fill different ecological niches is competition. Two otherwise similar species that use the same resources experience strong selection favoring the use of less-similar resources, if they have the option. The … Continue reading
Posted in birds, evolution, hybridization, natural history, population genetics
Tagged mountain bluebird, western bluebird
Leave a comment
The genomic architecture of ecological speciation
Speciation reshapes the ways genetic diversity is distributed in the genome — it’s been said that the establishment of reproductive isolation is essentially the evolution of genome-wide linkage disequilibrium. The “genomic islands of speciation” model of ecological isolation imagines genome-wide … Continue reading
Posted in association genetics, linkage mapping, selection, speciation
Tagged Rhagoletis pomonella
Leave a comment
TME Chat: That #NewPI life
This post is a new format for *The Molecular Ecologist: a group chat. Sometimes there are multiple TME contributors who have interesting takes on the same topic, and it’d be nice to hear from them all, and sometimes a conversation … Continue reading