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Category Archives: evolution
Local boy makes op-ed
Here’s a new one for my publications list: the Op-Ed pages of my hometown newspaper. I’ve spent the last weeks calling my congressional reps, and hassling other people to do the same, over the Trump administration’s vandalism of research funding (alongside its … Continue reading
Posted in Action Item, community, ecology, evolution, funding, NIH, NSF, politics, Science Communication, United States
Tagged Science Homecoming
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The creationists are winning. Here’s what we scientists can do about it
In my first year of graduate school at the University of Idaho, I joined a bunch of my colleagues in the audience of a debate staged between an evolutionary biologist and a creationist. I remember almost nothing of the debate’s … Continue reading
Posted in climate change, community, evolution, modest proposals, politics, Science Communication, United States
Tagged denialism, scicomm, social media
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What do we know about the genetics of “born this way?” — and how does it help us to know it?
Not quite five years ago, a collaboration led by researchers at the Broad Institute published what seemed like the last word in “born this way”: a genomic study of same-sex sexual behavior in a cohort of almost half a million … Continue reading
Don’t ask “When is it coevolution?” — ask “How is it coevolution?”
Ask me to pick a single word that describes what I study, and I’ll typically say “coevolution.” This is probably true of most evolutionary biologists who study interactions between species — plants and pollinators, hosts and symbionts, predators and prey, et … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, Coevolution, ecology, evolution, mini-review
Tagged disease ecology, herbivory, mutualism, natural selection, parasitism, symbiosis
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The glaciers of the last ice age left their mark on the genetic diversity of species across the globe
For the last two and a half million years or so — up until a certain species of upright-walking ape descendants really started making their presence known — the greatest force shaping Earth’s biological diversity may well have been ice. … Continue reading
Posted in evolution, insects, mammals, mutation, phylogeography, plants, population genetics
Tagged glacier, Quaternary
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Evolution 2023: Highlights of evolution and ecological genetics at Albuquerque
Evolution is back, folks. That is, the 2023 joint annual meeting of the American Society of Naturalists, Society of Systematic Biologists, and Society for the Study of Evolution, held last week in Albuquerque, New Mexico, felt just about like its pre-pandemic self. The … Continue reading
Four science books for 2022
The Molecular Ecologist receives a small commission for purchases made on Bookshop.org via links from this post. Books occupy a curious place in my reading life. I read a lot as an academic biologist, from research papers to grant proposals … Continue reading
Posted in book review, ecology, evolution, natural history, politics
Tagged forest conservation, J.B.S. Haldane, paleontology, sensory biology
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Recent reading: 18 Sept 2022
Los Angeles doesn’t really get full-on summer heat until September, after months of building warmth and time elapsed since that last gasp of winter rains and spring fog. This year we (and most of the rest of the western U.S.) … Continue reading
Posted in ecology, evolution, journal club
Tagged adaptive walk, geometric theory of adaptation, GWAS, Linanthus parryae
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Recent reading: 2 Sept 2022
It’s the end of the first week of classes on my campus, after a spring and summer of more or less successful, mostly in-person conferences (more on that later, I think). I’ve got two big lecture sections of Evolutionary Biology … Continue reading
Revealing the natural history of yeast
The following is a guest post by Matthew Vandermeulen, PhD, at the University at Buffalo. Matthew studies the regulation of responses to environmental variation; he is on Twitter as @mvandermeulen. Saccharomyces cerevisiae, baker’s and brewer’s yeast, may be one organism that could contend with dogs … Continue reading
Posted in domestication, ecology, evolution, genomics, microbiology, mini-review, yeast
Tagged Saccharomyces cerevisiae, yeast
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