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Category Archives: evolution
Recent reading: 4 March 2022
It’s now two weeks since I resumed in-person teaching, and so far, so good. It’s shockingly refreshing to actually interact with students directly, even with everyone masked, and to be able to just improvise with a specimen picked up on … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, ecology, evolution, journal club
Tagged milkweed, monarch butterflies, Muller's ratchet, mutualism, Red Queen, STRUCTURE
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Recent reading: 18 Feb 2022
Fieldwork in the spring is always a bit tricky, but I’ve fortunately been able to put my teaching commitment aside for a week to help plant Joshua tree seedlings in an ongoing experiment in climate adaptation. It was a scramble … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, climate change, Coevolution, ecology, evolution, journal club
Tagged adaptationism, Antonovics, host range
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Recent reading: 4 Feb 2022
It’s been an eventual two weeks in evolutionary biology. Meanwhile, I’ve somehow kept a lab-field course on track with minimal in person engagement, planned a bit for actual fieldwork in a couple weeks from now, and started wrangling a couple … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, ecology, evolution, journal club
Tagged convergence, drosophila, mutualism
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Recent reading: 21 Jan 2022
The period between semesters is supposed to be quiet. I’ve been mentally dumping things to do into this one — paper revisions, reviewing service, analysis of long-awaited new data, a first draft of a new grant, writing my (eek) application … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, ecology, evolution, genomics, howto, journal club
Tagged dispersal, mutualism
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Recent reading: 7 Jan 2022
It’s a new year, and while many of the challenges of 2020 and 2021 don’t show any sign of letting up, I’m trying to pick up some habits that fell by the wayside while I juggled fully online semesters and … Continue reading
Posted in adaptation, evolution, genomics, howto, journal club
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Fieldwork in the pandemic springtime
The first thing I did after getting my first dose of the Moderna vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 was to drive from the City of Los Angeles mass vaccination clinic at Pierce College to my home campus, California State University Northridge, to … Continue reading
How do you use genome-wide diversity in conservation?
Measuring how genome-wide diversity matters to threatened species has been a constant endeavor of conservation genetics, and still is in the era of genomics. But what should we do with the fact that it often do not correlate with IUCN Red List categories, a measure of species’ threat status? Continue reading
In the pipeline – Part 1: ‘Plan, plan, and plan some more’
So you’ve decided it’s time to finally get around to starting that sequencing project. But before you aimlessly leap into it and generate terabytes of sequencing data, just STOP. It’s far too tempting to rush into sequencing projects for a … Continue reading
Posted in bioinformatics, evolution, genomics, howto, methods, population genetics, Uncategorized
Tagged assembly, bioinformatics, genetics, genomics, In the pipeline, population genetics, Sequencing
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An enduring evolutionary mystery – the consequences of sex are shaped by more than sex itself
Rather shockingly, sexual reproduction remains an enigma – despite over a century of study. Theory has identified the costs and benefits of sex, illustrating why almost all* eukaryotes go to the trouble, at least occasionally. * Even supposedly obligate asexuals … Continue reading
Ask GEVEs
Yikes. This year has been a doozy, and while we all know that the hand on the wall (if you have one of those old fashioned things) that strikes midnight on December 31st will not put out the dumpster fires … Continue reading