What with the interdisciplinary thing, I know some delightful and interesting people in quite disparate fields. Starter for 10 is a semi-regular (monthly) series of peer interviews, with questions both serious and trivial for your edification. This month’s interview is with Dr Mike Dickison, who wears many awesome hats: comparative fossil biologist, teacher of and … Read more
What with the interdisciplinary thing, I know some delightful and interesting people in quite disparate fields. Starter for 10 is a semi-regular (fortnightly) series of peer interviews, with questions both serious and trivial for your edification. I’m very excited that this week’s interview is with Professor Rod Page, an evolutionary biologist at the University of … Read more
There are any number of articles available on the internerd about How To Give A Good Academic Talk, or Ten Tips To Get Your Paper Published. Etcetera. Current Biology has a piece by Mark Ptashne: On speaking, writing and inspiration. It’s not a how-to guide, but a really nice exposition about the elusiveness (both as … Read more
Wired has a nice little article on the molecular clock model being used by antiquarians to date prints/books etc. The original paper is here, describing how the properties of copperplate and woodblock degeneration (and the corresponding print quality features) can be used in a clock model to help date manuscrips. Nifty. Also, via Afarensis (who … Read more
Doolittle, W.F. (1999) Phylogenetic classification and the universal tree. Science, 284, 2124-2128. [link] Interesting review discussing recent findings which question a strict tree model for the universal tree of life. Lateral gene transfer is non-trivial, especial in archaeal and bacterial genomes. Doesn't dismiss the usefulness of molecular phylogenetics as a tool, but questions it as … Read more
Once upon a time I considered becoming an evolutionary bat biologist1. Bats are cool. They’re close to primates on the mammal phylogeny, they have interesting social systems, and some of them have astoundingly sophisticated echolocation systems. Gareth Jones and Emma Teeling have a paper in TREE: The evolution of echolocation in bats, discussing the phylogenetic … Read more