In the mind of a microbial paper 25 Aug 2009 Over at Small Things Considered is a point by point explanation and explication of a recent paper. For us nonscientists it’s a useful guide to how papers come to be written, how techniques and subjects are chosen, and so forth. Peer into the heads of some scientists and read it. Biology
Biology Repost: The Song of the Scientist 30 Oct 200918 Sep 2017 I found this on my old blog and liked it so much, I thought I’d replay it: A recent report on the songs of the eponymous “great tit”, a common forest bird famous for learning to peck the foil tops of milk bottles in the 1950s, shows that they independently… Read More
Biology A current list of species concepts 18 Nov 201718 Nov 2017 As part of my book, I have updated the list of species concepts. Thought you lot might like this: Species conceptions Basic Convention Taxonomic species [TSC] Diagnostic Morphospecies [MSC] Genealogy Evolutionary species [ESC] [Monophyly] Phylospecies [PSC] Gene-based Genetic species [GSC] Reproductive reach Biospecies [BSC] Ecological niche Ecospecies [EcSC] Replacement concepts… Read More
Administrative Update on a pilgrim’s progress 21 Jan 201122 Jun 2018 Okay, well it’s more like the John Wayne sense of “pilgrim” than John Bunyan, but here I am, having gotten out of Dodge Brisbane just as the latest natural disaster hit. “Here” being the Blue Mountains outside of Sydney. Once my goods and chattels were “uplifted”, to use the quaint… Read More
And once you’ve figured out where the proteins are, you’ll have to figure out when they are. The standard of what counts as an explanation keeps getting raised. I recall when a eukaryotic cell (though nobody called ’em that at the time) was just a an irregular circular shape with a smaller circle inside that represented the nucleus. As somebody once remarked to me, Watson and Crick discovered the meaning of life back in ’53 but it was only the meaning of life until the advance of biology upped the ante.