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 Atavisms and phylogeny 15 Sep 20094 Oct 2017 “Everybody knows” that species can lose features through evolution: snakes, whales and sea cows all lost hind limbs. But occasionally, they can “revert”, like the snake shown in the photo below, which has grown one limb. However, many people are confused as to why this happens. Read More
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 Are species theoretical objects? 27 Oct 201328 Oct 2013 [Note: this is a paper that has sat in my drawer for a while now. I am posting it to follow from my last post on the theological origins of species. If species are not ranks in biology, what are they?] It is often claimed that species are the units… 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.