About the author: Frank Stearns is an Adjunct Professor teaching Genetics and a writing course on Science Communication. He is interested in adaptation and speciation genetics and in the history of biology. He recently finished a postdoc at Johns Hopkins University and he runs a Facebook page (Darwin’s Bulldog) that shares evolution news. […]
Tag: Science Communication
Gene-culture coevolution in humpback whales
Aisha O’ Connor wrote this post as part of Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield’s Principles of Scientific Investigation course at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Aisha is a non-thesis Masters student in the Krueger-Hadfield lab, and is interested in marine conservation and sustainable management of marine resources. Aisha tweets @Aisha_MOC. Imagine swimming 1000’s of […]
Nature versus nurture: estimating heritability of deer antlers and body size
Aaron Shafer is an Assistant Professor at Trent University, Canada. Their research uses genomic and bioinformatics tools to characterize adaptive and demographic processes in natural populations. Research organisms in the lab currently include shrews, deer, caribou and mountain goats. Lead-author Aidan Jamieson was an honours biology student who is now doing a MSc at York […]
What role do pedigrees play in the preservation of the Galapagos giant tortoise?
About the author: Angie Bradley wrote this post as part of Dr. Stacy Krueger-Hadfield‘s Principles of Scientific Investigation course. Angie is a student in the Accelerated Bachelor’s/Master’s of Biology Program at UAB. In her time at university, Angie has become passionate about genetics, aging, and molecular biology. She hopes to one day attend dental school and […]
Bridge over troubled water: getting across the conservation genetics gap
About the author: Dr Helen Taylor is a conservation geneticist who studied for her PhD in New Zealand, working on inbreeding in little spotted kiwi. She went on to undertake postdoctoral research on inbreeding and male fertility in passerines and, at that point, became interested in the integration of genetics into conservation management. After […]
Genetic and epigenetic relationships across evolutionary and ecological timescales in Icelandic stickleback
The ability of organisms to colonize or adapt to new and changing environments is of critical interest in biology, especially considering the threats and advances of human-induced environmental change. Certain traits may play a key role in determining population persistence or decline in the face of climate change, habitat fragmentation, and the like. In the […]
Swiss army knife genetics: Does pleiotropy do all the adaptation job in Mimulus guttatus?
It is not a simple task to adapt to a new environment. An organism needs to acclimate itself to multiple new conditions, from differences in climate to novel parasites and predators awaiting for a newcomer. Such adaptive multitasking might take a long time to form at the genetic level and as a consequence delay the […]
It’s all about scale – evolution’s predictability (or lack thereof) across different spatial scales
In the late 20thcentury, a popular science communicator named Stephen Jay Gould asked a deceptively simple question: If we turned back the tape of life to the very beginning and allowed it to repeat from the beginning, would we arrive at a similar endpoint? In other words, how predictable and repeatable is evolution, and to […]
What if by overestimating the complexity of the genomic basis of a trait, we’re underestimating the complexity of its evolutionary dynamics?
The genomic bases, or architectures, of complex traits are… complex. But what if by overestimating the complexity of some aspects of the genomic architecture of a trait, we’re actually underestimating the complexity of its evolutionary dynamics? This notion struck me when two things clicked while I was preparing a fellowship application back in 2017. First, […]