Today marks a unique day for the LTEE and me. The LTEE started on February 17, 1988. That was 11,517 days ago. I was born on August 13, 1956. That was 23,034 days ago. That means that the LTEE is now half as old as I am. To put it another way, I’ve spent half …
Michael Behe has a new book coming out this month called Darwin Devolves. Nathan Lents, Joshua Swamidass, and I wrote a review of that book for the journal Science. (You can also find an open-access copy of our review here.) It provides an overview of the problems we see with his thesis and interpretations. As our …
I sometimes get email from people asking, in one way or another, whether our long-term evolution experiment (LTEE) with E. coli provides evidence of evolution writ large – new species, new information, or something of that sort. I try to answer these questions by providing some examples of what we’ve seen change, and by putting …
This new paper describes a technique for detecting recent (i.e., last 2k years) selection on both Mendelian and polygenic traits. The authors find evidence for selection on a number of phenotypes, ranging from hair and eye color, to height and head size (the data set they applied their method to was UK10K whole genomes, so …
The latest from the Reich lab at Harvard. The availability of ancient DNA allows for direct comparisons between ancestral and descendant populations. These methods will only become more powerful as technology and access to samples improve. Note the evidence for polygenic selection on height, over timescales of less than 10k years. (Fig. 3 from paper …
Homophily, our tendency to associate with people similar to ourselves, is one of the reasons why it is difficult for us to break out of our social echo-chambers to experience different perspectives. It is quite likely that homophily has a genetic basis. Evolutionary models predict its occurrence under a wide variety of circumstances, though no …
Freeman Dyson discusses Darwin’s failure to discover Mendelian inheritance. Had Darwin a stronger grasp of statistics (then under development by his cousin Francis Galton), he might have discovered the properties of the basic units of inheritance, so central to his theory of natural selection. See also Bounded cognition. NYBooks: … Seven years after Darwin published …