Whales and complex speciation
“Reader request”, what’s going on with this new crazy baleen whale paper, Whole-genome sequencing of the blue whale and other rorquals finds signatures for introgressive gene flow. First, putting “blue whale” in the title is genius, since blue whales are awesome and people will read the paper with that in the title (most people don’t […]
The tall and long tales that elephants tell (also, ancient DNA never forgets)
The new paper on ancient DNA from elephants, mammoths and mastodons, A comprehensive genomic history of extinct and living elephants, is pretty cool. It leverages next-generation sequencing and ancient DNA, to reconstruct the demographic history of several species of elephants, extant and extinct. The major core finding is that ancient DNA along with better data […]
Species are what you want them to be
What is a species? I don’t know. And honestly, I don’t really care too much. Species is just a semantic label I place on a set of individuals related to a phylogeny. There tends to be a correlation in genetic variants between these creatures. For sexual organisms, which does not include all organisms, it generally […]
Why the Amazon Rainforest is species rich
A monkey frog
The Pith: The Amazon Rainforest has a lot of species because it’s been around for a very long time.
I really don’t know much about ecology, alas. So my understanding of evolution framed in its proper ecological context is a t…
Evolutionary pressures, within and without
Foraminifera, Wikimedia Commons
The Pith: The tree if life is nourished by agon, but pruned by the gods. More literally, both interactions between living organisms and the changes in the environment impact the pulsing of speciation and extinction.
No…