Is it possible for advertising to evolve without human intervention? Today I was having a great coffee break discussion with Domino Joyce and James Gilbert about student classes and evolution experiments. We moved on to whether it is possible to evolve Twitter clickbait[1]? Why would you...
We have two jobs open at the moment in the Hull Evolutionary Genetics group @EvoHull. Both are, I think, quite exciting; not your standard postdoc positions and the group is looking forward to getting two new colleagues. 1-Year Lectureship in Evolutionary Biology This is maternity cover for Dr...
[caption id="attachment_165" align="alignright" width="230"] Godfrey Hewitt in 2001 after examining my first ever PhD student[/caption] 10 JANUARY 1940 - 18 FEBRUARY 2013 I was asked to write a piece about my PhD supervisor Godfrey Hewitt for the UK Genetics Society magazine, and have reproduced a version here....
In today's Guardian newspaper geneticist Steve Jones has a short column replying to a 7 year old child who had asked "Will humans evolve into a new species?". Jones is known in the UK as the media's favourite geneticist and evolutionary biologist; he is a...
I've been thinking about sustainable and accessible archiving of bioinformatics software, I'm pretty scandalized at the current state of affairs, and had a bit of a complain about it before. I thought I'd post some links to other people's ideas and talk a bit about the...
Today I got an email from David E. Schindel, who is the Executive Secretary of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life, announcing Google funding for DNA barcoding. The project aims to create a reference library of endangered species COI sequences so that DNA barcoding can...
 I have in front of me a copy of the book "Nucleotide sequences 1984 Part 1 A compilation from the GenBankTM and EMBL data libraries" published by IRL Press. Wow, what a surreal book for anyone used to dealing with sequence databases today. The idea that...
[caption id="attachment_106" align="alignleft" width="281" caption="Cryptic Species: Illustration of genetically, geographically, ecologically and reproductively isolated 'groups' currently classified as the single bryozoan species Celleporella hyalina. From Gomez et al 2007"][/caption] Rod Page at iPhylo draws attention to a new paper in Systematic Biology (Costello et al 2011)...
There is a really interesting take on the ethics of human genomics from Dienekes' Anthropology Blog prompted by the aboriginal genome recently released. I can't say I disagree with anything. Potential bad ethical outcomes of genetic sampling are very rarely clearly explained and just left...
For those of you who haven't come across it before Bio-Linux is an operating system set up for bioinformatics with a huge number of programs pre-installed. It can be obtained (for free) from the NERC Environmental Bioinformatics Centre. I've spent quite a while recently messing...
