This one is for my dad, who loves chickens. In the December 2012 edition of Heredity (Miao et al., 2012), there was an article published about the evolutionary history of chickens. It’s a good article and a good topic to learn about phylogenetic trees, too. Humans have been raising chickens for a long time–in fact,…
Category: Article Review
Cancer, Oxygen, and p53: coevolution?
One of the topics that most people find interesting is cancer. This is also true from an evolutionary perspective: what possible purpose could cancer serve? Is it just our bodies wearing out? Why haven’t we been able to evolve into a cancer-free species by now? Those are great questions, and they’re ones that don’t…
Irreducible Complexity
One of the primary arguments against evolution is that many things about life are too complicated to have evolved by chance. The argument is that these tiny molecular machines are so complex, and so exquisitely intricate and precise, that they could not function if any of the components were missing, damaged, or less complex. This…
Epigenetics of Lifespan
For years, I’ve been telling my students that epigenetics may represent a “Lamarckian” inheritance mechanism. Small chemical modifications to DNA that do not affect the actual sequence (of A, T, G, C) can control gene expression. These markers are acquired during our lifetimes as we experience and interact with the world. Some evidence has suggested…