Author Archives: gcochran9

MBE has a couple of new articles on altitude adaptation in Tibetans. One talks about a particular mutation in EGLN1, a key gene in the response to hypoxia. The mutation, around 0.5% in most other populations, has soared to 70% … Continue reading →

There is a fungus, Massospora cicadina, that attacks periodical cicadas[often called 17-year or 13-year locusts]. First, diploid resting spores infect cicadas just before they emerge, turning most of the abdomen into haploid spores while leaving the head and thorax intact. … Continue reading →

Running this blog takes time. If you like it, you can help it continue by contributing. Paypal is already set up. If people want to use a credit card, I can check out other methods. This might require a transition … Continue reading →

There have been societies that functioned for a long time, thousands of years. They had sustainable demographic patterns. That means that they had enough children to replace themselves – not necessarily in every generation, but over the long haul. But … Continue reading →

Transsexuals, people that believe their psychological gender conflicts with their physical gender, are not a particular evolutionary paradox, because they’re far rarer than homosexual men. One in tens of thousands of men seek sex reassignment surgery – that is, pay … Continue reading →

Recently, Y.-H. Percival Zhang and colleagues demonstrated a method of converting cellulose into starch and glucose. Zhang thinks that it can be scaled up into an effective industrial process, one that could produce a thousand calories of starch for less … Continue reading →

Apis mellifera, the common honeybee, seems to have originated in Africa and spread from there to Europe and Asia. Moving into temperate climates required major behavioral change that led to honey hoarding and ability to form a winter cluster. European … Continue reading →

Stalin died 60 years ago, and he’s still dead. That’s something to celebrate.

In yet another example of long-delayed discovery, it turns out that you can treat a number of filarial diseases, such as elephantiasis or onchocerciasis (river blindness) with tetracycline or doxycycline. Heedless of the evolutionary imperative to do no unnecessary harm, … Continue reading →

  I was thinking again about the consequences of having more small-effect deleterious mutations than average.  I don’t think that they would push hard in a  particular direction in phenotype space – I don’t believe they would make you look … Continue reading →