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The complete series of talks is now posted from the conference on Stephen J. Gould’s Legacy: Nature, History, Society, May 10-12, 2012 at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Venice, Italy. Telmo Pievani – Ten years without Stephen J. Gould: the scientific heritage Niles Eldredge – Stephen Jay Gould in the [...] Here is the video of my talk at the Stephen J. Gould’s Legacy: Nature, History, Society meeting held at the Istituto Veneto di Scienze, Lettere ed Arti in Venice, Italy. A short time ago, my colleague Derek Taylor of SUNY Buffalo published a paper reporting the presence of ebola virus remnants in mammalian genomes. Now another paper with a similar message has been published. Both papers are open access. Belyi et al. Unexpected Inheritance: Multiple Integrations of Ancient Bornavirus and Ebolavirus/Marburgvirus Sequences in Vertebrate [...] My colleague (and former PhD student in the same lab where I did my PhD, though not overlapping) Derek Taylor of SUNY Buffalo has published a very interesting paper indicating that relatives of the deadly Ebola and Marburg viruses can be found in the genomes of other mammals, including bats and wallabies. http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/07/100702152411.htm [...] Trichoplax adhaerens is a bizarre little animal with a decidedly simple morphology. (You can see some here). There has been some question as to the relationship between this critter and other animal groups, but mitochondrial sequences (Dellaporta et al. 2006) and, as of this week, a complete nuclear genome sequence (Srivastava et al. 2008), [...] Each copy of the human genome consists of about 3,200,000,000 base pairs, and includes about 500,000 repeats of the LINE-1 transposable element (a LINE) and twice as many copies of Alu (a SINE), as compared to around 20,000 protein-coding genes. Whereas protein-coding regions represent about 1.5% of the genome, about half is made up [...] In my previous post, I noted that because of what we understand about the nature, origins, and cross-taxon quantitative diversity of the various sorts of non-genic DNA in large eukaryote genomes, the default assumption is that much or even most of it is not functional at the cell and organism levels. Thus, the burden [...] Matt Ridley, author of such books as The Red Queen, Genome, and The Origins of Virtue (and not to be confused with biologist Mark Ridley), asks the question “Will we clone a dinosaur?” in Time Magazine. His answer, at least in terms of the Jurassic Park sense of cloning a dinosaur from ancient DNA, [...] Some of you may remember the post from Dec. 1, 2007, on Genome size, code bloat, and proof-by-analogy (which was posted on DNA and Diversity also). This post referred to a computer study published in the online, non-peer-reviewed arXiv database by Feverati and Musso (2007). Recently, Dr. Musso has been kind enough to provide [...] Just a reminder, these are the important points under discussion: * Proponents of ID themselves clearly suggest that “junk DNA” will mostly or all be functional. * No unambiguous explanation has been given for why ID must assume that non-coding DNA is functional, especially since they say nothing can be known about the designer [...] |
T. Ryan Gregory 
I am an evolutionary biologist specializing in genome size evolution at the University of Guelph in Canada.
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