Leaving aside the difficulty in defining terms such as “complexity” and “gene“, there has been for many decades an underlying assumption that there ought to be some relationship between morphological complexity and the number of protein-coding genes within a genome. This is a holdover from the pre-molecular era of genetics, when it was at [...]
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I imagine that every practicing scientist has experienced, in one form or another, the tendency of many non-scientists to expect all research to be directly beneficial to human health and well-being. I used to respond facetiously to these kinds of expectations when expressed by friends or family members, with something along the lines of [...] An article by Steven Sternberg and colleagues is set to appear in the May issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases. In it, the authors describe the results of complete genome sequence comparisons for 36 recent isolates of the avian flu virus (influenza H5N1). Their results “clearly depict the lineages now infecting wild and [...] I am not interested in engaging in debates with anti-evolutionists, though I am well aware of their key arguments. The big one, of course, is “irreducible complexity” — traits or features that supposedly could not have evolved because there is no conceivable function for their parts individually nor for a subset of their parts [...] The term “genome” is oft-heard but seldom defined, and indeed has more than one meaning. Little wonder, then, that discussions about genome sequences and comparisons thereof can leave otherwise interested audiences more frustrated than enlightened. “What is a genome?” and “whose genome was sequenced?” are legitimate questions, and what follows is an attempt at [...] The April 13 issue of Science includes a collection of papers reporting and analyzing the sequence of the macaque (Macaca mulatta) genome. This marks the third primate genome to be sequenced (after human in 2001 and chimpanzee in 2005). Needless to say, comparisons of three genomes are far more informative than analyses involving only [...] |
T. Ryan Gregory 
I am an evolutionary biologist specializing in genome size evolution at the University of Guelph in Canada.
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