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From the Max Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology comes a press release describing a paper in Nature about bacterial evolution… Bacteria Expect the Unexpected Organisms ensure the survival of their species by genetically adapting to the environment. If environmental conditions change too rapidly, the extinction of a species may be the consequence. A strategy [...] From today’s Nature, an editorial entitled Mind the spin: Scientists — and their institutions — should resist the ever-present temptation to hype their results. [skipping to the money quote...] …the temptation for scientists and their institutions to spin their research to the media, or to go publicity-mongering, is always there. And — as illustrated [...] I liked it. Overall, I think the Discovery Channel did a good job of capturing the painstaking work that goes into scientific research, in this case spanning more than 15 years from discovery to publication. Some other quick thoughts: This was not hype. If anything, it was pretty modest, given the amount and [...] Tomorrow’s Science will be a special issue reporting tons of new information on the fossil hominid Ardipithecus ramidus (“Ardi”), which is really exciting (though not as much as Darwinius, which was “like a meteor hitting the Earth” or whatever). There are news reports of course, including one at USA Today that I want to [...] I don’t watch CSI. Ok, that’s not totally true or this post wouldn’t exist. I almost never watch it. I did catch a re-run while I was eating lunch on the weekend, an episode called “Overload” (some guy was electrocuted and fell off a building — I can’t exactly remember why). In one scene, [...] This is too funny. A website called Kill or Cure? has been compiling links to science stories in The Daily Mail (UK) and their apparent “ongoing effort to classify every inanimate object into those that cause cancer and those that prevent it”. A snippet of the entries under [...] Here’s the abstract of a paper set to be published in Molecular Biology and Evolution. Now, I think this kind of study is interesting and important. But it’s predictable that they start out with the standard (and historically false) claim that “non-coding DNA was long dismissed as junk” (seriously, do reviewers require authors to [...] Dr. Mark Siddall is a friend of mine who is a curator at the American Museum of Natural History and a world expert on leech evolution. He also likes to cook. Leeches, not so tasty it turns out. He is the first researcher to be featured on PBS’s new web series, The Secret Life [...] One of Doug Futuyma’s great quotes is this one: “…no biologist today would think of publishing a paper on ‘new evidence for evolution’… it simply hasn’t been an issue in scientific circles for more than a century.” – Futuyma, 1998 Evolution Biology, 3rd edition Press officers are a different story. Here’s one from the [...] I believe that it is important to give both credit and criticism where they are due. Unfortunately, I don’t seem to do these in equal measure when it comes to science reporting. So, as a small corrective, here is a list of science writers whose work I have praised in the past: Heather Kowalski [...] |
T. Ryan Gregory 
I am an evolutionary biologist specializing in genome size evolution at the University of Guelph in Canada.
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