Pfffffffffft!

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 to successfully cope [...]


Phylogenetic fallacies: "early branching equals primitive".

Evolutionary trees, or “phylogenies”, are a major part of modern evolutionary science. They depict hypotheses regarding the relationships among taxa, and are therefore important in reconstructions of the historical path of evolution (Gregory 2008a,b). Various approaches can be taken to formulating phylogenetic hypotheses, including analyses based on morphological, fossil, and/or molecular data. [...]


What’s wrong with this figure? (Round three).

In the process of finishing up a paper, I came across this figure (Gilbert 2007).

Figure 1. Drosophila species assemblies, showing assembly sizes and coverage of these by D. melanogaster genome DNA (top and middle lines, in megabases, left ordinate), and counts of chromosome segments inverted relative to Dmel (bottom line, right ordinate). Species on abscissa [...]


What’s wrong with this figure? (Round two)

Once again, it’s time to play What’s wrong with this figure?

__________

Reference

Stebbing, A.R.D. 2006. Genetic parsimony: a factor in the evolution of complexity, order and emergence. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 88: 295-308.