Take it easy on Christina Aguilera, everybody. She only got asked to sing the national anthem at the Superbowl because, sadly, Enrico Pallazzo was not available.
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Bill O’Reilly is curious about how tides work, why we have a moon, and where the sun came from. All of which are deep mysteries for which no answers can be found. Unless you look them up, of course. (When I was an undergraduate, Wikipedia didn’t exist yet, so I had to learn this stuff the old fashioned way — by taking a course in stellar astronomy and one in planetary astronomy). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tides Example headline: Massive Daphnia genome leads to understanding gene-environment interactions  Photo by Paul Hebert It’s a cool species, an important addition to the cadre of species whose genomes have been sequenced, it has a notably large number of genes (>30,000, according to the current annotation — rice has >40,000, by the way), and the lead author of the study was a grad student with me in the same lab. But Daphnia pulex does NOT have a big genome. It’s about 200Mb, slightly larger than Drosophila melanogaster, and about 1/15 the size of the human genome. This is about a previous storm, but it seems apt in light of the much-hyped “Snowmageddon” we were expecting yesterday (which actually didn’t happen). Thanks to Larry at Sandwalk, I caught this clip from the Bill Maher show in which panelists were discussing climate change and evolution. The woman in the discussion is Kim Campbell, former Prime Minister of Canada. Some caveats, though: she wasn’t elected Prime Minister but assumed the role when she took over as leader of the Progressive Conservative Party following the departure of Brian Mulroney. Not long afterward, the PC party was decimated in a federal election and was left with only two seats in parliament. In part, this precipitated the rise of the current Conservative Party of Canada which currently has a minority government under Prime Minister Stephen Harper. I *should* be proud of Ms. Campbell and of Canadian politics in general that a former *conservative* Prime Minister is so articulate and informed on the issues of climate change and evolution. But mostly it makes me sad that the current conservative side of Canadian political discourse seems closer to Republicans in the USA than to the previous Progressive Conservatives in Canada. I love Dropbox. If you haven’t started using it, you should. (If you use this referral link it will give both of us some bonus storage space free). Anyway, the program is now available in full final release 1.0 (it was beta previously). Apparently there are various improvements, but it was excellent to begin with. It’s late in the season, but you might still be able to get Evolver Zone gear in time for the holidays.
I enjoyed Jerry Coyne’s book Why Evolution is True (though I don’t care for the title — Why Evolution is a Scientific Fact would have been much more accurate). The one complaint I had was that Coyne is a serious Darwinian (up to an including calling evolution “Darwinism”). That is, he interprets pretty much everything he discusses in the book in terms of natural selection and adaptation. Many evolutionary biologists, myself included, take a much more pluralistic view in which selection is one factor but not necessarily the dominant one in shaping any particular characteristic. Anyway, it seems Coyne may have taken one small step away from absolute adaptationism in his post “Redundant parts“. (I have to admit, the question he posed about “superfluous” veins, “Maybe we can live without them, but couldn’t they have evolved as ‘backups’—in case something went wrong with a partner vessel?” is the kind of thing I would expect one of my introductory evolution students to ask at the beginning of the course). Baba Brinkman, evo-rapper extraordinaire, is looking for support to finish an exciting project to create videos for his Rap Guide to Evolution. Most of the funding has come from the Wellcome Trust, but the last of the production costs are being assembled through Crowdfunder. Help if you can! Here’s the pitch: And an example of a very well done video for another of Baba’s tunes: Evolution: Education and OutreachVolume 3, Number 4 / December 2010
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T. Ryan Gregory 
I am an evolutionary biologist specializing in genome size evolution at the University of Guelph in Canada.
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