This past December, science writer David Dobbs published an essay (2013) in the online magazine Aeon (aeon.co/magazine/) that purports to explain why the ‘selfish gene’ concept is outmoded and should be retired. It elicited a good deal of commentary, and in...
Geneticists have recognized for some time that many genes exhibit pleiotropy, meaning that one mutation can manifest in two or more distinguishable phenotypic effects. In a fascinating study recently published in Science [2014 Jan 10;343(6167):152-7....
Last month, I completed teaching a graduate course for the tenth time. After several years (in the early 1990’s) of thinking about launching a new alternate-year seminar course and then planning it, I began teaching PATH 480 in the fall of 1994. The original name of...
Biomedical scientists and biologists routinely consider how selection shapes the structure and function of proteins of interest. Less commonly, I suspect, do we consider how selection for attributes other than protein structure and function can favor or disfavor...
Three new papers (Kilpinen et al., 2013; McVickers et al., 2013; Kasowski et al., 2013) published earlier this month in Science all address the effects on human patterns of gene expression and other phenotypes of 1) genetic variation in non-protein coding regions of...