There have been claims that variations in the composition of the intestinal flora influence individual health going back at least to the early years of the 1900s. Late in his career, Ilya Mechnikov, co-receipient of the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1908...
Both Nature and Science are currently celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of an icon of logic, computer science, and mathematical biology: Alan Turing. In reading Andrew Hodges’s spectacular biography of Turing (1983) many years ago I came to appreciate...
The new tools for determining nucleotide sequences for whole genomes can sometimes present a problem of data analysis: How can mutations that influence important phenotypes be distinguished from mutations that may be of minimal or no impact on fitness, so-called...
Natural selection depends on heritable phenotypic variation. The most obvious source of phenotypic variation is genotypic variation. A new study, by Casanueva et al. in Science (2012) suggests that in addition to genotypic variation, variation in life history and...
As noted in my last post, the selective advantage of heterozygosity for the sickle allele at the beta-globin locus has been known since Allison’s report in 1954 (Lancet). Nevertheless, a plausible and detailed mechanism to account for the protective effect of an...
