Thursday, May 24, 2007

Welcome

There's a new Evilutionary Biologist in the blogosphere. We cordially welcome Jonathan Marshall and look forward to his posts at Science, Politics, Religion et al. Dr. Marshall is a faculty member at Southern Utah University and specializes in phylogenetics.

Interestingly, Jon began his blog soon after meeting Carl Zimmer of the Loom (Zimmer gave a couple of invited lectures at SUU this past March). Carl apparently has this effect on evolutionary biologists; after coming into contact with him, they begin blogging. Zimmer posted about this trend earlier this year.

4 comments:

  1. You might suggest that he add some feeds. I tried, but apparently my old eyes couldn't handle his anti-spam characters.

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  2. I second that motion. I would also like to say that it would be nice if you allowed comments on the next post (about fish eyes). I was going to nitpick and say that it's not a Hedgehog protein that is overproduced, but two (Sonic Hedgehog and Tiggy Winkle Hedgehog). This was something I found out after looking through that one article trying to figure out just which Hedgehog protein you were talking about.

    I noticed both Zimmer and Myers talked about it as if there was only one too. Did they (and you) do that in order to simplify matters for the masses, or?

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  3. Huh that's weird. I never mess with the comments settings; I don't know why comments were disallowed, but I changed it. Anyway, you can now comment on the Cave Fish post.

    It's difficult to strike a perfect balance of information to present in a blog. I try to keep my posts short (<500 words) so that people can get the main point quickly and then move on. The eyeless/Hedgehog expression situation naturally is more complex than I was able to capture in my post, however, I try to leave links for further information if one desires. In this case, the further info link was Jeffery's paper in J. Hered.

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  4. Yeah, I see your point. And I guess there aren't that many who would both know that there are several hedgehog genes and also not know, but be curious about, which one(s) are involved in eye formation.

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