Discuss evolution reading group

Feedback - Week 7B (Midsem break) - JOURNAL CLUB - CANCELLED

We had intended to look at Pigluicci's paper, but postponed it to the Journal Club in week 9.

posted by Chris Glen @ 10:35 PM 0 comments

Feedback - Week 7 - BOOK CLUB - CANCELLED

We had intended to look at Gavrilet's paper, but postponed it to the Book Club in week 8.

posted by Chris Glen @ 10:29 PM 0 comments

Gavrilets again in two weeks

We'll address Sergey in two weeks. Nobody showed up today (fair enough too).

So In a little while I'll do a short summary of my understanding of Gavrilets' views, and then we can discuss them in a fortnight.

posted by John S. Wilkins @ 4:34 PM 1 comments

Repost Gavrilets 1-2

Sorry for the error in the previous version - only every second page got inserted. Here is a (12Mb) version with all the pages.

posted by John S. Wilkins @ 5:26 PM 0 comments

Gavrilets chapters 1 and 2 online

You can download the 8.4Mb PDF of Gavrilets' book here. You may need to click the Annoying Lawyer's Button disclaiming any responsibility for life, earthquakes, fraud or inadvertent education first.

posted by John S. Wilkins @ 3:52 PM 0 comments

More on Gavrilets

Due to technical problems with computers (are there any other kind) I haven't been able to post the scanned first two chapters of G's book yet. With luck, I'll have them up soon, but perhaps we can discuss them after we do the paper for Thursday.

If anyone is coming along, let me know - we have two pikers so far (Chris and Duncan) due to some religious holiday or other. If nobody's coming, then I'll drink beer at home instead.

posted by John S. Wilkins @ 11:21 AM 0 comments

Feedback - Week 6 - JOURNAL CLUB - de Visser et al (2003)

Genetic robustness:

Katrina pointed out some flawed arguments in the review, or instances of lumping concepts together incorrectly. In particular were the concepts of plasticity and varience which were getting confused.

One thing I raised, Which Katrina countered (apologies if my terminology is a bit off), is I've often thought that any genes that are not being fully expressed due to some buffering system as discussed in this paper would be come "deleted", or at least decoupled from the ancestral phenetypic character it is now not actively used for. This is probably because I'm used to seeing the "use it or loose it" effect in functioanl anatomy (eg wings reduced or lost in some animals, where there's no longer natural selection pressures maintaing its normal function). I assumed if the expression of a gene was being buffered over enough generations, the gene is no longer subject to natural selection to maintain its role in a functional workable system, and could become a "non functional intron sequence" from random point mutations, or possibly changes in the parts of the "genetic network" that are buffered with it could end up excluding the gene from is role in effecting the phenotypic character. I can see that through pleiotropy, its possible the gene's role elsewhere in other characters will save it from "deletion" or prevent radical change - so that elsewhere the expresion of the gene is regulated by natural selection. Katrina said that the "use it or loose it" effect wouldn't work like this on genes, as the buffer system is an active integrated part of the system too, and only buffers the products of the "normal gene", and any radical change will sidestep the buffering system, be expressed, and therefore presented to natural selection and mostly likely removed from the population (as most mutations are deleterious).

We decided to go with another paper that Katrina has noticed flaws in for the next JOURNAL CLUB meeting.

Please add comments

posted by Chris Glen @ 1:33 PM 0 comments

Feedback - Week 5 - BOOK CLUB Kauffman (1993) Ch2

The majority generally thought that the author wasn't backing up his ideas with enough data, and was making sweeping statements on a narrow base of observations.

Majority of poeple weren't enthused by the book and we decieded to change to something else - next BOOK CLUB we will start on the work of Gavrilets on fitness landscapes.

posted by Chris Glen @ 1:29 PM 0 comments

On Gavrilets

Since we are reading Gavrilets' on speciation I thought I might offer a few links for those who are interested to follow it up.

Here's his homepage. He has other papers one can download.

Here's a link to his book, and a press release. This is a paper in Paleobiology he coauthored with various folk, including Eldredge. And this is a paper on Adaptive Dynamics.

posted by John S. Wilkins @ 12:51 PM 0 comments