July 2006 Archives

Spotted on EvolDir:

The Big Evolutionary Bibliography

This is a bibliography with more than 12,000 references to papers in evolutionary biology, population genetics and ecological genetics. It is useful because it includes references to many papers written before computer searches became established. Please note that the bibliography contains errors and duplications, and offers absolutely no guarantee of accuracy. You should always check any reference against the original publication before quoting it. I made the thing over many years as an aid to research, and for a book on frequency-dependent selection. It struck me that others might find the bibliography useful. Many of the recent references have abstracts attached.

I have one paper in the bibliography, number 362:

Reference Type: Journal Article Record Number: 362 Author: Asmussen, M. A.; Cartwright, R. A.; Spencer, H. G. Year: 2004 Title: Frequency-dependent selection with dominance: A window onto the behavior of the mean fitness Journal: Genetics Volume: 167 Issue: 1 Pages: 499-512 Date: May Alternate Journal: Genetics Accession Number: ISI:000221851100041 Keywords: Genetic-variation; single-locus; viability selection; polymorphism; populations; model; maintenance; evolution; complex; chaos Abstract: Selection in which fitnesses vary with the changing genetic composition of the population may facilitate the maintenance of genetic diversity in a wide range of organisms. Here, a detailed theoretical investigation is made of a frequency- dependent selection model, in which fitnesses are based on pairwise interactions between the two phenotypes at a diploid, diallefic, autosomal locus with complete dominance. The allele frequency dynamics are fully delimited analytically, along with all possible shapes of the mean fitness function in terms of where it increases or decreases as a function of the current allele frequency in the population. These results in turn allow possibly the first complete characterization of the dynamical behavior by the mean fitness through time tinder frequency- dependent selection. Here the mean fitness (i) monotonically increases, (ii) monotonically decreases, (iii) initially increases and then decreases, or (iv) initially decreases and then increases as equilibrium is approached. We analytically derive the exact initial and fitness conditions that produce each dynamic and how often each arises. Computer simulations with random initial conditions and fitnesses reveal that the potential decline in mean fitness is not negligible; on average a net decrease occurs 20% of the time and reduces the mean fitness by >17%. Notes: GENETICS

American Floyd Landis, leader of the Tour de France, cracked on the last climb today and finished rougly ten minutes back. The dream of him winning the Tour is gone, but he may be able to work himself back into a podium finish.

With Landis out, I have no idea who to root for.

Today we closed on our house in Raleigh and are official home owners. Yea!

We started moving in, although, only the bare minimum that I’ll need to live there. The big move of furniture and stuff will take place in August after graduation.

I can’t enjoy it yet because I got some deadlines for graduation that I need to take care of in this next week.

I also started to set up my office at NCSU. Got a sweet Dell workstation that is going to be FreeBSDed. However, I won’t be an official postdoc until we get all the paper work filed next week.

The media have a tendency to using the word “mutate” (or its derivatives) whenever “evolve” (or its derivatives) is more accurate. This is especially true in medical articles when they talk about germs “mutating” as opposed to “evolving”. Therefore, I was surprised this morning when I read an article on a new AIDS medication that contained the following:

If the single pill does help patients stick to their pill-taking regimen, that in turn could slow the emergence – and ultimately, transmission – of drug-resistant strains of the virus. Those strains can evolve when patients take less than 95 percent of their pills, said John Martin, head of Gilead Sciences Inc., the manufacturer of two of the drugs in Atripla.

(Single-dose ‘cocktail’ OK’d for U.S. HIV patients)

Next Generation has an article on five fallen icons of the gaming industry.

I’d say that the loss of Black Isle is the worst one of the bunch. I’m still waiting to play Fallout 3.

Le Tour is on. With most of the race favorites out of the race because of a doping scandal, the race is wide open. I can’t wait until the mountains to see if any of the contenders will step up or if any unknown will show up.

If you can’t watch Le Tour on OLN, you can follow it at cyclingnews.com.