Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Some updates
Some new developments in stories that have appeared in these pages:
- My support for the Bellbird in the annual Bird of Year poll was not enough for it raise above a mid-table finish. In a fit of creativity kiwis voted the Kiwi as their favourite bird with rifleman and kea filling the minor placings.
- That nutty paper about insect metamorphosis was held up at PNAS while the editorial board looked into Lyn Margulis' own claim that she went through seven reviewers to find two that would sign off on it. Even so, the paper will make it to a dead-wood issue of PNAS along with a letter from Gonzalo Giribet who told a Nature reporter the idea was "the most stupid thing that has ever been proposed"- should be fun.
- Finally, if you thought that the idea of their being some genetic differences between human races wasn't a controversial idea then you might check out two threads (1, 2) that started when Larry Moran talked about the same article at The Sandwalk.
Labels: bellbird, evolution, human genome, Korimako, population genetics, sci-blogs, science