Next week I’ll be heading to Utah. Southern Utah University asked me to be their Visiting Eccles Scholar, which means that I’ll be spending a couple days talking with students and faculty. I’ll also be giving two talks that are open to the public. The first, Wednesday evening, will be on global warming and extinctions, about which I wrote an article for the New York Times a couple months back. The next evening I’ll be talking about E. coli and the meaning of life. It’s the first time I’ll be speaking about my book in public, so I’m looking forward to sharing some of the stuff I learned while writing it. So if you’re anywhere in the vicinity of Cedar City, come on out.
Science moves forward by flow. One experiment leads to another. Observations accrue. What seem like side trips or even dead ends may bring a fuzzy picture further into focus. Yet science often seems as if it moves forward one bombshell at a time, marked by scientific papers and press conferences. I can’t think of a bigger contrast between the bombshell illusion and the flowing reality of science than the day in 2000 when President Clinton announced the completion of the first draft of the human genome on the White House lawn. He declared it “an epoch-making triumph of science and reason.”
Continue reading “You Don’t Miss Those 8,000 Genes, Do You?”
Perhaps the notion of conservatives building an alternative to Wikipedia that includes many “scientific” entries based on creationist books aimed at seventh graders sounds like some bizarre hoax. For those who doubt, there’s now audio evidence.
National Public Radio ran a segment yesterday in which they interviewed the founder of Conservapedia, Andrew Schlalfly. The interviewer, Robert Siegel, got right to the point. He described Wikipedia’s entry on kangaroos, which includes details about extinct species of kangaroos known from fossils.
Dinosaurs had small genomes. At least some of them did–the ones that gave rise to birds. If you have access to Science, you can read my News Focus article on the new field of “dinogenomics.” As I mentioned last week, my web site carlzimmer.com is in serious overhaul, so as soon as it’s ready, I’ll post a copy of the article there, too.
Originally published March 12, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.
Science, March 9, 2007
Tyrannosaurus rex, it turns out, had a pretty small genome. A team of American and British scientists estimates that it contained a relatively puny 1.9 billion base pairs of DNA, a little over half the size of our own genome.
The scientists who came up with this estimate—along with estimates for the genomes of 30 other dinosaur species—had no ancient DNA to study. T. rex, after all, became extinct 65 million years ago, and its genome is long gone. Instead, they discovered a revealing correlation: Big genomes tend to be found in animals with big bone cells. By comparing the size of cells in dinosaur fossils to those of living animals, the scientists got statistically sound estimates for the sizes of the dinosaur genomes.