The famous and distinguished film critic Roger Ebert passed away yesterday, after a heroic battle against throat cancer that left him voiceless but hardly wordless the last seven years of his life. The news about the death of such an influential and heroic man was all over the airwaves, especially...

I am using this posting to call attention to a moving and important blog about Nobel Laureate Rita Levi-Montalcini's life and research (A Tale of Centenarians, posted February 25, 2013).

My fellow student from the mid-1960s at the Cambridge University Genetics Department, Claudio Scazzocchio, originally...

In correspondence and comments on some of my blogs, there have been confusions or questions as to what I mean by "natural genetic engineering" (NGE). I will use this blog to spell out what my understanding of NGE is. Then I will discuss some implications of our knowledge of NGE...

Shortly before New Year's Day, we lost Carl Woese, one of the 20th Century's greatest scientists. It is fitting to use the first blog of 2013 to pay homage to this creative and determined pioneer of molecular phylogenomics.

Carl put our picture of living organisms on a solid empirical basis...

Last week, on his very popular blog, WhyEvolutionIsTrue.wordpress.com, Jerry Coyne ridiculed Nicholas Wade's NYT article discussing the negative consequences resulting from the anti-religious tone of most orthodox defenses of evolution.

Wade's article was far from ideal. He failed to distinguish clearly between the overwhelming empirical evidence...

Wendell Read just sent me notice of a new paper in Genome Biology linking transposable elements, long intergenic non-coding RNAs, and cell type. This paper highlights difficulties in understanding genome evolution using the conventional idea of "genes."

In the early days of genetics, following the rediscovery of Mendel's...

Earlier blogs have covered horizontal DNA transfer between bacteria and from bacteria and fungi to animals. This blog will present some of the evidence for horizontal transfer in the reverse direction: DNA acquisition by infectious bacteria from eukaryotic hosts.

Bacteria pick up eukaryotic sequences encoding different...

Last week, PLOS Genetics published a delightful interview with National Medal of Science winner Evelyn Witkin. The interview rewards the time it takes to read.

From the 1940s to the 1980s, Evelyn (born 1921) was a key pioneer in understanding how E. coli and other bacteria respond to...

A couple of weeks ago, Sdf Dsfds asked me to write something about my work on bacteria as multicellular organisms. I promised to do so after posting the blog about horizontal DNA transfer in animal evolution. The announcement of the UCS Center for Science and Democracy...

In commenting on a recent blog, James Ballard admonished me: "Might I suggest you not wait around in the protective wings of academia..."

Part of my response to James' useful admonition is to serve as a member of the National Advisory Board of the Union of Concerned...

In a recent blog, I discussed symbiogenesis, one way that sudden large changes have occurred in evolution. Symbiogenetic events included the origin of the eukaryotic cell. This major step enabled all the following evolution leading up to multicellular organisms, including us.

Let me repeat that last point...

On a number of occasions over the past month, my frequent commentator John Kwok has chided me to be more like "Science Guy" Bill Nye in defending evolution and science in general against Creationists (Bill Nye: Creationism Is Not Appropriate For Children).

I agree with John that...

I previously mentioned attending the European Molecular Biology Organization meeting on "Evolution in the Time of Genomics" this past May in Venice. There were several interesting talks about the functional and evolutionary roles of mobile DNA repeats. They provided good evidence that many of these repeats have helped establish genome...

Last week, there were two HuffPost blogs on the release of the ENCODE (Encyclopedia of DNA Elements) project data: mine and one by colleague Michael White. We took opposing positions on the question of whether the ENCODE results are compatible with the "junk DNA" explanation for...

As I wrote in a previous blog, I attended the EMBO conference "Evolution in the Time of Genomics" in Venice this past May. At that conference, after my presentation (visible on YouTube), I had an exchange with Dan Hartl, a Harvard evolutionary biologist who studies...

"And don't criticize
What you can't understand"

Last week, the ENCODE project (ENCyclopedia Of Dna Elements) released a tremendous amount of new information about our genomes. The results of literally hundreds of millions of experiments using the most current "high throughput" technologies provided the data for over a dozen...

An August 25, 2012 Washington Post article talked about a superbug outbreak at the NIH. The article highlighted the problem that we are running out of useful antibiotics. Antibiotic resistance is an evolutionary question of great practical importance. I have recently been asked and agreed to sign on...

In the last blog, I questioned the creative role of natural selection in evolutionary innovation. To clarify further what I had in mind, this blog will look at one of the truly creative processes of tremendous importance in evolutionary history: symbiotic mergers of two distinct organisms to generate...

How has evolution successfully produced the diversity of organisms occupying virtually every ecological niche on the planet? This has been the central question in scientific evolution since thinkers in the late 18th century (including Erasmus Darwin, Charles' grandfather) introduced the idea that living organisms change over time. The big unknowns...

In the first comment on my last blog, Philip Rivera posted:

Unfortunately IMHO, your newer articles are still way too complex for the general public to grasp and the problem is that they are far less knowledgeable about evolution.

...

So keep it VERY simple ......