Sunday, December 2, 2012

Carnival of Evolution #54

Carnival of Evolution #54 is now up!  We don't have a post in this carnival, since we were so demoralized and outraged by our unjust but crushing defeat in the Halloween pumpkin-carving contest that we apparently couldn't write any further blog posts last month.  But nevertheless, #54 is an awesome carnival, with posts ranging from malaria to slime molds, eusociality to eukaryotes, pleiotropy to pedigrees.  A wild ride, as always.

The carnival theme this month is "A Walkabout Mount Improbable", which makes me think of adaptive walks on fitness landscapes.  So I'll leave you with this picture, ostensibly of a fitness landscape, and a question: do real fitness landscapes look like this?


By -

4 comments:

  1. Andrew HendryDecember 2, 2012 at 9:47 AM

    Yes, but the question is: which peak are you on?

    ReplyDelete
  2. Ben HallerDecember 2, 2012 at 12:47 PM

    PhD students are in a valley, by definition. The question is: which peak do I want to climb? :->

    ReplyDelete
  3. Bjørn ØstmanDecember 2, 2012 at 5:42 PM

    Do you think real biological multidimensional fitness landscapes have peaks at all?

    ReplyDelete
  4. Ben HallerDecember 2, 2012 at 6:59 PM

    Well, there must be phenotypes with higher fitness and phenotypes with lower fitness. That much seems certain. And so there must be peaks, or at least ridges.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)

Histories of Stickleback Research - Tom Reimchen

Retrospection - by Prof. Tom Reimchen (University of Victoria, BC, Canada) I was a second year undergraduate student at the University of A...

  • How to write/present science: BABY-WEREWOLF-SILVER BULLET
    As an editor, reviewer, supervisor, committee member, and colleague, I have read countless papers and proposals and have seen similarly co...
  • 17 months
    By Dan Bolnick This past month, The American Naturalist published what I hope is the final step in the Editorial Board's evaluation of w...
  • The things we wished we had known
     Becoming a new professor is exciting. You are at last the captain of your own research. You pick who you want to work with, what you want t...