The Walking Whales
Whales have a pretty phenomenal evolutionary story. Not only do they share our terrestrial mammalian history, arising from a hooved deer-like creature, but they subsequently managed to become fully aquatic […]
What Are the Major Differences between Autism & Intellectual Disability?
The notion of overlap between autism and genius has been culturally popularized. However, a significant portion of those on the spectrum also test within the intellectually disabled (ID) range with […]
Kanner’s Eleven Families
The term, Broader Autism Phenotype (BAP), is not a diagnosis. Instead, it’s used to refer to sub-diagnostic traits of autism in family members of those with the condition. Symptoms can […]
Is a Lack of Consanguinity Uncovering the Hidden Autism in Our Genes?
Although it’s a difficult topic to study, because the human species has experienced a number of population bottlenecks over time it’s assumed that rates of consanguinous (close kinship) marriage or […]
Animal, Plant, & Fungal Genomes Have Streamlined Over Time
Let’s face it: humans are kinda narcissistic. For those of us who are evolutionarily-minded, as such we have a tendency to envision ourselves as lying at the pinnacle of eukaryotic […]
Gene Evolution Is All about Regulation
Okay, so gene evolution isn’t entirely about regulation. But protein-coding sequences of genes have changed comparatively little over hundreds of millions of years. When you look at the proteins that […]
Tweny-three Chromosome Pairs? Try 1,000!
Every once in awhile, maybe once in a blue moon, you may read something that’s so left-field, so alien that it literally changes your fundamental concepts. For me that happened […]
The Absurdity of “Just So Stories” in Explaining Evolution
And the Camel said ‘Humph!’ again; but no sooner had he said it than he saw his back, that he was so proud of, puffing up and puffing up into […]
Change Is Coming – Lessons from Geology on Extinction Events
I’ve been reading the second edition of Michael Benton’s, When Life Nearly Died: The Greatest Mass Extinction of All Time, which tells of what we know of the Permian extinction […]
Links between the Metabolic Syndrome, the Immune System, and Autism
Last weekend I attended a Think Tank sponsored by the Autism Research Institute. In attendance were Judy van de Water and Paul Ashwood from the MIND Institute, reporting on some […]
