Wednesday, July 26, 2006

Survival of the twit-test

Geneticists found a solution
For uncovering new evolution.
By measuring genes,
They now have the means
To map an event's contribution.

And armed with this means of detection
They've identified recent selection;
But it still can't reveal
The errant allele
That resulted in Bush's election!

Thanks to George at Brewed Fresh Daily for allerting me to the story. It's worth a read if only for the wonderful evolutionary morph of Stephen Jay Gould.

And the Evolutionary Beat Goes On . . .
By Shankar Vedantam, The Washington Post, 7/24/06

4 comments:

Cowtown Pattie said...

That morph thingy was so cool!

Twit-test

I love your play on words.

Cowtown Pattie said...

Have you ever thought about writing a book? These limericks deserve some serious shelf space in Borders, or Barnes and Noble.

John Latter said...

I like the poem too (and I admire it - can do 'cat' & 'mat' but that's about it!).

I also posted this link at George's place in case anyone's interested in the paper the Washington Post's article is based on:

A Map of Recent Positive Selection in the Human Genome

John Latter / Jorolat

Evolution Research

The Limerick Savant said...

Pattie, thank you, as always, for your kind comments.

As to a book: Do you know any publishers? Send them to my blog. I actually self-published a chap book of earlier limericks (Four-Year Funk)about a year ago. I couldn't give them away, even for a good cause. I'll probably offer the remainder as a premium again for those that donate to NAMI Walks this September. Will be posting on that soon.

John, thanks for visiting. I did post a link to the journal article hidden in my limerick. It's a bit dense for a non-geneticist but, then, so is the Savant. As Pattie might say, "Y'all come back, y'hear?"