I'm an Intellectual Blogger

The Evilutionary Biologist (aka John Dennehy) has tagged me with an Intellectual Blogger Award. Given my serious lack of posting lately, I'm not sure that I deserve it...but thanks!

The award traces to An Unquiet Mind where the stated rules are:

This award is intended for those bloggers who demonstrate an inclination to think on their own. This is what I think is needed in today’s blogosphere. The term ‘Intellectual’ has often been derided in recent times, and this is one way to resurrect the true meaning: “An intellectual is one who tries to use his or her intellect to work, study, reflect, speculate on, or ask and answer questions with regard to a variety of different ideas.” The rules are:

1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with nominations for 5 blogs that you think are of “Intellectual Bloggers”.
2. Optional: Link to this page so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme.
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Intellectual Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.

I hereby nominate:

1. Tree of Life (Jonathan Eisen; even though he doesn't like these memes)
2. Aetiology (Tara Smith)
3. Twisted Bacteria (Cesar Sanchez)
4. Small Things Considered (Elio)
5. Evolgen (RPM)

and one that I was suprised to find has apparently not yet been included:

• Sandwalk (Larry Moran)

Why Rosie doesn't work on Sex

My friend and colleague, Rosie Redfield, has written an interesting post about the origin of eukaryotic sex, entitled "Why I don't work on sex in eukaryotes ". She sums up what we do and don't know about deep eukaryotic relationships and how this impinges on the origin of sex and meiosis. One bottom line is that we still don't know what the earliest branch on the eukaryotic tree is. The other is that it might not matter for the origin of meiosis since work in my lab has shown that homologs of meiotic genes are present in all of the major protist lineages (e.g, this paper, but stay tuned for more details...). Rosie ends her provocative post by paying me a sincere compliment:

"I'm glad that John Logsdon has been working on this, rather than me."

Thanks, Rosie!

Microbial-bloggers

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, a few science bloggers got together in Toronto while some of us were attending the American Society for Microbiology general meeting. ASM's MicrobeWorld (a.k.a Chris Condayan) captured us on video. My colleague Tara Smith reported on this earlier today, as did Ryan Gregory. Addendum: Jonathan Badger also reported on this.

Banning the word "prokaryote"

Here I am at the the American Society for Microbiology annual meeting which is being held in Toronto. As Larry Moran has already pointed out, there are a few of us bloggers that are getting together with him while we are here. This should be great.

My first day (actually, part day) was capped off with a really fun, but in many ways maddening, lecture from Norman Pace. Norm was on my PhD committee, and it was the first time I had seen him for 12 years. The talk was wonderfully vintage Norm—even some of the phrases were the same as I remembered. That's not to say that the talk was at all tired. Norm is so fun to see in the spotlight; in this case, he had a big and well-deserved stage on which to perform! As an historical aside, Norm's class on the biochemistry of nucleic acids at Indiana University was the only biochemistry course that I ever took that started by reference to a rRNA tree of life. Norm has been ahead of the curve for a long time...

A major—and provocative—theme of Norm's talk is that we microbiologists should strike the word "procaryote" (or prokaryote, as I prefer to spell it) from our vocabulary. This is not a trivial matter for the microbiologists in attendance, both from practical and intellectual points of view. This part of his talk followed directly from his recently published piece in Nature entitled "Time for a change." (2006) 441:289. I happen to strongly disagree with Norm on this point and am much more aligned with the views subsequently published by Martin & Koonin entitled "A positive definition of prokaryotes" in Nature (2006) 442: 868. Although I'm too short on energy to do so now, I'll try to decipher my notes and give a more clear account of what Norm said (and my reactions to it) in the coming days.