The Sins of Custer Are Not Anthropological Sins: A Reply to Mark E. Randall

Memory: sins and virtues.

Memory plays an important role in everyday life but does not provide an exact and unchanging record of experience: research has documented that memory is a constructive process that is subject to a variety of errors and distortions. Yet these memory "sins" also reflect the operation of adaptive aspects of memory. Memory can thus be characterized as an adaptive constructive process, which plays ...

An ABC of Prescribing Sins.

Aging: The Sins of the Parents

Yeast cells have an asymmetric, stem-cell-like division. As the mother cell ages it becomes 100 times more genetically unstable, but it is only the daughter cells that exhibit loss of heterozygosity; the latter effect is not connected to SIR2-dependent aging, but seems to be accompanied by a loss of the DNA damage checkpoint.

The sins of the fathers, take 2.

Alas, poor Darwin. By all rights, 2009 should be his year, as books, museums, and scholarly conclaves celebrate his 200th birthday (Feb. 12) and the 150th anniversary of “On the Origin of Species” (Nov. 24), the book that changed forever how man views himself and the creation. Teamed with genetics, Darwin’s explanation of how species change through time has become the rock on which biology stan...

The seven deadly sins of comparative analysis.

Phylogenetic comparative methods are extremely commonly used in evolutionary biology. In this paper, I highlight some of the problems that are frequently encountered in comparative analyses and review how they can be fixed. In broad terms, the problems boil down to a lack of appreciation of the underlying assumptions of comparative methods, as well as problems with implementing methods in a man...