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Experiments on the origin of life

Nobel laureate J. W. Szostak delivered an interesting lecture on his experiments relating to the...

Wait: What Were The Controls? (Kids In Lesbian Households)

A CNN headline reads "Kids of lesbians have fewer behavioral problems, study suggests".Interesting...

What are scientists reading?

I recently took a look around my department to see what academic scientists are reading. I ignored...

Philosophy for kids

About a week ago, I asked the question "What is the most important field of science for the public...

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Adam RetchlessRSS Feed of this column.

I get paid to study microbial evolution. These writings are for my non-scientist friends and family (hi guys!) and anyone else who sees any value in them. The content will mainly be pointers to... Read More »

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If you want something amusing and informative to listen to on your MP3 player, check out Parasites from the public radio show Radiolab. You can download it or listen via streaming audio.

The featured parasites include the zombie wasp, the blood fluke, and Toxoplasma. There's also a nice story about hookworm eradication in the southeast US during the early 20th century.
As described in my profile, I don't want to blog about my own field of research. However, in anticipation of questions about my research, I'm going to write this introductory post.

So far, all my published work addresses how species concepts apply to bacteria.

If you are interested in learning more about this issue, I recommend the following:

1) An essay proposing one approach to defining bacterial species.
2) An essay panning the idea of universal species concepts.