5. Molecular Genetics II

Stanford University.

Let's see.

Various announcements.

I am out of town tomorrow, so no office hours.

I managed effortlessly to confuse a whole bunch of people

Monday about positive selection versus stabilizing selection.

All of that on the Q&A part of the course works.

I've pulled out the paragraphs from the extended readings

that explain that coherently, as opposed to what happened here.

And Monday-- Monday I discovered that somebody sitting in this

room, who I cannot spot at the moment,

has a spectacular tattoo illustrating the central dogma

of life, or at least one person.

If there's two, it's really something.

So amazing demonstration of DNA to RNA to protein.

So if the person doesn't have a class afterward,

he will be standing up on top of this counter

here displaying it for everybody's

educational purposes.

So besides finding about that guy, what else happened Monday?

Monday we introduced two concepts

and, with great dramatic foreshadowing,

started to trash both.

The first one being this huge emphasis

in all of the preceding lectures on the evolution of behavior--

not only this emphasis on adaptation,

not only this emphasis on inferring a genetic basis

through that roundabout-- here's a story

and until you make up a better one, I win.

But also that emphasis on gradualism,

that slow evolutionary change.

What we focused on there was what

would be the mechanisms, the molecular mechanisms,

for classic gradualist evolutionary change,

microevolution, the whole world of point mutations-- deletion,

insertion, all of that, the whole world of mutations

potentially being big news, knocking a protein completely

out of business and suddenly you've

got a different gender than you actually are chromosomally,