Recommendations for scientific papers

Does any one have any recommendations for scientific papers avaliable online that would beA. Understood by laymen who make a little effort.B. Providing evidence that any one with even a little open-mindedness could say......."Ok I can see why this is good evidence for common descent"ThanksThis message has been edited by judge, 04-23-2005 01:17 AM

Moving thread to Biological Evolution.This message has been edited by AdminJar, 04-23-2005 07:22 AM

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Thread moved here from the Proposed New Topics forum.

Um... about what?

the problem is that scientists are long past the stage where they might write papers on evolutionary biology in general. The theory of evolution doesn't need to be restated or justified in every single article that mentions it. It's taken for granted as the bedrock of biology.If you want a general overview of the evidence for evolution in laymans terms you should try some of the popular science books by Dawkins etc. You won't find what you're looking for in the academic scientific literature because it is much more focused on specific issues, often in specific narrow taxonomic groups, rather than the general theory. The theory of evolution is taken for granted and might not even be mentioned by name in an article about evolution.

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Um... about what?

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OK , are there some papers that demonstrate the the kinds of mutations used in supporting NDT are random (presumably WRT the fitness of the organism I suppose) and not subject to "non random" influences?Are their papers that show that "convergent evolution" is unlikely to have produced the heirarchies we see.

Ok, if you are willing to get a little technical (but not painfully so)... Biologist don't believe that mutations are not subject to non-random processes. There are clear non-random patterns in mutation rate and mutation type.These patterns, for example, may depend on the position of a nucleotide on a chromosome, or its position in the nuclear genome versus mitochondrial genome [1]; the sequence itself (some combinations of nucleotides such as tandem repeats (i.e. ATATATATATATAT) are subject to higher mutation rates) [2]; sex ratio[3]; generation length, body size and metabolic rate [4]; taxonomic group [5]; the local richness of DNA in C and G nucleotides [6]; There are a variety of tests we can use to detect convergent evolution in DNA sequences [i.e., 7]. For morphological characters, we will usually just infer convergent evolution on the basis of the phylogeny [8].How do we know that the phylogenetic tree itself doesn't result from convergent evolution? First, we are increasingly using multiple genes and morphological characters to create our hierarchical phylogenetic trees. This means that if one or two genes are similar across species by virtue of convergent evolution, we still have many genes in our dataset that are not. It seems rather unlikely that lots of genes would all be convergent and all point at exactly the same incorrect tree. Rather, if convergence is a random process, we would expect to find different genes suggesting different shaped trees, and that would be a signal that our genetic markers aren't good enough.Secondly, when we build a phylogenetic tree we use probabalistic models of nucleotide evolution that permit us to calculate statistical confidence limits on each node in the hierarchy. Our models account for the possibility that multiple mutations might occur at a single site (i.e. a nucleotide might mutate once, then mutate back to its original form) and they include the possibility that convergent evolution occurs between two sequences that is not indicative of their true phylogenetic relationships. When you see a tree published in a journal, you will often notice little numbers printed alongside each node. These are usually some measure of our confidence that a node in our hierarchy is a "real" node given the data that we used in generating the tree and given the statistical model that we incorporated into the analysis. There are various measures of confidence that we use but one popular method is the bootstrap [9].Hope this helps! Of the references cited here, reference 4 is probably the easiest to understand, and the most interesting for the layperson.Best wishes,Mick[1] Just a moment...[2] http://www.oup.co.uk/isbn/0-19-850407-1[3]Shortened link[4]http://mbe.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/full/19/3/302[5]Missed this one: AdminJar[6]http://mbe.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/short/msi043v1[7]http://mbe.oupjournals.org/cgi/content/abstract/14/5/527[8] Mesquite[9]http://virgil.ruc.dk/kurser/Sekvens/bootstr.htmThis message has been edited by mick, 04-24-2005 12:29 PMThis message has been edited by AdminJar, 04-24-2005 11:31 AMThis message has been edited by AdminJar, 04-24-2005 11:32 AMThis message has been edited by mick, 04-24-2005 01:16 PM

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Hope this helps! Of the references cited here, reference 4 is probably the easiest to understand, and the most interesting for the layperson.

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Best wishes,

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Mick

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Thanks it may take me some time to really grasp the details but there is not much i can do about that. But if I eventually get it then great!