Richard Buggs

Professor, Queen Mary University of London
  • United Kingdom

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Recent Comments

Dec 06, 2022

Thank you, Susanne. This is very encouraging coming from such an authority on plant phylogenetics!

Apr 13, 2021

Thanks for your comment, Adi. There is a big discussion to be had about levels of selection, but I agree with you that Dawkins' claim about gene tree congruence seems to be driven more by what would be predicted by a simplistic 1970s model for how evolution works than by the data.

Mar 30, 2021

Hi Olivier, thank you for a thoughtful response. However, Richard Dawkins is not just saying that most gene trees are much closer than expected by chance: he is saying that they are all "approximately the same".  This is the claim that I am disputing.

Nov 01, 2017

Readers may be interested in a discussion of this article, including comments by Joe Felsenstein (University of Washington) and Steve Schaffner (Broad Institute) here: http://theskepticalzone.com/wp...

Jun 02, 2017
Hi Rafiq, I have answered my own question, thanks to your Dryad data (thanks for making it so accessible, BTW). I don't seem able to place a figure here in a comment, so I have tweeted a figure with my plot here https://twitter.com/RJABuggs/status/870697142070816768 My interpretation of this is that the vast majority of the random sequences were deleterious when expressed. The induced replicates have lower diversity upon the first round of sequencing, suggesting that many bacteria have died before the first cycle of the experiment, and then during the experiment, the diversity of the induced replicates continues to fall. Do you think that is the right interpretation? So most of the bioactivity is harmful bioactivity.
May 27, 2017
Hi Rafik, this is very cool! Congratulations on the paper. Do you have results for how the overall diversity of your E. coli populations was affected by the different treatments? I see that you started with about a million different random variants. Do you know how many of these were present at the end of cycle number 1 for the IPTG induced and non-induced treatments? How did this overall level of diversity change with the different cycles? This seems a fascinating aspect of the experiment. I am guessing that the non-induced populations maintained higher levels of diversity. Is that what happened? Richard

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