About

This blog gravitates around statistical methods for evolutionary studies, which means you can expect to see a lot of Bayesian statistics, non-Bayesian statistics, phylogenetics, molecular evolution and the algorithms that glue them together. We can eventually talk about philosophy of science, virology or gastronomy – from a probabilistic point of view, of course... if you are looking for more personal comments I keep another blog with non-academic material (politics, leisure, etc). I have also a supersized microblog, with my daily rants that don’t fit inside a tweet.

On this blog I write material related to my work, but it’s still my personal space. My employers have no responsibility over what I write here, and the mistakes you find are all mine. If you still haven’t done so, please read our policy for comments before joining the discussion.

You can follow new messages through the RSS feed (see "subscribe to" links at the panel on the right). Comments - even aesthetic ones -, criticisms and questions are welcome. If you are looking for downloads, documentation and datasets about my academic work, please check also the "old school" site http://www.biomcmc.org.

History of this blog

The blog has its name from the program biomc2 that I developed during my Ph.D., which in turn was named after bioperl, biopython and other bioprograms. But I don’t actually have a strong philosophical preference for Bayesian methods or Monte Carlo algorithms. They can be thought as starting points  for more general – or more detailed – discussions about any biological problem that demands a statistical treatment. On the other hand, I do feel more comfortable working under a Bayesian framework…


This blog is the product of the merging of my two homonymous blogs: one at wordpress that I created to blog about articles that I was reading or wanted to read; and another one, the original from here, that I set up as a discussion place for the software biomc2, described first in the PLoS ONE paper doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0002651.

So this blog was originally thought to discuss developments on the biomc2 software and related issues from the standpoint of the final user. My intention was to have a flexible alternative to mail communication (less intrusive than mailing lists, and somehow easier to keep track of the topics).

This blog will still discuss this and other softwares of mine. But it will also have posts with theoretical works developed by others, and on areas not strictly related to recombination or phylogenetics. I decided to merge both subjects into one single blog since the volume of material I was adding to each one separately was too low -- well, even if you sum up all my blog posts combined you would still have a boring production...