Chasing Red Herrings

Chasing red herrings: making sense of the colors while mapping.

Red herrings and rotten fish

Geoffrey B. West ∗, Van M. Savage, James Gillooly, Brian J. Enquist, William. H. Woodruff, James H. Brown 1 Los Alamos National Laboratory, Los Alamos, NM 87545, USA. 2 The Santa Fe Institute, 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA. 3 Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM 87131, USA. 4 Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Arizona, Tucson...

MEFV mutations - therapeutic guides or red herrings?

Background/question Familial Mediterranean Fever (FMF) is a hereditary inflammatory disorder characterised by self-resolving attacks of fever and serositis common in populations from Mediterranean ancestry [1]. Mutations affecting MEFV gene is believed to be responsible for the disease phenotype[1]. The correlation between the genotype and phenotype is not very strong, indicating the presence o...

Experimental paleoecology (resurrection ecology): Chasing Van Valen’s Red Queen hypothesis

Taking an experimental approach to paleoecology, we evaluated the prey portion of Van Valen’s Red Queen hypothesis by retrieving diapausing eggs from lake sediments for laboratory tests of evolutionary responses. The sediments consisted of core samples from Portage Lake (Michigan), which were dated by a combination of varve counts and radioisotope (137Cs and 210Pb) techniques. The sedimentary r...

Red Herrings and Revelations: The Destabilizing and Stabilizing Effects of Economic Theory

This paper assumes that output depends on a large number of variables, but that economic theory has only revealed a subset of these variables. The variables that determine output include exogenous shocks, as well as endogenous variables that depend on both the exogenous variables and agents’ expectations. This paper examines a policy maker’s attempts to forecast output under two different types...