A blog about life, past and future
Carl Zimmer is a science writer. His articles appear in the New York Times and many magazines. He is also the author of six books about science. Send messages to blog/ at/ carlzimmer/ dot/ com
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Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life
Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man: The Concise Edition
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"...among the joyous, heartless, ever-juvenile eternities, Pip saw the multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters, heaved the colossal orbs. He saw God's foot upon the treadle of the loom, and spoke it; and therefore his shipmates called him mad."
--Moby Dick
October 31, 2003
Category: Brains
Last week a region of the brain called the insula was in the news. As I described in my post, scientists found that physical pain and social rejection both activate the insula in much the same way. The insula returns...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:46 PM • 0 Comments •
October 30, 2003
Category: General
Books have been bubbling up from the comments cauldron. Jim Harrison has asked what I think of Simon Conway Morris's Life's Solution. Web Webster says Cosmos was his first favorite science book and asks for suggestions. Humboldt and Feyerband make...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:49 PM • 0 Comments •
October 29, 2003
Category: Evolution
Evolution is nature's great R&D division. Through mutation, natural selection, and other processes, life can find new solutions for the challenge of staying alive. It's possible to see a simplified version of this problem solving at work in the lab....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:54 PM • 0 Comments •
October 28, 2003
Category: Evolution
Loyal denizens of the blogosphere will forgive me if I begin this post by sketching out the details of the recent Gregg Easterbrook affair for those who haven't kept up with the details. Easterbook, a senior editor at the New...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:57 PM • 0 Comments •
October 26, 2003
Category: Evolution
When Charles Darwin was thrashing out his theory of evolution, he would doodle sometimes in his notebooks. To explain how new species came into existence, he wrote down letters on a page and then connected them with branches. In the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:59 PM • 0 Comments •
October 23, 2003
Category: Brains
After years at a slow burn, the controversy over Terri Schiavo has hit the national news. Schiavo lost consciousness in 1990 after a cardiac arrest, and her husband recently won a lawsuit to have her feeding tube removed, over the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:03 PM • 0 Comments •
October 21, 2003
Category: Evolution
The Great Lakes of East Africa swarm with fish--particulary with one kind of fish known as cichlids. In Lake Victoria alone you can find over 500 species. These species come in different colors and make their living in many different...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:05 PM • 0 Comments •
October 17, 2003
Category: Brains
Science is so specialized these days that it's hard for scientists to look up beyond the very narrow confines of their own work. Biologists who study cartilage don't have much to say to biologists who study retinas. Astronomers who study...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:11 PM • 3 Comments •
Category: Brains
My book Soul Made Flesh will be coming out in January, but in the meantime, I've posted an excerpt on my web site. You can read it online or print out a pdf....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:09 PM • 0 Comments •
October 15, 2003
Category: Brains
In the comments to my post yesterday about Nanoarchaeum equitans, an ancient parasite, the discussion took an interesting turn. Web Webster wrote: "So in a way, N. equitans is both 'smarter' in that it uses more of its total capabilities...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:19 PM • 0 Comments •
October 13, 2003
Category: The Parasite Files
Biologists these days can paint many different portraits of the same organism. They can follow the tried and true style of Aristotle and paint with a broad brush, describing what they can see with the naked eye--number of legs, color...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:21 PM • 0 Comments •
October 10, 2003
Category: Brains
There's been a fair amount of press about a new paper in Science that shows how the brain responds to social rejection. The kicker is that a region of the brain known as the insula becomes active. As I mentioned...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:23 PM • 0 Comments •
October 9, 2003
Category: Brains
One reason that I'm so riveted by neuroscience is the way it can blow the lid off of philosophical conundrums that have dogged Western thought for centuries. Case in point: in a recent study, scientists at Dartmouth asked subjects about...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:25 PM • 0 Comments •
October 7, 2003
Category: Evolution
Thanks again for the comments on my previous two posts about eugenics. As a novice blogger, I was surprised by their focus. I expected comments about the past--the historical significance of the eugenics movement--but instead the future dominated, with assorted...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:45 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Brains
It's never pretty to see journalism transformed into propaganda, especially when you're the one who wrote the journalism. I recently did an article for the New York Times Magazine about the grey zone between coma and consciousness. The National Right...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:27 PM • 2 Comments •
October 6, 2003
Category: Evolution
Ask and ye shall receive. In a recent post on eugenics, I claimed that the connection between early 20th century genetics and early 21st century genetic engineering was weak. I asked if anyone thought I was wrong, and in no...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:49 PM • 0 Comments •
October 5, 2003
Category: Evolution
The folks behind the Macarthur genius grant chose wisely this week when they gave one to Loren Rieseberg, an evolutionary biologist at Indiana University. Rieseberg does fascinating work on the origin of new species (that little subject). Specifically, he's shown...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:51 PM • 0 Comments •
Category: Evolution
Today Daniel Kevles, a Yale historian, has an interesting review in the New York Times of a new book about eugenics. The book in question is War against the Weak, by Edward Black. It's a cinderblock of a book, and...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:50 PM • 0 Comments •
October 2, 2003
Category: The Parasite Files
As someone who writes a lot about evolutionary biology, I've often had people say to me, "I just can't believe that evolved." Originally, that referred to the lovely side of nature--the beauty of flowers, for example, or the grace of...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:53 PM • 0 Comments •
