"...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
Futurepundit has an interesting post based on a new paper about so-called junk DNA. Only 2% or so of the human genome actually encodes protein sequences. The rest is a grab-bag of broken genes and virus-like sequences called mobile elements...
I'll be talking about evolution on Tuesday at 12 pm PST/3 pm EST with Alan Stahler on KVMR in California. You can listen to the live webcast here. UPDATE: I'll be on at about 20 minutes after the hour. Andy...
It's too early yet for reviews of Soul Made Flesh to start rolling in (it pubs in January 2004), so I'm still in an anxious state. But this is promising: The Daily Telegraph in London asked several leading writers to...
The glow of a beetle has inspired an elegant bit of evolutionary detective work that appears in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Americans like myself are familiar with fireflies, but in the tropics the night is also...
Texas may be off the hook for now, but Razib at Gene Expression observes that some medical students at the University of Oslo are lobbying for anti-evolution lectures. I guess I'll try not to be in Norway if I need...
For everyone interested in how their brain works, I'd suggest checking out a book coming out soon called Picturing Personhood, by MIT anthropologist Joseph Dumit. Dumit shows how easy it is for brain scans to become cultural Rorschach tests. Scans...
The case of Terri Schiavo has moved back into the Bleak House realm of endless trips to the courthouse. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Schiavo lost consciousness thirteen years ago, and her husband has been trying for the...
Over the past couple years, a few pounds of rock from Australia have been the subject of a fierce scientific battle between geologists and paleontologists. Some paleontologists have claimed that microscopic marks in the 3.5 billion year old rocks are...
In February I wrote an article in Science about what Craig Venter's up to these days. In the late 1990s Venter made his mark by challenging the government human genome project to a race, promising to beat them to the...
Time always marches forward, of course, but does evolution? It's certainly easy to impose a march of progress on the course of evolution. That's why the sequence of apes transforming into humans as they march from left to right is...