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
June 30, 2004
Category: Brains
Our brains are huge, particularly if you take into consideration the relative size of our bodies. Generally, the proportion of brain to body is pretty tight among mammals. But the human brain is seven times bigger than what you'd predict...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:45 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 21, 2004
Category: Evolution
We like to think of boundaries as being clear-cut borders, but at least in the biological world they generally turn out to be fuzzy zones of change. The line between land and sea is my own favorite example. Last summer...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:41 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 16, 2004
Category: Evolution
Love demands an explanation. Less than 5% of mammal species live monogamously, with males and females staying together beyond mating, and fathers helping mothers care for babies. We humans aren't the most monogamous species of the bunch, but we're closer...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:13 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 15, 2004
Category: Brains
In the New York Times this morning, the poet Diane Ackerman has written an essay about the brain, in which she waxes eloquent about its ability to discern patterns in the world. The essay is distilled from her new book,...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:30 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 3, 2004
Category: General
A press release turned up in the comments for a couple of my posts. While that's not as bad as Viagra-ad spam, it's not in the spirit of blogosphere. If you post a press release, it will be deleted. Post...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:21 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: The Parasite Files
One of the most exciting lines of research in evolution today is how parasites have become so good at making us sick. A case in point appears in the latest issue of Genome Biology (full text of paper here). It...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:34 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
June 1, 2004
Category: Brains
I always like book reviews that combine books that might not at first seem to have that much in common. In the new issue of Natural History, the neuroscientist Williams Calvin reviews Soul Made Flesh along with The Birth of...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:13 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Do you know who George Williams is? If you don't, let me introduce you to one of the most influential evolutionary biologists ever to ponder natural selection. If you do know who he is, you may still be interested in...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:48 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains
It's strange enough hearing yourself talking on the radio. It's stranger still to see a transcript someone makes of you talking on the radio. Recently I was interviewed about Soul Made Flesh on Australian Broadcasting Corporation's show "All in the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:00 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains
I was asked a couple weeks ago to contribute a piece to a special series of articles in Newsweek about the future of Wi-Fi. I must admit that a fair amount of the stuff that's on the Wi-Fi horizon seems...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:42 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
