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 29, 2004
Category: General
The good folks at Corante are rejiggering the design of their blogs, The Loom included. Some stuff has yet to make the transition as of this writing, but before too long it will all be back in place....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:52 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 26, 2004
Category: Hobbits (Homo floresiensis)
Get to know that little skull. Scientists are going to be talking about it for centuries. As researchers report in tomorrow's issue of Nature, the skull--and along with other parts of a skeleton--turned up in a cave on the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:30 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 25, 2004
Category: General
I've written a piece for Newsweek about how to program a cell. (The Newsweek International edition comes out this week; the US edition comes out next week.) I find the ongoing research exciting, but sometimes I wonder how much of...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 5:19 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 21, 2004
Category: Evolution
Last month I blogged about my Scientific American review of Dean Hamer's new book, The God Gene. I was not impressed. It's not that I was dismissing the possibility that there might be genetic influences on religious behavior. I just...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:25 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 18, 2004
Category: Evolution
I have an article in tomorrow's New York Times about the mystery of autumn leaves. Insect warning? Sunscreen? The debate rages. The one thing I was sad to see get cut for space was the statement by one of the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:27 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 17, 2004
Category: Evolution
Last week I blogged about the strange story of our past encoded in the DNA of lice. We carry two lineages of lice, one of which our Homo sapiens ancestors may have picked up in Asia from another hominid,...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:24 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 16, 2004
Category: Evolution
Here's the most important thing about The Ancestor's Tale that I couldn't fit in my review. I kept noticing how little Richard Dawkins mentioned the other celebrity evolutionary biologist of our time, Stephen Jay Gould. After all, Gould was a...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:35 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
The New York Times is running my review of Richard Dawkins's new book The Ancestor's Tale this weekend. I'm particularly grateful at times like these to have a blog, where I can add extra information and the occasional correction. Towards...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 7:15 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 15, 2004
Category: Evolution
Yesterday I blogged about how the National Park Service is selling a young-Earth creationist book about the Grand Canyon in its stores. Today the Washington Post wrote an article on the subject. It contains a response from the National Park...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 5:19 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 13, 2004
Category: Evolution
David Appell points to some depressing news about how our government deals with science. In August 2003, the Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent tried to block the sale of a book in National Park Service stores. The book claims that...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:04 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 11, 2004
Category: Evolution
A lot of readers have commented on my recent post about a study that suggests we all share a common ancestor who lived 2,300 years ago. Some people doubted that isolated groups could share such a recent ancestry. One of...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:32 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
In March, I wrote a post on some tantalizing new findings about the secrets of human evolution lurking in our genome. In brief, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studied a gene called MYH16 that helps build jaw muscles in...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:07 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
October 4, 2004
Category: Evolution
Contempt is never wise in biology. The creature that you look down on as lowly, degenerate, or disgusting may actually turn out to be sophisticated, successful, and--in some cases--waiting to tell you a lot about yourself. That's certainly the case...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 5:59 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Congratulations to Linda Buck and Richard Axel for winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine today. They won for their pioneering work on the 600 or so receptors that we use to smell. As is so often the case these days,...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:15 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
