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
November 30, 2004
Category: Evolution
I have a short piece in today's New York Times about how male swallows are evolving longer tails, which female swallows find sexy. Here's the original paper in press at The Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Measuring the effects of natural...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:06 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 26, 2004
Category: Evolution
On Wednesday I spoke on "The Current," the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's morning radio show. The hour-long segment focuses on various aspects of evolution, such as the evolution of diseases and the ongoing creationist circus in Georgia. I spoke about how...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:58 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Last month saw the bombshell report that a tiny species of hominid lived on an Indonesian island 18,000 years ago. Since then there has been a dribbling of follow-up news. Some American paleoanthropologists have expressed skepticism, pointing out that while...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:54 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 22, 2004
Category: General
In tomorrow's issue of the New York Times, I have an essay that grew out of a meeting I went to earlier this month on natural history illustrations through the ages. The essay is accompanied by some of the cooler...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:32 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 19, 2004
Category: Evolution
There are lots of news stories today (as well as PZ Myers' take) about the fabulous new discovery in Spain of Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, a 13-million year old fossil close to the common ancestor of all living great apes. The early...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 5:53 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Apparently so. ...Actually, this new Gallup report shows that 35% of people believe that Darwin's theory of evolution is not supported by the evidence, while another 29% don't know enough to say, and 1% have no opinion. So perhaps I...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:43 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 18, 2004
Category: Evolution
A little more horn-tooting: The Loom has just been named a winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's 2004 Science Journalism Award. The judges considered three pieces: Hamilton's Fall, Why the Cousins Are Gone, and My Darwinian...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:28 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 10, 2004
Category: Brains
Soul Made Flesh made Amazon.com's Editor's Pick list of the ten best science books of 2004. It's an honor, although it seems a little premature to call 2004 over!...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:28 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
November 3, 2004
Category: Evolution
Thanks to Wired for excerpting my post on what DNA has to say about one-man-one-woman marriage. When the editors told me that they were going to run the excerpt, I thought at first that it might be a bit stale...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 5:37 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: General
It's obvious from yesterday's vote that embryonic stem cells will continue to split the country (California versus Washington DC, for one thing). But in an ironic bit of timing researchers at the Reproductive Genetics Institute have just published some...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:24 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
