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
December 31, 2004
Category: Evolution
Evolutionary biologists face a challenge that's a lot like a challenge of studying ancient human history: to retrieve vanished connections. The people who live in remote Polynesia presumably didn't sprout from the island soil like trees--they must have come from...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:30 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 29, 2004
Phyllis Schlafly has suddenly become interested in evolution! She has written the most staggering display of buffoonery on the subject that I've read in a long time. She can't even tell the difference between Darwin and Lamarck--seriously. At least Steve...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:28 PM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 27, 2004
Category: Evolution
Size matters. At least that's the result of some recent research on long-term evolutionary trends that I'll be reporting in tomorrow's New York Times. Here are the first few paragraphs... Bigger is better, the saying goes, and in the case...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:53 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 16, 2004
Category: Evolution
Intelligence is no different than feathers or tentacles or petals. It's a biological trait with both costs and benefits. It costs energy (the calories we use to build and run our brains) which we could otherwise use to keep our...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:54 PM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 13, 2004
Category: General
The folks at Real Climate have hit the ground running. They carefully demonstrate how misleading Michael Crichton's new book State of Fear is on global warming. Let's hope they can keep this quality up....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:56 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 10, 2004
Category: General
I just heard about Real Climate, a blog authored by some of the best climatologists in the business. The blogosphere has been flooded by awful gibberish about climate change that tries to make the most out of flimsy bits of...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:41 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Imagine you're a columnist. You decide to write something about how the National Park Service is allowing a creationist book to be sold in their Grand Canyon stores, over the protests of its own geologists, who point out that NPS...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:29 AM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
The Australian media are doing a fantastic job of keeping up with the developments with Homo floresiensis. Here's the first three-dimensional reconstruction I've seen of the little hominid, made by an Australian archaeologist. It's published on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:56 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 9, 2004
Category: Blink ›
Homo floresiensis update: The Economist weighs in on the "borrowing" of the fossils. They mention that when the bones were removed, they were simply stuffed in a leather bag. This is not exactly the sort of procedure you see in...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:13 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 6, 2004
Category: Evolution
In tomorrow's New York Times, I have an article about how to reconstruct a genome that's been gone for 80 million years. The genome in question belongs to the common ancestor of humans and many other mammals (fancy name: Boreoeutheria)....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:08 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
December 3, 2004
Category: Blink ›
The tension continues to mount over the locking-up of the Homo floresiensis fossils, according to this new article in the Australian. (via Gene Expression)...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:29 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
