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
NOW ON SALE!
Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life
Charles Darwin's The Descent of Man: The Concise Edition
"As fine a book as one will find on the subject."-- Scientific American
Revised with a new introduction
"Superb...a non-stop delight."-- New Scientist
"Fascinating...thrilling... Zimmer has produced a top-notch work of popular science." --LA Times
"A fascinating story, which Zimmer unfolds as a tale of high-stakes scientific sleuthing...thanks to marvelous lucid writing." --Booklist
Stay abreast of your favorite bloggers' latest and greatest via e-mail, via a daily digest.
"...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
March 30, 2005
Category: Evolution
Spring is finally slinking into the northeast, and the backyard wildlife here is shaking off the winter torpor. Our oldest daughter, Charlotte, is now old enough to be curious about this biological exuberence. She likes to tell stories about little...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:16 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 28, 2005
Category: Evolution
I'll be a guest tonight at 7 PM EST on NPR's talk show On Point, talking about the new wave of dinosaur science. Jack Horner will be on as well, delivering the dirt about his mind-blowing discovery of soft tissue...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:02 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 23, 2005
Category: Evolution
Today Gregor Mendel is a towering hero of biology, and yet during his own lifetime his ideas about heredity were greeted with deafening silence. In hindsight, it's easy to blame his obscurity on his peers, and to say that they...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:43 AM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 21, 2005
Category: Evolution
Panda's Thumb has an update on the ongoing drama over teaching creationism in public schools taking place in York, Pennsylvania. Last year a group of residents donated 58 copies of a creationst book called Of Pandas and People to the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:05 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Readers were busy this weekend, posting over fifty comments to my last post about HIV. Much of the discussion was sparked by the comments of a young-Earth creationist who claims that the evolutionary tree I presented was merely an example...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:57 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 18, 2005
Category: Evolution
You may have heard last month's news about an aggressive form of HIV that had public health officials in New York scared out of their professional gourds. They isolated the virus from a single man, and reported that it was...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:04 PM • 59 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 16, 2005
Category: Evolution
I can't remember the first time I saw the dinosaur fossils at the American Museum of Natural History, but they've been good friends for over thirty years. We've all changed a lot over that time. I've grown up and gotten...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:03 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 7, 2005
Category: Evolution
Last week my editor at the New York Times asked me to write an article about the evolution of crying, to accompany an article by Sandra Blakeslee on colic. Both articles (mine and Blakeslee's) are coming out tomorrow. As I've...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:21 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 3, 2005
Category: Hobbits (Homo floresiensis)
At 1 p.m. today I listened by phone to a press conference in Washington where scientists presented the first good look inside a Hobbit's head. The view is fascinating. While it may help clear up some mysteries, it seems to...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:00 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 1, 2005
Category: Evolution
I've got an article in today's New York Times about animal personalities. Update: I'm not ashamed to admit I'm a regular visitor to the gossip site Gawker. But I have to say I was surprised to see the personality article...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:01 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
In my last post, I traced a debate over the evolution of language. On one side, we have Steven Pinker and his colleagues, who argue that human language is, like the eye, a complex adaptation produced over millions of years...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:56 AM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
