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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, 2005
Category: Evolution
This week a few more tantalizing clues about the origin of language popped up. I blogged here and here about a fierce debate over the evolution of language. No other species communicates quite the way humans do, with a system...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:38 PM • 12 Comments •
June 28, 2005
Category: Evolution
Last year I went to a fascinating symposium in honor of the great evolutionary biologist George Williams. The March issue of the Quarterly Review of Biology ran a series of papers written by the speakers at the meeting that offered...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:46 PM • 11 Comments •
June 23, 2005
Category: Evolution
In the comments, Doug gets exasperated with some recent posts of mine: “Isn't it amazing how everything seems to provide evidence for evolution? The brain shrinks in some form of pygmy homo erectus. Thats evolution! Ancient genes survive millions of...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:02 PM • 108 Comments •
June 21, 2005
Category: Evolution
Back in 1986 a biologist named Cindy Lee Van Doverwas poking around the innards of shrimp from the bottom of the sea. They came from a hydrothermal vent in the Atlantic, where boiling, mineral-rich water came spewing up from cracks...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:11 PM • 5 Comments •
Category: Evolution
I’ve got an article in today’s New York Times about jellyfish and their kin—known as cnidarians. Cnidarians look pretty simple, which helped earn them a reputation as simple and primitive compared to vertebrates like us, as well as insects,...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:38 AM • 16 Comments •
June 16, 2005
Category: Hobbits (Homo floresiensis)
In October 2004 Australian and Indonesian announced they had discovered a three-foot tall species of hominid, Homo floresiensis, that was still alive no earlier than18,000 years ago. As I’ve detailed in previous posts, this claim has inspired a lot of...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:22 AM • 10 Comments •
June 15, 2005
Category: Hobbits (Homo floresiensis)
So let’s recap: It’s been almost eight months now since scientists announced the discovery of Homo floresiensis, the diminutive people that some claim belong to a new branch of hominid evolution and skeptics claim were just small humans. We...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:20 AM • 19 Comments •
June 9, 2005
Category: Evolution
I've been meaning to get around to writing about female orgasms. Philosopher of science Elizabeth Lloyd just published a new book in which she rejects the idea that they are an adapation. Then a paper was just published tying variation...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 5:07 PM • 3 Comments •
June 5, 2005
Category: Evolution
It’s strange enough that beetles grow horns. But it’s especially strange that beetles grow so many kinds of horns. This picture, which was published in the latest issue of the journal Evolution, shows a tiny sampling of this diversity....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:14 PM • 6 Comments •
Highly Allochthonous 11.05.2009
Eruptions 11.05.2009
Not Exactly Rocket Science 11.05.2009
Corpus Callosum 11.05.2009
Starts With a Bang 11.04.2009
