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
August 31, 2005
Category: Evolution
Clint, the chimpanzee in this picture, died several months ago at a relatively young age of 24. But part of him lives on. Scientists chose him--or rather, his DNA--as the subject of their first attempt to sequence a complete chimpanzee...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:01 PM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 29, 2005
Category: Evolution
Our genes are arrayed along 23 pairs of chromosomes. On rare occasion, a mutation can change their order. If we picture the genes on a chromosome as ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ a mutation might flip a segment of the chromosome, so that it...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 7:33 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 28, 2005
Category: Evolution
Sometimes a picture can tell you a lot about evolution. This particular picture has a story to tell about how two species--in this case a fly and an orchid--can influence each other's evolution. But the story it tells may not...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:38 AM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 24, 2005
Category: Evolution
Well, Dr. Chopra has given us part two of his ruminations on evolution with a post that will make physicists cringe as much as biologists. My favorite line: "Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 5:01 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
From an article on how John McCain may be positioning himself for a presidential run in The Arizona Star: McCain told the Star that, like Bush, he believes "all points of view" should be available to students studying the origins...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:50 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Scientists have been making some remarkable discoveries about viruses recently that may change the way we think about life. One place to start understanding what it all means is by looking at this picture. You can't help put see a...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:02 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 23, 2005
Category: Evolution
Here is an error-filled post about evolution by Deepak Chopra, frequent poster to the lefty blog, Huffington Post. I don't have time to point out the many ways in which Chopra mangles his description of biology, but PZ Myers has....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:25 PM • 8 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
The red blob in this picture is a human red blood cell, and the green blob in the middle of it is a pack of the malaria-causing parasites Plasmodium falciparum. Other species of the single-celled Plasmodium can give you malaria,...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:17 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 22, 2005
Category: Evolution
New branches on the tree of life have just turned up in Africa. Some are cuter than others. In Madagascar, our primate family was enlarged by two adorable species of mouse lemurs. Meanwhile, other scientists made an uglier discovery in...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:39 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 21, 2005
Category: Evolution
This article in the New York Times is a pretty useful overview of the political and financial support behind the Discovery Institute, the main anti-evolution think tank. It describes how the Institute has spent $3.6 million dollars to support fellowships...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:54 AM • 24 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 18, 2005
Category: General
Those interested in my upcoming talks may want to visit my main web site. I've started to post information about the talks, as well as bringing the archive of my articles up to date. Nothing more depressing than a stale...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:27 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 16, 2005
Category: Evolution
In today's New York Times I have an article about the quest to create a virtual organism—a sort of digital Frankenstein accurate down to every molecular detail. The creature that the scientists I write about want to reproduce is that...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:47 AM • 34 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 14, 2005
Category: Evolution
Mole rats are a pretty ugly, obscure bunch of creatures. They live underground in Africa, where they use their giant teeth to gnaw at roots. Those of you who know anything about mole rats most likely know about naked mole...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:59 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 11, 2005
Category: Evolution
It's bad enough to see basic scientific misinformation about evolution getting tossed around these days. USA Today apparently has no qualms about publishing an op-ed by a state senator from Utah (who wants to have students be taught about something...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:34 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 8, 2005
Category: The Parasite Files
I've got two stories in tomorrow's New York Times about getting sick. One is about malaria. I've always been fascinated by how parasites can manipulate their hosts for their own ends, and much of my book Parasite Rex is dedicated...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:39 PM • 22 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 5, 2005
Category: Evolution
I'll close the week with an open letter to President Bush just released by the American Astronomical Society's president, Prof. Robert Kirschner, to express disappointment with his comments on bringing intelligent design into the classroom. Astronomers may not deal with...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:26 PM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 3, 2005
Category: Evolution
A statement from the National Science Teachers' Association on Bush's remarks about Intelligent Design: NSTA Disappointed About Intelligent Design Comments Made by President Bush 2005-08-03 - NSTA The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), the world's largest organization of science educators,...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:57 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 2, 2005
Category: Evolution
The American Geophysical Union just issued a press release in response to Bush's comments about intelligent design. It's not online at their web site yet, so I've posted it here. (Update: It's on line now.) This is not the first...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 7:44 PM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
After a day-long road trip from Ohio, I finally had the chance to read the news that President Bush thinks that schools should discuss Intelligent Design alongside evolution, so that students can "understand what the debate is about." As Bush...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 5:35 PM • 52 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
August 1, 2005
Category: Evolution
I've been on hiatus for quite a while, in part because of some surgery (more on that later), but I just wanted to write a quick post to point you to my latest article in tomorrow's New York Times, about...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:34 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
