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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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
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 •
