"...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
From time to time, my Seed magazine hosts throw out a question for bloggers to answer. Today's question is concerns a column by James S. Robbins on global warming in the National Review Online. Robbins claims that global warming will...
I'll admit, I was a bit surprised when Popular Mechanics got in touch with me a while back about writing a story about aliens. I had always associated the magazine with people who knew how to take their car apart...
The language of DNA is written in a four-letter alphabet. The four different chemical units of DNA (called nucleotides) create an incomprehenisbly vast range of possibility codes. Consider a short sequence of 41 nucleotides. There are over 4.8 trillion trillion...
Cut-and-paste creationism? Yesterday I pointed readers to a column attacking evolution by Jack Kemp on the web site Town Hall. Today a sharp-eyed commenter pointed out that it is almost entirely identical to a column from Phyllis Schlafly from August...
Scoop up some dirt, and you'll probably wind up with some slime mold. Many species go by the common name of slime mold, but the ones scientists know best belong to the genus Dictyostelium. They are amoebae, and for the...
From his latest column: Liberals see the political value to teaching evolution in school, as it makes teachers and children think they are no more special than animals. Childhood joy and ambition can turn into depression as children learn to...
I'm happy to report that the eyes are back. My third book, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, came out in 2001. It's a survey of the history and cutting edge of evolutionary biology, from the origin of new species...
Like many parasites, a species of bacteria called Wolbachia takes charge of its own fate. Wolbachia can only survive inside the cells of its hosts--invertebrates such as this lovely common eggfly. This way of life limits Wolbachia's opportunities for long-term...
The Sunday Times in the UK reported yesterday on an upcoming paper that claims that the ever-fascinating Homo floresiensis (a k a the Hobbit) is not a new species, as previously reported. Instead, it was a human with a genetic...
I was happy to see that my post on Tuesday about the evolution of whales attracted a lot of readers. One commenter asked about seals and manatees. As other commenters kindly explained, those mammals descend from other ancestors (relatives of...