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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"...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
September 28, 2006
Category: Evolution
PZ Myers did an excellent job yesterday of dismantling the latest from intelligent-design advocate Jonathan Wells. Wells wrote a piece on WorldNetDaily called "Why Darwinism is Doomed." It is based some new research identifying an important gene involved in the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:54 AM • 50 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 26, 2006
Category: Global Warming
I always like to consider questions of the day from the perspective of deep time. How hot is it these days? Look back 1.35 million years, and you can see it's pretty hot. Here's a chart, published yesterday in...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:10 AM • 19 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 22, 2006
Category: Evolution
Last week I caught some of the talks at this year's Dwight H. Terry Lecture at Yale. The lectures are in their hundredth year, and this time around the topic was "The Religion and Science Debate: Why Does It Continue?"...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:29 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 19, 2006
Category: Brains
Congratulations to the new crop of Macarthur genius grant winners, including Ken Catania, a neuroscientist at Vanderbilt University whose muse is the star-nosed mole. It turns out that a single strange animal can reveal a lot about how nervous systems...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:40 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 18, 2006
Category: Evolution
Over the weekend I wrote about the natural history of the Escherichia coli strain that has contaminated spinach. According to reports today, 109 people have been identified as sickened with Escherichia coli O157:H7, and one has died. In the comment...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:04 PM • 21 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
I'm gearing up for some autumn talks. First up: Notre Dame University University of Notre Dame. The title of the talk is, "The Darwin Beat: Reporting on Evolution in a Controversial Age." When: Thursday, September 21, 4 pm. Where: Jordan...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:21 AM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 15, 2006
Category: Evolution
Don't eat your spinach. That's the word coming today from the FDA: they want everyone to avoid bagged spinach until they can get to the bottom of a nasty outbreak of Escherichia coli O157:H7, a virulent strain that infects an...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 8:48 PM • 35 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
Welcome to the club, Chris Mooney... Chris Mooney is the author of the excellent book, The Republican War on Science. He examines big hot-button scientific issues of the day such as global warming, stem cell research, and, of course, evolution....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 6:26 PM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 14, 2006
Category: Brains
Before 1833 there were no scientists. It was in that year that William Whewell, a British philosopher, geologist, and all-around bright bulb, coined the word scientist. His mentor, the poet Samuel Coleridge, thought the English language needed a term for...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:32 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 8, 2006
Category: Evolution
The comment thread over on my recent creationist-critique post has been very lively. A second creationist has joined in the fray, and I've posted a response....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 11:21 AM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 4, 2006
Category: Evolution
This female praying mantis is finishing up the last tasty bits of the male that just mated with her. In the lead article in tomorrow's science section of the New York Times, I talk to scientists who study females of...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:18 PM • 16 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
September 1, 2006
Category: Evolution
Before I moved the Loom to this address earlier this year, I got a fair amount of comments on my blogs about evolution from creationists. (See this entry, for example.) They fell off after the move, but now they're back...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:58 AM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
