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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Revised with a new introduction
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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
February 27, 2007
Category: General
This morning I noticed that on top of my blog there's an ad for an upcoming show on the Discovery Channel that claims to reveal the tomb of Jesus and his family. I haven't seen a preview of the show,...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:57 AM • 10 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
I suspect poking around Conservapedia will become one of my new tools for procrastination. You're guaranteed a jaw drop within a couple minutes of searching on this Wikipedia for conservatives. It occurred to me that I had not yet bothered...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:00 AM • 25 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 26, 2007
Category: Evolution
My ancestry forms a smear across northern and central Europe, a region of the world where many people have a peculiar gift: they can drink milk as adults. Almost all people can digest milk sugar (lactose) as babies, but in...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 5:06 PM • 6 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Upcoming Talks
Tomrrow I'm heading down to New York to take part in the "Inside Out" speaker series at New York University's Department of Journalism. John Rennie, editor-in-chief at Scientific American, and I will try to answer the question, "Can two prominent...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 10:56 AM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 24, 2007
Category: Evolution
Loyalty, teamwork, cruel deception: welcome to robot evolution....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:52 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 23, 2007
Category: General
The Koufax awards are among the biggest honors out here in the blogmos. It just came to my attention that the Loom has been nominated in the category of best writing. Of course, I'm packed in with lots of excellent...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 9:48 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 22, 2007
Category: Evolution
There was a time--in the 1960s and 1970s--when the phrase "Man the Hunter" enjoyed a lot of popularity. Some researchers claimed that the evolution of hunting played a key role in the origin of our lineage. That's what we made...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 12:00 PM • 15 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 21, 2007
Category: Evolution
Behold conservapedia, which calls itself "an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America"--and where we don't like Wikipedia at all. My fellow Sciencebloggers have been finding all sorts of factual troubles with the site over the...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 6:12 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 19, 2007
Category: The Parasite Files
Darwin gave a lot of thought to the strangest creatures on this planet, wondering how they had evolved from less strange ancestors. Whales today might be fish-like warm-blooded beasts with blowholes and flukes, but long ago, Darwin argued, their ancestors...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 2:22 PM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 7, 2007
Category: Evolution
The latest joy from the Discovery Institute: an attempt to make dodos look scary....
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 4:50 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Evolution
There are six and a half billion human stomachs on this little planet of ours, and over half of them are home to a microbe called Helicobacter pylori. Scientists have known about the bacteria since the late 1800s, but it...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 1:01 PM • 11 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
February 6, 2007
Category: Upcoming Talks
In celebration of Darwin's 198th birthday, there will be lots of events--talks, etc.--going on around the world next week. I'll be doing my part, heading to the Rockies to talk at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado. My talk is...
Posted by Carl Zimmer at 3:06 PM • 74 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
