Reef sightings : Neuron Culture

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I write articles on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications, and am working on my fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, which expands on my recent December 2009 Atlantic article. In August 2010, I'll be moving to London for a year to work on the book. I'll also serve as a senior fellow at City University London's MA science journalism program.

You're encouraged to check out my third book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which traces the strangest but most forgotten controversy in Darwin's career; subscribe to Neuron Culture by email; see more of my work at my main website ; or track Twitter feed, my Google Reader shared items, or my Tumblr log, which gets it all.

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Reef sightings

Posted on: September 2, 2009 6:37 AM, by David Dobbs

I was pleased to see my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral written up in a couple of venues recently. Over at The Primate Diaries, Eric Michael Johnson, who does on history and philosophy of science, looks at the "terrific argument" that the book follows -- an argument simultaneously about how coral reefs form, how to do science, and (a third layer out), creationism versus empiricism. A nice write-up -- you can't go wrong starting a piece about the creationism-empiricism debate (among other things) with an atomic blast.

The book is also mentioned in a more wide-ranging interview of myself at The Reef Tank, a site that covers all things coral, and often runs interviews with scientists, writers, and others interested in reefs. We talked about Reef Madness as well as The Great Gulf, my book on the collapse of the New England fishery (and how to count fish). Among other treasures: This photo of me with a goosefish, taken while I was collecting survey data on a research cruise aboard NOAA's R/V Albatross IV, a decade ago this November.