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Posts by this author
September 15, 2006
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. It's a polemic, to be sure, but a well-researched one…
September 13, 2006
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 someone who studied the natural world but…
September 8, 2006
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.
September 4, 2006
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 some species that sometimes devour their mates. Sexual cannibalism is not common,…
August 31, 2006
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 in fine form. Today we are joined by Kevin Anderson, editor-in-chief of the…
August 30, 2006
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 be a great thing if it happens, which he doubts. The question is…
August 28, 2006
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 down to the last bolt and put it back together again. (Me, I gush with pride if I can…
August 25, 2006
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 possible sequences it could take. In…
August 24, 2006
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 16 on the Eagle Forum. I don't know if these…
August 23, 2006
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 most part they live the life of a rugged individualist. Each slime mold prowls…
August 23, 2006
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 reject that they were created in the image of God.
He may…
August 22, 2006
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 to mass extinctions, from the rise of complex life to the emergence of humans. The…
August 21, 2006
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 survival. If Wolbachia lives inside a…
August 21, 2006
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 defect called microcephaly that gave it a small head.
This is a long-…
August 18, 2006
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 bears and elephants, respectively) that independently…
August 16, 2006
The textbook explanation of DNA goes something like this: enzymes in our cells read a stretch of DNA and convert its code into a single-stranded RNA molecule, which is then used by ribosomes as a template for building a protein. That stretch of DNA biologists call a gene. The protein it encodes…
August 15, 2006
Whales are beautifully ridiculous. They are majestic divers, in some cases plunging nearly two miles underwater. And yet sooner or later they must rise back to the surface to breathe air. They breathe through a rather ridiculous-looking hole on top of their head. Unlike fish, which often reproduce…
August 9, 2006
Can a tumor become a new form of life?
This is the freaky but serious question that arises from a new study in the journal Cell. Scientists from London and Chicago have studied a peculiar cancer that afflicts dogs, known as canine transmissible venereal tumor (CTVT) or Sticker's sarcoma. It is a…
August 7, 2006
Last night, as my family settled into a three-hour drive home, I began scanning the AM radio dial. The tuner stopped at on a well-produced segment in which the announcer was talking about recent evolution of pigmentation genes and lactose-digestion genes in humans. This is a surprise, I thought,…
August 4, 2006
I'm heading out of blog contact for a couple days, so allow me to share one of my favorite posts, from last January--on wasps that perform brain surgery.
I collect tales of parasites the way some people collect Star Trek plates. And having filled an entire book with them, I thought I had pretty…
August 2, 2006
This morning the Kansas State Board of Education is all shook up.
Last year the board voted 6-4 for much-criticised, creationism-friendly science education standards. Yesterday the primaries for the board elections took place, and on balance, the science-standards bloc lost two seats to Republic…
August 1, 2006
Once again, I hear the siren song of Toxoplasma, the parasite that dwells in the brains of 50 million Americans.
Toxoplasma gondii is an extraordinary creature, whose exploits I've chronicled in previous posts , an article in the New York Times and my book Parasite Rex. This single-celled organism…
August 1, 2006
John Noble Wilford has a long, interesting article in today's New York Times on the rehabilitation of the alchemist. Once the icon of the bad old days before the scientific revolution, alchemy has been emerging in recent years as more of a proto-science. Indeed, a fair number of the heroes of the…
July 24, 2006
The Washington Post has an article today called And the Evolutionary Beat Goes On . . .. It is based on some interviews with scientists who are documenting evidence of natural selection in humans. I won't be surprised if it gets emailed hither and yon, but not for the text, which is based on stuff…
July 20, 2006
As I wrote in May, there have been some signs that scientists were gearing up to reconstruct the Neanderthal genome. Now it's official, as Nicholas Wade reports in the NY Times. [link fixed] I'm particularly intrigued that the paleoanthropologists doing this work are teaming up with a hot little…
July 19, 2006
As I browsed the new papers published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, I was brought up short by this frolicsome picture. It's a nice example of the visual display of information done right. It shows the spread of primates 55 million years ago across the Northern…
July 17, 2006
If our genes are wired like circuits, does that mean nature is an electrician?
One of the most important sorts of jobs that genes do is to switch other genes on or off. The classic example comes from Escherichia coli, and how it eats milk. (I'm afraid Escherichia coli will be progressively…
July 13, 2006
Randy Olson visited the Loom a few months ago in connection with his movie about our national fun and games with evolution and intelligent design, Flock of Dodos. He provoked a lot of discussion with his main point, that biologists were doing a poor job of reaching out to the public. Some skeptics…
July 12, 2006
It was eight years ago that some computer programmers got together and issued a manifesto for something they called open source software. Conventional software development--kept hidden behind walls of intellectual property, copyright, and secrecy--was clumsy and slow. It would be far better, the…
July 11, 2006
A good article on the importances of big animals helps put the new dodo fossil discoveries in some ecological context. If you can't bring dodos back, at least bring in the giant tortoises!