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January 1, 2006
I'll be in Ann Arbor for a talk on January 14 at the natural history museum in conjunction with the opening of the "Explore Evolution" exhibit there. I'll talk about reporting on new research in evolutionary biology. Here are the details.
December 29, 2005
Wandering around Amazon.com a couple weeks ago, I discovered that they are letting authors blog. It didn't take long for me to set one up here. But once I had set it up, it occurred to me I wasn't sure what exactly I should write for it. I then belatedly discovered this article and some blog…
December 28, 2005
Why is it that politicians who say they want to strengthen science teaching standards can sound so post-modern about science? Two examples:
1. John McCain grooving with the kids on MTV about evolution:
"I see no reason why students should not be exposed to all theories, recognizing that Darwin's…
December 25, 2005
If you could travel back to Spain about ten million years ago, you'd have no end of animals to watch, from apes to bear-dogs to saber-tooth tigers. With so many creatures jockeying for your attention (and perhaps chasing you down for lunch), you might well miss the creature shown here. Simocyon…
December 21, 2005
In October I wrote about the latest ideas about the evolution of autumn colors. The paper is now out.
December 21, 2005
When Judge John E. Jones III issued his decision in the Dover creationism trial on Tuesday, I downloaded the document with a vague sense of dread. It wasn't just that the decision was 139 pages long. I knew that Judge Jones had ruled that teaching intelligent design was unconstitutional, but I was…
December 20, 2005
For the information hounds out there, Alan Templeton's paper, "Haplotype Trees and Modern Human Origins," on which I based my previous post is now published.
December 20, 2005
Judge Rules Against 'Intelligent Design'
Initial reaction: what a relief. Once I have a chance to read the decision, I'll have something vaguely more insightful to say...
Update: Oy. The decision turns out to be 139 pages. PDF here.
Update, 11:30 am: Okay, I've had a chance to give it a quick read…
December 15, 2005
Blunt talk from L. Lynn Hogue, conservative law professor from Georgia via law.com. Hogue has signed an amicus brief in the Georgia textbook sticker case supporting the removal of the anti-evolution disclaimers. "I'm not religiously sympathetic to anti-evolutionists, who I think are lunatics."…
December 12, 2005
There are few things as fascinating to me as the question of how our ancestors evolved from small-brained, tree-dwelling apes. But sometimes it all can feel a bit abstract. After all, we're talking about things that happened six million years ago. Recently, though, I had a weird experience that…
December 6, 2005
Over the weekend I was part of a panel at the American Anthropology Association, the topic of which was "Updating Human Evolution." I got to listen to ten presentations by scientists, each offering a look at how our understanding of our ancestry is changing with new research. While they were all…
December 1, 2005
I've been asked to review a couple books about global warming. Climate change and evolution, which I mainly write about, are intimately related, since life is a potent source of greenhouse gases (methane from bacteria, etc.) and abrupt climate change has triggered profound changes in the biosphere…
December 1, 2005
Light blogging this week is due to my frantic fragment of a week, returning from Thanksgiving and preparing to head down to DC to participate on a panel at the American Anthropological Association. The panel is called "Updating Human Evolution: Bringing Anthropological and Public Coneceptions into…
November 29, 2005
Writing about paleontology without illustrations is like directing a movie without a camera. When I wrote my first book, At the Water's Edge, I had the good fortune to join forces with Carl Buell, who brought walking whales and fish with fingers to life. Now he has come to the other side, with a…
November 28, 2005
I've got a short piece in tomorrow's New York Times about the 400-million year history of insects. Some beautiful pictures of the creepers included.
November 28, 2005
Getting back home from a Thanksgiving journey full of turkey and queasy toddlers on airplanes, I just noticed that my visit-counter has rolled past the 500,000 mark. I never would have dreamed of such figures when I started this blog, and I just want to take a second to thank everyone who has ever…
November 27, 2005
Natural selection is not natural perfection. Time and again, biologists have discovered traits that are both beneficial and harmful. Perhaps the most famous example is the devastating disorder known as sickle-cell anemia. To get sickle-cell anemia, you have to inherit two faulty copies of a gene…
November 21, 2005
Back in February I discovered the remarkable work of Australian biologist Bryan Grieg Fry, who has been tracing the evolution of venom. As I wrote in the New York Times, he searched the genomes of snakes for venom genes. He discovered that even non-venomous snakes produce venom. By drawing an…
November 18, 2005
Following up on my earlier post, I wanted to relay one more piece of book news. I've been getting some emails over the past couple months inquiring about my book, Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. I wrote it as a companion volume to the 2001 PBS television series, Evolution. Like the series, the…
November 17, 2005
My latest book, Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins is now available on Amazon.com, and I think it's getting put on the shelves at bookstores. I've only referred to the book here glancingly from time to time, and I wanted to take a minute now to give Loom readers a sense of the book (and…
November 14, 2005
This story starts in 1987, with the skin of a frog.
Michael Zasloff, a scientist then at NIH, was impressed by how well a frog in his lab recovered from an incision he had made in its skin during an experiment. He kept his frogs in a tank that must have been rife with bacteria that should have…
November 7, 2005
As a father of two dawn-loving children I don't get as much sleep as I used to, which makes me wonder sometimes why I crave it so much. A number of scientists who share my curiosity have turned to sleeping animals to find an answer. Sleep appears to be an ancient behavior, perhaps 600 million years…
November 5, 2005
The insects scandalously embracing in this picture are decorated crickets (Grylllodes sigillatus), which can be found in the southwestern United States, among other places. The droplet on the male's tail is--for want of a better word--a gift. After producing this glob he sticks it onto the package…
November 3, 2005
Back in March I described a provocative paper that suggested that plants might be able to get around Mendel's laws of heredity. Reed Cartwright, the grad student behind De Rerum Natura, left a comment expressing some deep skepticism. Now he reports that he and Luca Comai of the University of…
October 30, 2005
A new autumn has brought another burst of red and yellow leaves. And it has also brought an interesting new idea about why trees put on this show every year.
In recent years, scientists have been roughly divided into two camps when it comes to autumn leaves. One camp holds that autumn colors are…
October 28, 2005
Peter Brown, anthropologist on the hobbit team, jumps into the comment fray himself on the nature of the fossils he discovered.
October 28, 2005
I'll be talking to science writers about blogging on Tuesday in New York. If you'd like to participate in the discussion, leave your comments here. Thanks.
October 27, 2005
A Bronx cheer for the four-legged hobbit from one of its discoverers. See my updated post.
October 27, 2005
Well, here's an idea I haven't heard of before...
Last year scientists found the bones of what they recognized as a new species of hominid that lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. They named it Homo floresiensis, and its three foot stature earned it the nickname the Hobbit. All of the…
October 26, 2005
There have been some interesting new developments in the study of the evolution of language. The idea that human language emerged from hand gestures rather than sounds has been getting very popular in recent years. Some scientists think that certain neurons in the brain played a crucial role in…