loom
Posts by this author
August 24, 2005
From an article on how John McCain may be positioning himself for a presidential run in The Arizona Star:
McCain told the Star that, like Bush, he believes "all points of view" should be available to students studying the origins of mankind.
"Available" is a wonderfully vague word.
Senator, Senator…
August 24, 2005
Scientists have been making some remarkable discoveries about viruses recently that may change the way we think about life. One place to start understanding what it all means is by looking at this picture.
You can't help put see a bright triangle with its three corners sitting on top of the black…
August 23, 2005
Here is an error-filled post about evolution by Deepak Chopra, frequent poster to the lefty blog, Huffington Post. I don't have time to point out the many ways in which Chopra mangles his description of biology, but PZ Myers has. Clear evidence that scientific illiteracy does not respect political…
August 23, 2005
The red blob in this picture is a human red blood cell, and the green blob in the middle of it is a pack of the malaria-causing parasites Plasmodium falciparum. Other species of the single-celled Plasmodium can give you malaria, but if you're looking for a real knock-down punch, P. falciparum is…
August 21, 2005
New branches on the tree of life have just turned up in Africa. Some are cuter than others.
In Madagascar, our primate family was enlarged by two adorable species of mouse lemurs. Meanwhile, other scientists made an uglier discovery in the small country of Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa. They…
August 20, 2005
This article in the New York Times is a pretty useful overview of the political and financial support behind the Discovery Institute, the main anti-evolution think tank. It describes how the Institute has spent $3.6 million dollars to support fellowships that include scientific research in areas…
August 18, 2005
Those interested in my upcoming talks may want to visit my main web site. I've started to post information about the talks, as well as bringing the archive of my articles up to date. Nothing more depressing than a stale web site.
August 15, 2005
In today's New York Times I have an article about the quest to create a virtual organisma sort of digital Frankenstein accurate down to every molecular detail. The creature that the scientists I write about want to reproduce is that familiar denizen of our gut, Escherichia coli.
There are two…
August 14, 2005
Mole rats are a pretty ugly, obscure bunch of creatures. They live underground in Africa, where they use their giant teeth to gnaw at roots. Those of you who know anything about mole rats most likely know about naked mole rats, which have evolved a remarkable society that is more insect than…
August 11, 2005
It's bad enough to see basic scientific misinformation about evolution getting tossed around these days. USA Today apparently has no qualms about publishing an op-ed by a state senator from Utah (who wants to have students be taught about something called "divine design") claiming there is no…
August 8, 2005
I've got two stories in tomorrow's New York Times about getting sick.
One is about malaria. I've always been fascinated by how parasites can manipulate their hosts for their own ends, and much of my book Parasite Rex is dedicated to explaining how this creepy remote control works. I've come across…
August 5, 2005
I'll close the week with an open letter to President Bush just released by the American Astronomical Society's president, Prof. Robert Kirschner, to express disappointment with his comments on bringing intelligent design into the classroom. Astronomers may not deal with natural selection or fossils…
August 3, 2005
A statement from the National Science Teachers' Association on Bush's remarks about Intelligent Design:
NSTA Disappointed About Intelligent Design Comments Made by President Bush
2005-08-03 - NSTA
The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), the world's largest organization of science…
August 2, 2005
The American Geophysical Union just issued a press release in response to Bush's comments about intelligent design. It's not online at their web site yet, so I've posted it here. (Update: It's on line now.) This is not the first time that the 43,000 members of the AGU have spoken out against…
August 2, 2005
After a day-long road trip from Ohio, I finally had the chance to read the news that President Bush thinks that schools should discuss Intelligent Design alongside evolution, so that students can "understand what the debate is about."
As Bush himself said, this is pretty much the same attitude he…
August 1, 2005
I've been on hiatus for quite a while, in part because of some surgery (more on that later), but I just wanted to write a quick post to point you to my latest article in tomorrow's New York Times, about how birds can sing like cricket. It's a wonderful example of how sexual selection can alter…
July 12, 2005
I've got an article in today's New York Times about one of my perennial fascinationsmusical hallucinations. One of the reasons that I find this condition so interesting is that it gives us a look under the neurological hood. Our brains do not simply take in objective impressions of the world. They…
July 8, 2005
I've been fascinated by this picture since I first saw it over the weekend. It's a hint of how we may be visualizing life in years to come.
As Darwin was trying to figure out how new species could evolve from old species, he began to think of evolution as a tree. He scribbled some simple branches…
July 5, 2005
How long can an idea stay tantalizing?
Back in 2003, I blogged about an experiment that suggested, incredibly enough, that our long-term memories are encoded by prions the misfolded proteins that are generally accepted to be the cause of mad cow disease. The evidence came from studies of a protein…
June 30, 2005
Science Magazine is celebrating its 125th anniversary with 125 big questions that scientists will face in the next 25 years. You can read them all for free here. For the 25 biggest questions, the editors commissioned short essays. I addressed the minor matter of how and where life began.…
June 30, 2005
This week a few more tantalizing clues about the origin of language popped up.
I blogged here and here about a fierce debate over the evolution of language. No other species communicates quite the way humans do, with a system of sounds, words, and grammar that allows us to convey an infinite number…
June 28, 2005
Last year I went to a fascinating symposium in honor of the great evolutionary biologist George Williams. The March issue of the Quarterly Review of Biology ran a series of papers written by the speakers at the meeting that offered much more detail on how Williams had influenced them in their…
June 23, 2005
In the comments, Doug gets exasperated with some recent posts of mine:
Isn't it amazing how everything seems to provide evidence for evolution? The brain shrinks in some form of pygmy homo erectus. Thats evolution! Ancient genes survive millions of years unchanged. That's evolution?! Women have…
June 21, 2005
Back in 1986 a biologist named Cindy Lee Van Doverwas poking around the innards of shrimp from the bottom of the sea. They came from a hydrothermal vent in the Atlantic, where boiling, mineral-rich water came spewing up from cracks in the Earths crust and supported rich ecosystems of tube-worms,…
June 21, 2005
Ive got an article in todays New York Times about jellyfish and their kinknown as cnidarians. Cnidarians look pretty simple, which helped earn them a reputation as simple and primitive compared to vertebrates like us, as well as insects, squid, and other creatures with heads and tails, eyes, and…
June 16, 2005
In October 2004 Australian and Indonesian announced they had discovered a three-foot tall species of hominid, Homo floresiensis, that was still alive no earlier than18,000 years ago. As Ive detailed in previous posts, this claim has inspired a lot of debate, much which revolves around whether the…
June 15, 2005
So lets recap: Its been almost eight months now since scientists announced the discovery of Homo floresiensis, the diminutive people that some claim belong to a new branch of hominid evolution and skeptics claim were just small humans. We seem to have entered a lull in the flow of new scientific…
June 9, 2005
I've been meaning to get around to writing about female orgasms.
Philosopher of science Elizabeth Lloyd just published a new book in which she rejects the idea that they are an adapation. Then a paper was just published tying variation in the experience of orgasms to genes.
Unfortunately, I've been…
June 5, 2005
Its strange enough that beetles grow horns. But its especially strange that beetles grow so many kinds of horns. This picture, which was published in the latest issue of the journal Evolution, shows a tiny sampling of this diversity. The species shown here all belong to the genus Onthophagus, a…
May 19, 2005
Today in Science scientists reported a potentially big advance in creating embryos that can be used for stem cell transplants. Briefly put, they figured out how to take skin cells from patients, inject them into donated eggs emptied of their own DNA, and nurture them along until they had divided…