loom
Posts by this author
February 12, 2005
Readers of the Loom may recall an earlier post about how creationists (including proponents of Intelligent Design) misleadingly cite peer-reviewed scientific research in order to make their own claims sound more persuasive. I mentioned that when the scientists themselves find out their research has…
February 8, 2005
Scientists studying people in minimally conscious states have published the results of brain scans showing that these people can retain a surprising amount of brain activity. The New York Times and MSNBC, among others, have written up accounts.
I profiled these scientists for a 2003 article in the…
February 7, 2005
Growing up as I did in the northeast, I always assumed that the really weird life forms lived somewhere else--the Amazonian rain forest, maybe, or the deep sea. But we've got at least one truly bizarre creature we can boast about: the star-nosed mole. Its star is actually 22 fleshy tendrils that…
January 28, 2005
Thanks to the many people who left comments on my recent post about some recent work on the intersection of stem cells and human evolution. I noticed that several people expressed variations on the same theme, one which deserves a response. To recap briefly: a great deal of research indicates that…
January 27, 2005
Recently I assisted the folks at Soundprint with an hour-long radio documentary about how humans are driving evolution in new directions. Here's the show, available on Real Player.
January 23, 2005
Last October, word leaked out that something might be seriously amiss with the embryonic stem cell lines approved by President Bush for federally funded research. Today, the full details were published on line in Nature Medicine. It's an important paper, and not only because it points out a grave…
January 21, 2005
My thanks to Nova for becoming my first blog sponsor. I've always been leery of the random scattershoot of ads you see on many blogs, and so I was relieved that I wound up with a better fit. (Full disclosure: I wrote the companion book to the big series on evolution that the Nova/WGBH team put…
January 18, 2005
The Guardian has a long but disjointed report about the dispute over Homo floresiensis. Articles like these rarely give a very good picture of scientific disputes, since all parties involved only get a couple catchy quotes apiece. I've been particularly puzzled by Teuku Jacob, the elderly…
January 14, 2005
Unscrewing the Inscrutable has been updating progress of the Huygens probe as it screeches towards the surface of Titan. So far (8:20 am) it still seems to be going well. The first real data will come later this morning. Of course, the really exciting stuff for us bio-freaks will come in a few…
January 13, 2005
Scrape off those stickers! AP reports that a judge has ruled that those goofy "Evolution is just a theory" stickers must be taken off of textbooks in Georgia. Now, how about those "Continental drift is just a theory" stickers on the geology textbooks?
January 13, 2005
More to read: The Tangled Bank--The Tangled Bank is a semi-regular banquet of posts from various blogs on biology. Thanks to the powers that be for including one of mine in the latest issue. Go read it for the rest, which are fascinating.
January 12, 2005
Dinosaur-eating Mammals (You heard me right): Jeff Hecht at New Scientist has a good write-up of the discovery of a dog-sized 130-million year old mammal with dinosaur bones in its gut. Most mammals may have been humble little critters during the Age of the Dinosaurs, but at least a few seemed to…
January 10, 2005
The more time I spend talking to biologists, the more they remind me of detectives. I have two stories in tomorrow's New York Times that make this connection particularly clear. In the first, E.O. Wilson attempts to solve the mystery of a plague of ants that devastated some of the earliest Spanish…
January 8, 2005
Not long ago I had a remarkable experience: I got to visit the nursery for what might prove to be a new form of life. At Michigan State University, a group of computer scientists, biologists, and philosophers run the Digital Evolution Laboratory. There, they are developing software called Avida…
January 6, 2005
When you consider a tapeworm or an Ebola virus, it is easy think of them as being evil to their very core. That's a mistake. It's true that at this point in their evolutionary history these species have become well adapted to living inside of other organisms (us), and using our resources to help…
December 31, 2004
Evolutionary biologists face a challenge that's a lot like a challenge of studying ancient human history: to retrieve vanished connections. The people who live in remote Polynesia presumably didn't sprout from the island soil like trees--they must have come from somewhere. Tracing their connection…
December 29, 2004
Phyllis Schlafly has suddenly become interested in evolution! She has written the most staggering display of buffoonery on the subject that I've read in a long time. She can't even tell the difference between Darwin and Lamarck--seriously. At least Steve Reuland at Panda's Thumb can dismantle this…
December 27, 2004
Size matters. At least that's the result of some recent research on long-term evolutionary trends that I'll be reporting in tomorrow's New York Times. Here are the first few paragraphs...
Bigger is better, the saying goes, and in the case of evolution, the saying is apparently right.
The notion…
December 16, 2004
Intelligence is no different than feathers or tentacles or petals. It's a biological trait with both costs and benefits. It costs energy (the calories we use to build and run our brains) which we could otherwise use to keep our bodies warm, to build extra muscle, to ward off diseases. It's also…
December 13, 2004
The folks at Real Climate have hit the ground running. They carefully demonstrate how misleading Michael Crichton's new book State of Fear is on global warming. Let's hope they can keep this quality up.
December 10, 2004
I just heard about Real Climate, a blog authored by some of the best climatologists in the business. The blogosphere has been flooded by awful gibberish about climate change that tries to make the most out of flimsy bits of research while making the least of the overwhelming scientific consensus.…
December 10, 2004
Imagine you're a columnist. You decide to write something about how the National Park Service is allowing a creationist book to be sold in their Grand Canyon stores, over the protests of its own geologists, who point out that NPS has a mandate to promote sound science. Hawking a book that claims…
December 10, 2004
The Australian media are doing a fantastic job of keeping up with the developments with Homo floresiensis. Here's the first three-dimensional reconstruction I've seen of the little hominid, made by an Australian archaeologist. It's published on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's web site. I'…
December 9, 2004
Homo floresiensis update: The Economist weighs in on the "borrowing" of the fossils. They mention that when the bones were removed, they were simply stuffed in a leather bag. This is not exactly the sort of procedure you see in protocols for avoiding contamination of ancient DNA. In the Australian…
December 6, 2004
In tomorrow's New York Times, I have an article about how to reconstruct a genome that's been gone for 80 million years. The genome in question belongs to the common ancestor of humans and many other mammals (fancy name: Boreoeutheria). In a paper in this month's Genome Research, scientists…
December 3, 2004
The tension continues to mount over the locking-up of the Homo floresiensis fossils, according to this new article in the Australian. (via Gene Expression)
November 30, 2004
I have a short piece in today's New York Times about how male swallows are evolving longer tails, which female swallows find sexy. Here's the original paper in press at The Journal of Evolutionary Biology. Measuring the effects of natural selection is tough work, the details of which are impossible…
November 26, 2004
On Wednesday I spoke on "The Current," the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation's morning radio show. The hour-long segment focuses on various aspects of evolution, such as the evolution of diseases and the ongoing creationist circus in Georgia. I spoke about how humans are altering the evolution of…
November 26, 2004
Last month saw the bombshell report that a tiny species of hominid lived on an Indonesian island 18,000 years ago. Since then there has been a dribbling of follow-up news. Some American paleoanthropologists have expressed skepticism, pointing out that while bones from several small individuals have…