loom
Posts by this author
November 22, 2004
In tomorrow's issue of the New York Times, I have an essay that grew out of a meeting I went to earlier this month on natural history illustrations through the ages. The essay is accompanied by some of the cooler images I saw there, some of which are also included in the web version. Here's one…
November 19, 2004
There are lots of news stories today (as well as PZ Myers' take) about the fabulous new discovery in Spain of Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, a 13-million year old fossil close to the common ancestor of all living great apes.
The early evolution of apes is where some of the most interesting…
November 19, 2004
Apparently so.
...Actually, this new Gallup report shows that 35% of people believe that Darwin's theory of evolution is not supported by the evidence, while another 29% don't know enough to say, and 1% have no opinion. So perhaps I should say, wrong or uninformed.
November 18, 2004
A little more horn-tooting: The Loom has just been named a winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's 2004 Science Journalism Award. The judges considered three pieces: Hamilton's Fall, Why the Cousins Are Gone, and My Darwinian Daughters. Here's the press release. Thanks…
November 10, 2004
Soul Made Flesh made Amazon.com's Editor's Pick list of the ten best science books of 2004. It's an honor, although it seems a little premature to call 2004 over!
November 3, 2004
Thanks to Wired for excerpting my post on what DNA has to say about one-man-one-woman marriage. When the editors told me that they were going to run the excerpt, I thought at first that it might be a bit stale by the time the magazine came out. But it seems today that the proper form of marriage is…
November 3, 2004
It's obvious from yesterday's vote that embryonic stem cells will continue to split the country (California versus Washington DC, for one thing). But in an ironic bit of timing researchers at the Reproductive Genetics Institute have just published some results at Reproductive BioMedicine Online…
October 29, 2004
The good folks at Corante are rejiggering the design of their blogs, The Loom included. Some stuff has yet to make the transition as of this writing, but before too long it will all be back in place.
October 26, 2004
Get to know that little skull. Scientists are going to be talking about it for centuries.
As researchers report in tomorrow's issue of Nature, the skull--and along with other parts of a skeleton--turned up in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. Several different dating methods gave the same…
October 25, 2004
I've written a piece for Newsweek about how to program a cell. (The Newsweek International edition comes out this week; the US edition comes out next week.) I find the ongoing research exciting, but sometimes I wonder how much of its promise will become real. Programmable cells, for example, are an…
October 21, 2004
Last month I blogged about my Scientific American review of Dean Hamer's new book, The God Gene. I was not impressed. It's not that I was dismissing the possibility that there might be genetic influences on religious behavior. I just think that the time for writing pop-sci books about the discovery…
October 18, 2004
I have an article in tomorrow's New York Times about the mystery of autumn leaves. Insect warning? Sunscreen? The debate rages. The one thing I was sad to see get cut for space was the statement by one of the scientists that the answer might be "all of the above." This sort of multitasking is the…
October 17, 2004
Last week I blogged about the strange story of our past encoded in the DNA of lice. We carry two lineages of lice, one of which our Homo sapiens ancestors may have picked up in Asia from another hominid, Homo erectus. I always get a kick imagining human beings, having migrated out of Africa around…
October 16, 2004
Here's the most important thing about The Ancestor's Tale that I couldn't fit in my review. I kept noticing how little Richard Dawkins mentioned the other celebrity evolutionary biologist of our time, Stephen Jay Gould. After all, Gould was a prominent character in many of Dawkins's previous books…
October 16, 2004
The New York Times is running my review of Richard Dawkins's new book The Ancestor's Tale this weekend.
I'm particularly grateful at times like these to have a blog, where I can add extra information and the occasional correction.
Towards the start of the review I mention a remarkable tree of 3,000…
October 15, 2004
Yesterday I blogged about how the National Park Service is selling a young-Earth creationist book about the Grand Canyon in its stores. Today the Washington Post wrote an article on the subject. It contains a response from the National Park Service, which I find pretty unbelievable. They claim that…
October 13, 2004
David Appell points to some depressing news about how our government deals with science.
In August 2003, the Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent tried to block the sale of a book in National Park Service stores. The book claims that the Grand Canyon formed in Noah's Flood. No vague ambiguity…
October 11, 2004
A lot of readers have commented on my recent post about a study that suggests we all share a common ancestor who lived 2,300 years ago. Some people doubted that isolated groups could share such a recent ancestry.
One of the study's authors, Steve Olson (also the author of the book Mapping Human…
October 11, 2004
In March, I wrote a post on some tantalizing new findings about the secrets of human evolution lurking in our genome. In brief, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studied a gene called MYH16 that helps build jaw muscles in primates. In our own lineage, the gene has mutated and is no…
October 4, 2004
Contempt is never wise in biology. The creature that you look down on as lowly, degenerate, or disgusting may actually turn out to be sophisticated, successful, and--in some cases--waiting to tell you a lot about yourself. That's certainly the case for lice.
The human body louse, Pediculus humanus…
October 4, 2004
Congratulations to Linda Buck and Richard Axel for winning the Nobel Prize for Medicine today. They won for their pioneering work on the 600 or so receptors that we use to smell. As is so often the case these days, the research that wins people the Nobel for Medicine also reveals a lot about our…
September 23, 2004
Every now and then you come across a scientific hypothesis that is so elegant and powerful in its ability to explain that it just feels right. Yet that doesn't automatically make it right. Even when an elegant hypothesis gets support from experiments, it's not time to declare victory. This is…
September 20, 2004
I am sure that in 50 years, we are going to know a lot more about how the mind works. The fusion of psychology and genetics will tell us about how our personality is influenced by our genes, and they'll also show exactly how the environment plays a hand as well. The preliminary evidence is just too…
September 15, 2004
The soft spot on a baby's head may be able to tell us when our ancestors first began to speak.
We have tremendously huge brains--six times bigger than the typical brain of a mammal our size. Obviously, that big size brings some fabulous benefits--consciousness, reasoning, and so on. But it has…
September 13, 2004
Evolution works on different scales. In a single day, HIV's genetic code changes as it adapts to our ever-adapting immune system. Over the course of decades, the virus can make a successful leap from one species to another (from chimpanzees to humans, for example). Over a few thousand years,…
September 2, 2004
Today scientists took another step towards creating the sort of simple life forms that may have been the first inhabitants of Earth. I wrote a feature for the June issue of Discover about this group, led by Jack Szostak at Harvard Medical School. Szostak and his colleagues suspect that life started…
September 1, 2004
"A world without memory is a world of the present," Alan Lightman wrote in Einstein's Dreams. "The past exists only in books, in documents. In order to know himself, each person carries his own Book of Life, which is filled with the history of his life...Without his Book of Life, a person is a…
August 30, 2004
While doing some research on human evolution, I stumbled across the web site for a wonderful meeting that was held in March at San Diego to celebrate the sequencing of the chimpanzee genome. You can watch the lectures here. By comparing the chimp genome to the human genome, scientists are…
August 27, 2004
Is Intelligent Design the same thing as creationism? The people who back Intelligent Design have spilled an awful lot of ink saying they're different. Even self-proclaimed creationists have tried to claim a difference. Somehow, both of these camps think that any confusion between the two is…