loom
Posts by this author
March 23, 2004
Attention Virginian readers of the Loom: I'll be heading to warmer climes later this week to speak in Charlottesville at the Virginia Festival of the Book. On Thursday at 4 I'll be speaking on a panel about science and society. On Friday at 4 I'll be speaking again on scientific discoveries and how…
March 22, 2004
I've posted a new batch of reviews for Soul Made Flesh on my web site. The newest is from Ross King, the author of Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling. His review in yesterday's Los Angeles Times is a rare sort--he likes the book (which he calls "thrilling") for what the…
March 22, 2004
Last week I wrote about an important new study showing that three very different groups of species--plants, butterflies, and birds--have all been declining at the same alarming rate for over 40 years in Great Britain. The authors concluded that if the pattern is global, it may mean that we are…
March 18, 2004
When I ask scientists what's the biggest misunderstanding people have about their work, they often talk about how they know what they know. People tend to think that a scientist's job is to gather every single datum about something in nature--a mountain, a species of jellyfish, a neutron star--and…
March 17, 2004
Three weeks ago, I gave a talk at Stanford University about my new book Soul Made Flesh. A wonderful crowd turned out and peppered me with excellent questions afterwards, each of which could have become new talks of their own. CSPAN was there to film it, and they'll be broadcasting the talk this…
March 17, 2004
In one of the weirdest attempts to pretend that creationism is a real science, a student at Harvard Law School wrote a favorable review in the Harvard Law Review of a book about Intelligent Design. You'd think that this would be so irrelevant that it would vanish off the cultural radar in a flash.…
March 15, 2004
For over two centuries, opponents of evolution have searched for examples of natural complexity that could have only been created by design. Reverend William Paley was fond of the eye, with its lens, retina, and other components all beautifully fine-tuned to work with one another. These days, the…
March 12, 2004
I have been grievously mum in response to the many comments that readers have been sending to the Loom. My silence is not hostile--it is the result of way too much traveling, too much magazine writing, and the standard sleep deprivation that comes with life with two young daughters. In fact,…
March 10, 2004
Ohio's Board of Education has taken a big step towards forcing its students to waste their time on creationist pseudo-objections to evolution. PZ Meyers has a good round-up of this sad situation.
March 9, 2004
When George Bush quietly dismissed two members of his Council on Bioethics on the last Friday in February, he probably assumed the news would get buried under the weekends distractions. But ten days later, its still hotsee, for example, two articles in Slate, and an editorial in the Washington Post…
March 9, 2004
Over on my web site I've posted an article I've just written for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine in England about an eerie brain disorder called musical hallucinosis. You've probably had a tune stuck in your head for an hour at least once in your life. Now imagine that the tune played all day and…
March 4, 2004
The Austin Chronicle has an interesting piece today on blogs, which marks the first time anyone's ever interviewed me about the Loom. Conclusion: no money, uncertain future, but much fun.
March 4, 2004
Probing the origins of humanity is actually a lot like being a dentist. The bones of our hominid ancestors tend to fall apart, leaving behind a smattering of shards. But teeth, made of enamel, can do a better job of withstanding the ravages of time. And teeth--particularly those of mammals--are not…
March 2, 2004
I was puzzled by an article in today's New York Times called "Researchers rewrite first chapter for the history of medicine." William Honan, the reporter, announced that "an art historian and a medical researcher say they have pushed back by hundreds of years the earliest use of a medicinal plant…
March 2, 2004
If you want to hear about brain science at its birth and today, check out the public radio show Tech Nation, this week. In the first half of the show, I'll be talking about Soul Made Flesh. In the second half, Steven Johnson will be talking about his excellent new book, Mind Wide Open. You can find…
March 1, 2004
In my last post, I wrote about how our genes work in networks, much like circuits made of elements wired together in various ways. As genes are accidentally duplicated, mutated, and rewired, old networks can give rise to new ones. It's pretty clear our ancestors could have never become particularly…
February 29, 2004
As biologists figure out more about how life is, they can then figure out how it got to be that way. First there were genes. Mendel noticed that somehow the wrinkles on wrinkled peas could be transmitted down through the generations, even if some of those generations had no wrinkles at all. It…
February 26, 2004
Apologies for the long radio silence. Travelling and the obligatory pre-travelling frenzy shut down the blogging assembly line for a couple weeks. Having wrapped up my west-coast jaunt (thanks to the great crowd that came out for the CSPAN taping at Stanford), I can write a bit about some of the…
February 18, 2004
If you live in the Bay Area, please join me noon on Monday, February 23, at Stanford University for a talk about Soul Made Flesh. (Here are all the details.)
The talk is sponsored by the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics and the Stanford Brain Research Institute. It's gratifying that…
February 12, 2004
My wife and I have two lovely daughters: Charlotte is two and a half, and Veronica is seven weeks. And we are tired. We think of ourselves as being on the losing end of a tag-team wrestling match--particularly at about seven in the morning, after Veronica has gone through a few hours of pre-dawn…
February 9, 2004
I'll be on Fresh Air with Terry Gross today, talking about Soul Made Flesh. If you miss it today, it will be archived at the show's web site.
February 6, 2004
Abominable is not the sort of word that most people may associate with flowers, but for Darwin, it was a perfect fit. He saw life on Earth today as the result of millions of years of victories and defeats in the evolutionary arena. Flowering plants, by that reasoning, were among the greatest…
February 5, 2004
A while back I had the pleasure to join a team of scientists and teachers to build web site that explains evolution. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation, it charts the history of evolutionary thought (both before and after Darwin), and lays out the…
February 5, 2004
Georgia's State Schools superintendent Kathy Cox has backed down from her ban on the word evolution.
While this is excellent news, Georgia is still left with an incompetent superintendent. For one thing, she thinks Intelligent Design is an acceptable theory to teach in schools. For another, she…
February 5, 2004
"Conservative board members said they wanted to make sure that schools teach sound science, arguing that evolution is a flawed theory that cannot be proven."
--"In Kansas, key decision on teaching evolution" Associated Press, August 12, 1999.
If the new fad of "sound science" takes hold in…
February 5, 2004
Check out Chris Mooney's post on the latest move in Washington to gut government science, which cloaks itself in bogus terms like "sound science." This dreadful campaign probably won't get much attention in the national media, but its effects--on conservation, climate change policy, and so on--…
January 30, 2004
Charles Darwin had no great hope of witnessing natural selection at work in his own time. He assumed that it would operate as slowly and imperceptibly as the water that eroded cliffs and canyons. He would have been delighted to discover that he was actually wrong on this count. By the mid-1900s,…
January 26, 2004
If you're in New York, you've got two chances on Tuesday January 27 to hear me talk about Soul Made Flesh. At 5:30 I'll be giving a talk in the "Mind Over Body" lecture series at New York Public Library's Science and Industry Branch at 188 Madison Ave. I'll then be heading to the East Villiage to…
January 26, 2004
Last week I wrote a post about some new research that suggests that global warming could trigger large-scale extinctions in the next few decades. In particular, I dissected some of the objections that were leveled at the study, pointing out how irrelevant they are to the actual science at hand.…
January 23, 2004
If you'd like an example of the latest rhetorical tricks being used by antievolutionists, you can't do better than this press release issued today from the Discovery Institute. The Minnesota legistlature has to choose between two drafts of state science standards written by a committee. A minority…