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Posts by this author
January 23, 2004
Sometimes when you take a look at life on Earth, it seems like evolution might be able to produce anything you could ever imagine. Can a mammal become so adapted to swimming in the ocean that it never comes back on dry land? Check. Can a squid evolve eyes as big as dinner plates? Check. Can a mole…
January 19, 2004
At noon today in New York I'll be at the Makor Center of the 92nd St. Y at 35 W. 67 St. to talk about Soul Made Flesh.
January 19, 2004
If you've ever been to a Central American forest, you've probably heard the hoots and wails of a howler monkey. But these creatures deserve our attention for more than their howls. They turn out to tell us a lot about the evolution of our own senses. We and some of our close primate relatives are…
January 14, 2004
The emotions that other species summon up in the human brain are perplexing. A lion inspires awe and respect. It is the king of the jungle, a great name for a football team, a noble guardian of the entrance to the New York Public Library. A tapeworm, on the other hand, summons disgust mixed with a…
January 14, 2004
Based on some feedback from subscribers and my own nosing around, I've decided to switch the subscription system to Bloglet. While this requires you to create a user name over at bloglet.com, the result of this minor chore seems better to me. The main attraction is that links and such don't turn…
January 12, 2004
Last week I briefly mentioned some stark estimates about the potential extinctions that could be triggered by global warming. Since then, some global warming skeptics have tried to pour cold water on these results by making some dubious claims about natural selection and extinctions. While I have…
January 12, 2004
Today I'll be talking for an hour about Soul Made Flesh on Minnesota public radio. You can listen to the broadcast live online at 11 am EST (the show will be archived). At 2 pm EST, you can listen online again when I talk on the Glen Mitchell show on Dallas public radio.
Some thoughts on the…
January 11, 2004
It's been a month since I've joined Corante, and my deep thanks go out to the many new readers who have visited the Loom. Daily visits reached a new high this Friday, January 9, with 900 pairs of eyeballs pointed this way. Please be sure to enter your email address in the subscription box in the…
January 9, 2004
Oliver Sacks muses on how we construct our perceptions of reality. (Via ALDaily.)
January 7, 2004
I'm en route to Washington DC to talk tonight about Soul Made Flesh. If you're in the District, please come to Reiter's Bookstore at 2021 K Street NW at 6:30. On my web site I'm posting all my talks and radio interviews as they get confirmed.
In lieu of a blog of my own, let me point to a couple…
January 7, 2004
Few humans have been as successful in Hollywood as parasitoids. Parasitoids are a particularly gruesome kind of parasite that invariably kills its host by the time it becomes an adult and is ready to leave the host's body. A parasitoid female wasp, to give one example, will fly along until it finds…
January 4, 2004
Today's issue of Newsday has my review of Sea of Glory, Nathaniel Philbrick's history of the first great scientific U.S. expedition. The review gets pretty harsh towards the end, despite the fact that the book is an exquisitely researched narrative of a fascinating subject. (What makes it…
January 2, 2004
By sheer coincidence (or some journalistic twist of fate) two magazine articles of mine are coming out this week, and they just so happen to make a nice neurological pairing.
In Science, I've written an essay about what seventeenth-century natural philosophers have to teach twenty-first century…
December 30, 2003
They say that history is written by the winners, but if that's true, then natural history is written by those who can write. Our ancestors split from the ancestors of chimpanzees some 6 or 7 million years ago, and since then they've given rise to perhaps twenty known species of hominids (and…
December 24, 2003
I can already see the grim look many Americans will have as they chew on their Christmas roast tomorrow. They'll be thinking about yesterday's report that a cow in Washington state tested positive for mad cow disease. There's some comfort in knowing that so far it's just a single cow, and that…
December 22, 2003
Evolution isn't simply about the genes you gain. It's also about the genes you lose.
The word loss has a painful, grieving sound to human ears, and so it can be hard to see how it can have anything to do with the rise of diversity and complexity in life. And until recently, evolutionary biologists…
December 18, 2003
I will never figure out the publishing world. My new book, Soul Made Flesh officially publishes on January 6, 2004. But Amazon and Powell's both say they've got it now and can get it to customers in 1-2 days. I guess time isn't what it used to be.
I have put some early reviews on my web site.…
December 18, 2003
Just before the winter solstice brings autumn to an end, here's a chance to blog about the great evolutionary biologist--and student of fall foliage--William Hamilton. Hamilton, who died in 2000, has never reached the household-name status of other evolutionary biologists such as E.O. Wilson or…
December 17, 2003
Here's a new development in the search I described last week for the genes that make us uniquely human. Science's Michael Balter reports on a new study about a gene that's crucial for making big brains. Mutant versions of the gene produce people with tiny brains--about the size that Lucy had 3.5…
December 15, 2003
Darwin's spirit lives on in everything from the Human Genome Project to medicine to conservation biology--the three topics I covered in my post on Friday. It also lives on in brain scans.
While Darwin is best known for The Origin of Species, he also wrote a lot of books in later years, most of…
December 12, 2003
To those who are new to my web log, thanks for checking it out. To those who have come from my old site, thanks for clicking through.
This week, while a sickly laptop robbed me of the opportunity to blog, a steady stream of interesting papers were published. Three struck me as particularly…
December 3, 2003
In a post last month, I pointed out how aerospace engineers can learn a lot from looking at the fossils of ancient flying reptiles. Today's issue of Nature contains a variation on that theme: ancient swimming reptiles can teach geneticists a lot as well.
Almost all humans have five fingers. Genetic…
December 2, 2003
Craig Venter has followed up on his announcement that he and his coworkers have assembled a virus from its genome sequence. Now there's a paper available at the Proceeding of the National Academy of Science web site. A bleary-eyed late-night inspection suggests that this is not a flawless Xerox…
November 26, 2003
Futurepundit has an interesting post based on a new paper about so-called junk DNA. Only 2% or so of the human genome actually encodes protein sequences. The rest is a grab-bag of broken genes and virus-like sequences called mobile elements that hijack the cell's DNA copying-machinery from time to…
November 24, 2003
I'll be talking about evolution on Tuesday at 12 pm PST/3 pm EST with Alan Stahler on KVMR in California. You can listen to the live webcast here.
UPDATE: I'll be on at about 20 minutes after the hour. Andy Knoll from Harvard is on first.
November 23, 2003
It's too early yet for reviews of Soul Made Flesh to start rolling in (it pubs in January 2004), so I'm still in an anxious state. But this is promising: The Daily Telegraph in London asked several leading writers to name the favorite book they read in 2003. Yesterday it printed the results. Steven…
November 19, 2003
Texas may be off the hook for now, but Razib at Gene Expression observes that some medical students at the University of Oslo are lobbying for anti-evolution lectures. I guess I'll try not to be in Norway if I need antibiotics.
November 18, 2003
For everyone interested in how their brain works, I'd suggest checking out a book coming out soon called Picturing Personhood, by MIT anthropologist Joseph Dumit. Dumit shows how easy it is for brain scans to become cultural Rorschach tests. Scans of mental activity, such as fMRI or PET, are…
November 13, 2003
The case of Terri Schiavo has moved back into the Bleak House realm of endless trips to the courthouse. As I mentioned in an earlier post, Schiavo lost consciousness thirteen years ago, and her husband has been trying for the past few years to have her feeding tube removed over the objections of…