loom
Posts by this author
November 13, 2003
Over the past couple years, a few pounds of rock from Australia have been the subject of a fierce scientific battle between geologists and paleontologists. Some paleontologists have claimed that microscopic marks in the 3.5 billion year old rocks are the oldest fossils of life yet found. Some…
November 13, 2003
In February I wrote an article in Science about what Craig Venter's up to these days. In the late 1990s Venter made his mark by challenging the government human genome project to a race, promising to beat them to the full sequence for a fraction of their budget. Ultimately the race was a tie, and…
November 12, 2003
Time always marches forward, of course, but does evolution?
It's certainly easy to impose a march of progress on the course of evolution. That's why the sequence of apes transforming into humans as they march from left to right is so universal. Of course, there are also pictures in which Homo…
November 11, 2003
A lot of work has gone into reconstructing an entire human being in a computer. Computer scientists put in the precise dimensions of a person's body, factor in biomechanics, mimic facial expressions and so on. This work gets huge amounts of hype in the press, but for all the effort and all the…
November 7, 2003
Chris Mooney, CalPundit, Signal+Noise and others have been doing a great job of keeping track of the woeful textbook battles down in Texas. The Board of Education there has been arguing over how evolution should be presented in the textbooks they're about to buy for the state's high school students…
November 7, 2003
The other day I (among others) came down on Gregg Easterbrook for his poor grasp of science. Finding myself procrastinating today, I wandered over to his blog and had yet another good laugh. In a post today, he actually displays some interest in evolutionary biology. After discussing some work…
November 4, 2003
My hotel here in Wisconsin has a great high-speed connection and I have some downtime, and so I'll post on a really interesting paper that just came out that may tell us a lot about how we got so complex.
When I say "we," I'm speaking very broadly. Humans, other mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibian…
November 2, 2003
I'll be off blogging duty for a couple days while I head out to Wisconsin to give a couple talks at UW. I'll be talking about what chimp DNA can tell us about ourselves. I wrote about the topic last year for Natural History, but I'll be focusing on some newer work that has come out since then. I…
October 31, 2003
Last week a region of the brain called the insula was in the news. As I described in my post, scientists found that physical pain and social rejection both activate the insula in much the same way. The insula returns now for a disgusting encore that gives a glimpse at how we get inside other people…
October 30, 2003
Books have been bubbling up from the comments cauldron. Jim Harrison has asked what I think of Simon Conway Morris's Life's Solution. Web Webster says Cosmos was his first favorite science book and asks for suggestions. Humboldt and Feyerband make an appearance too. It's ironic that two forms of…
October 29, 2003
Evolution is nature's great R&D division. Through mutation, natural selection, and other processes, life can find new solutions for the challenge of staying alive. It's possible to see a simplified version of this problem solving at work in the lab. The genetic molecule RNA, for example, can…
October 28, 2003
Loyal denizens of the blogosphere will forgive me if I begin this post by sketching out the details of the recent Gregg Easterbrook affair for those who haven't kept up with the details. Easterbook, a senior editor at the New Republic, started up a blog recently where he cranked out postings at a…
October 26, 2003
When Charles Darwin was thrashing out his theory of evolution, he would doodle sometimes in his notebooks. To explain how new species came into existence, he wrote down letters on a page and then connected them with branches. In the process, he created a simple tree. Across the top of the page, he…
October 23, 2003
After years at a slow burn, the controversy over Terri Schiavo has hit the national news. Schiavo lost consciousness in 1990 after a cardiac arrest, and her husband recently won a lawsuit to have her feeding tube removed, over the objection of her family. Then on Tuesday, Governor Jeb Bush ordered…
October 21, 2003
The Great Lakes of East Africa swarm with fish--particulary with one kind of fish known as cichlids. In Lake Victoria alone you can find over 500 species. These species come in different colors and make their living in many different ways--sucking out eyeballs of other cichlids, scraping algae off…
October 17, 2003
Science is so specialized these days that it's hard for scientists to look up beyond the very narrow confines of their own work. Biologists who study cartilage don't have much to say to biologists who study retinas. Astronomers who study globular clusters probably can't tell you what's new with…
October 17, 2003
My book Soul Made Flesh will be coming out in January, but in the meantime, I've posted an excerpt on my web site. You can read it online or print out a pdf.
October 15, 2003
In the comments to my post yesterday about Nanoarchaeum equitans, an ancient parasite, the discussion took an interesting turn.
Web Webster wrote: "So in a way, N. equitans is both 'smarter' in that it uses more of its total capabilities (versus humans and the old '10% of the brain thing') and '…
October 13, 2003
Biologists these days can paint many different portraits of the same organism. They can follow the tried and true style of Aristotle and paint with a broad brush, describing what they can see with the naked eye--number of legs, color of hair, live young or eggs. Or they can paint a creature at the…
October 10, 2003
There's been a fair amount of press about a new paper in Science that shows how the brain responds to social rejection. The kicker is that a region of the brain known as the insula becomes active. As I mentioned yesterday, that's the same area that responds to pain and physical distress. It's an…
October 9, 2003
One reason that I'm so riveted by neuroscience is the way it can blow the lid off of philosophical conundrums that have dogged Western thought for centuries. Case in point: in a recent study, scientists at Dartmouth asked subjects about something that was on their mind--an exam, a girlfirend, and…
October 7, 2003
Thanks again for the comments on my previous two posts about eugenics. As a novice blogger, I was surprised by their focus. I expected comments about the past--the historical significance of the eugenics movement--but instead the future dominated, with assorted speculations about the possible…
October 7, 2003
It's never pretty to see journalism transformed into propaganda, especially when you're the one who wrote the journalism. I recently did an article for the New York Times Magazine about the grey zone between coma and consciousness. The National Right to Life web site then posted a long "News &…
October 6, 2003
Ask and ye shall receive. In a recent post on eugenics, I claimed that the connection between early 20th century genetics and early 21st century genetic engineering was weak. I asked if anyone thought I was wrong, and in no time I got a comment from Razib at Gene Expression.
He suggests that I'm…
October 5, 2003
The folks behind the Macarthur genius grant chose wisely this week when they gave one to Loren Rieseberg, an evolutionary biologist at Indiana University. Rieseberg does fascinating work on the origin of new species (that little subject). Specifically, he's shown how new plant species emerge from…
October 5, 2003
Today Daniel Kevles, a Yale historian, has an interesting review in the New York Times of a new book about eugenics. The book in question is War against the Weak, by Edward Black. It's a cinderblock of a book, and it's got a lot of chilling material to offer on how popular eugenics was in the…
October 2, 2003
As someone who writes a lot about evolutionary biology, I've often had people say to me, "I just can't believe that evolved." Originally, that referred to the lovely side of nature--the beauty of flowers, for example, or the grace of birds in flight. The implication was that these things were so…
September 28, 2003
Over the past couple weeks an unplanned experiment has taken place that shows what sort of science makes it into the popular consciousness and what doesn't. In the past couple weeks we've had three pieces of research on the same evolutionary puzzle in the same high-profile journal (Nature). One was…
September 27, 2003
I wrote an article for this Sunday's New York Times Magazine about the grey zone between coma and consciousness. Stories like this one are always hard, because there are so many crucial dimensions to the subject and so little room to do justice to them all. For example, I couldn't even begin to…
September 26, 2003
I write about science, and in a recent overhaul of my web site, I decided it was a good time to add a blog. I'll be posting thoughts about new research in the fields that I can't get enough of--the brain and the body, how they evolved, and where they're going. I'm still getting the hang of iblog,…