laelaps | January 4, 2010How can you turn a monkey into a man? By feeding it "Rex" Brand Extract of beef, of course!
I might just have to throw in a bid on this Victorian promotional card. In bizarre fashion it combines several mythical elements common to popular depictions of human origins; that we evolved in a straight-line fashion, that consumption of meat made all the difference in our transformation, and that men "led the way" in the evolution of our species. Each of these misconceptions has been cast out of the scientific arena in turn, but they still pop up from time to time, especially in advertising.…
laelaps | January 3, 2010
A Japanese macaque (Macaca fuscata), photographed at the Central Park Zoo.
laelaps | January 2, 2010
A red panda (Ailurus fulgens), photographed at Turtleback Zoo in New Jersey.
laelaps | January 1, 2010Ever since my first book, Written in Stone, found a home at Bellevue Literary Press I have had a number of people ask me how to publish their own books. How does a book go from being an idea to a real, dead-tree product? I will be discussing some of the details of this process (especially using online resources to write and promote books) with Rebecca Skloot and Tom Levenson in a few weeks at ScienceOnline2010, but I thought I would cover some of the basics here.
The first and most crucial step of the process is coming up with a book to write! This is not as easy as it might sound.…
laelaps | December 31, 2009With a few hours left in 2009, now seems as good a time as any to take stock of what I have accomplished during past year.
The year got off to a pretty good start. After participating in the ScienceOnline09 conference I decided to get serious about science writing, both on blogs and "dead tree media." Among my first formal efforts to be published outside the blogohedron were an article about spotted hyenas for Antennae and a review of A History of Paleontology Illustration for Palaeontologia Electronica.
What I did not expect, however, was the appearance of "Ida." I won't recapitulate the…
laelaps | December 30, 2009
Horseshoe crabs (Limulus polyphemus), photographed at Cape Henlopen State Park, Delaware.
laelaps | December 30, 2009
A restoration of the skull of "Pithecanthropus" erectus by Manonvrier.
"Pithecanthropus" erectus, described by the Dutch anatomist Eugene Dubois, was an immediate sensation. Known from a skullcap, a femur, and a tooth discovered on the island of Java, it was the first fossil that could be regarded as an "intermediate type" between humans and apes (even if there was some debate about whether all the parts Dubois had found really went together). In later years "Java Man" would become more popularly represented by sculpted busts of our prehistoric relative, but one of the earliest full…
laelaps | December 29, 2009
During the past year scientists have been celebrating the work of Charles Darwin for the insight the 19th century naturalist had into how evolution works. It is truly amazing how much Darwin got right, but there was also a lot that Darwin didn't know. Indeed, Darwin recognized a group of disciplines that were relevant to what he was proposing, from paleontology to embryology, but despite his discoveries there were still mysteries in each field. A new NOVA program, What Darwin Never Knew, looks at what we now know about some of the questions Darwin's research raised but could not…
laelaps | December 28, 2009"Yeah, well like they say, it takes as much faith to believe in science as religion."
I had just been suckerpunched. After spending the last several minutes explaining evolution and its relevance to the history of our species I was hit between the eyes with that old one-liner. Even worse, there was no time to respond. Given that I was a guest in an evangelical home on Christmas and dinner had just been set I simply replied "I don't think that's true at all."
Asserting that science is just as much a religion as Christianity must be one of those things that Christians like. It is a comment…
laelaps | December 24, 2009
There was perhaps no Victorian naturalist so well-known and so misunderstood as Richard Owen. He could be warm to friends, but to his scientific peers he was an obstinate autocrat. He was among the first scientists to start publicly considering life in evolutionary terms, yet he never fully demonstrated the mechanism by which his evolutionary visions might be carried out. He crossed swords with theologians who were rankled by the implications evolution, but at the same time Owen fancied himself as a "high priest" of science. Neither here nor there, neither warm nor cold, Owen was seemingly a…
laelaps | December 24, 2009
A female pronghorn (Antilocapra americana) and two fawns, photographed in Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming.