laelaps | December 8, 2009Long before I signed up with ScienceBlogs.com I started blogging on the website ProgressiveU.org as part of the "Blogging For Progress" scholarship contest. I was one of the winners selected for the fall of 2006, and some of the folks at ProgressiveU recently caught up with me about what I have been up to since then. Science blogging, the public's fascination with dinosaurs, "Ida", Written in Stone, and more covered in the two-part interview, which can be viewed here and here. Enjoy!
laelaps | December 7, 2009
Via PHD comics.
Blogging might be a little light here over the next few days. I have only one week left to tune-up the initial draft of Written in Stone before sending it off to my editor for comments, so the pressure is on. The entire manuscript will be finished by the end of January (and then it will be time to finish those papers I have been working on and the proposal for book #2).
Photos of the day and little tidbits will pop up now and then, but every time I get the compulsion to write a new essay I am going to turn that energy to editing Written in Stone instead. Posts at Dinosaur…
laelaps | December 6, 2009No doubt you have heard the news by now. ScienceBlogs is teaming up with National Geographic "for a big, sciencey love-in." We ScienceBloggers will get access to some NG photos and video while NG will get some cross-promotion here, though I am not sure when all of this will start to be put in effect.
I am of two minds about the partnership. On the one hand I am looking forward to picking through the material NG makes accessible and the potential writing opportunities the partnership might provide. At the very least there will be more to blog about.
On the other hand, however, I am concerned…
laelaps | December 6, 2009
A young Rhim gazelle (Gazella leptoceros), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | December 4, 2009Much of my forthcoming book is steeped in insights about evolution that have been derived from the new paleobiological synthesis, and in doing a bit a background reading I came across an interesting tidbit.
In 1980 numerous authorities on evolutionary science converged in Chicago for a conference on macroevolution. Spurred by the work of paleontologists such as Niles Eldredge, Stephen Jay Gould, David Raup, and Steven Stanley, the meeting's goal was to assess whether the traditional slow-and-steady model of evolution preferred by geneticists fit what paleontologists saw in the fossil record.…
laelaps | December 3, 2009
A marabou stork (Leptoptilos crumeniferus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | December 3, 2009The December 2009 issue of the journal Evolution: Education and Outreach has just been released, and among the new offerings is a paper on "Print Reference Sources about Evolution" by Adam Goldstein. It seems to be a spinoff of Goldstein's paper on evolution blogs published in the same journal earlier this year, and it stresses the importance of print references during a time when online resources are becoming more widely available. While I agree that print references are still very important for anyone who wants to educate themselves about evolution, though, I don't think that Goldstein made…
laelaps | December 3, 2009
A small-clawed otter (Aonyx cinerea) in a short tree, photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
laelaps | December 1, 2009
The skull of Paranthropus boisei ("Zinj," "Dear Boy," "Nutcracker Man," etc.).
Louis Leakey had a problem.
During the summer of 1959 he and his wife Mary recovered the skull fragments of an early human scattered about the fossil deposits of Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The skull had been deposited among the shattered bones of fossil mammals and a collection stone tools, and this led Louis to conclude that it was one of our early ancestors. Only an ancestor of Homo sapiens could be a toolmaker, Louis thought, but the skull looked nothing like that of our species.
When Mary fit all the pieces…
laelaps | November 30, 2009
Eden, from The World Before the Deluge.
At least I know that, if I fail at everything else in life, I could write a book claiming to reconcile science and Christianity. People love them. No matter how many times the same old talking points are trotted out there always seems to be room for one more volume on the subject. And even if readers do not entirely agree with the content of such books many are still comforted by their existence. Among the "Things Christians Like" is to see scientists saying that hard evidence from nature supports Christian beliefs.
I do not say this to belittle the…
laelaps | November 28, 2009For months now I have been hammering away at individual chapters of my first book, Written in Stone, but this weekend I finally put all the individual parts together into one document. I still have a lot of editing to do, but it still feels good to move past the stage of large-scale construction and get down to fine tuning.
With the greater body of work properly arranged I could hardly resist creating a Wordle cloud for the book. For those unfamiliar with Wordle, it is an online program that will scan through a body of text and pick out the most frequently used words and display them in a…
laelaps | November 27, 2009
A western gorilla (Gorilla gorilla) with an upset stomach, photographed at the Bronx Zoo.