laelaps | October 15, 2008UPDATE: Many, many thanks to everyone who donated today. I am pleased to say that the "Throw Us a Bone!!" project has been fully funded! There are still a few other projects that need your contribution, but I am very grateful to everyone who responded to this challenge so far.
It has been about two weeks since I started my DonorsChoose drive, and so far only one person has made any donations. I definitely appreciate that person's generosity, but I was really hoping to get some of these other projects funded!
Now, as Janet has noticed, one particular challenge is down to the wire. Called "…
laelaps | October 15, 2008When Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859, he largely avoided the issue of human evolution. The implication that our species had evolved was there, and many were concerned with our connection to "lower" animals, but Darwin did not provide his opponents any extra ammunition in this area. In 1871, however, Darwin's two-volume The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex was printed, and this was a somewhat belated contribution to debates already stirred by T.H. Huxley's 1863 pamphlet Evidences as to Man's Place in Nature and Charles…
laelaps | October 15, 2008
A pair of ring-tailed mongoose (Galidia elegans), photographed at the Bronx zoo.
laelaps | October 14, 2008I'm tired of being prevented from reading academic papers because of subscription walls. Both as a student and someone who loves to dig into the history of science, I often cast a wide net when I'm searching for information on a topic I want to know more about. At this very moment, for instance, I'm taking a break from writing a chapter of my book about birds and dinosaurs. In doing research for the chapter, I have come across a number of references that have been hard to come by, one of which is Alick Walker's 1972 Nature paper "New light on the Origin of Birds and Crocodiles."
Rutgers,…
laelaps | October 13, 2008Earlier today PZ wrote a brief review of Jerry Coyne's upcoming book Why Evolution is True. I'm not particularly interested in reading it, I doubt it's going to have much information I haven't seen before, but I decided to look into it all the same. (To tell you the truth, I feel that my book, when finished, is going to be much better than most books about evolution presently on the market. But that's just me being arrogant.)
Now part of marketing a book about evolution is making it seem new and original. There is a long list of popular books on evolution that have been published over the…
laelaps | October 13, 2008This coming January I will have the pleasure of speaking at two discussion at Science Online '09; one on the history of science, and the other about using the web to teach science in college. You can have a look at the wiki pages for both talks here (history) and here (college science), but they will certainly change during the coming days and weeks.
I want to make sure the things that I will be talking about with my esteemed colleagues will be interesting and relevant, so if you have any ideas about what you would like to be discussed during these sessions, please chime in via the comments.…
laelaps | October 13, 2008As we approach the 150th anniversary of the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, I can't help but notice the shoddy treatment natural selection receives in many of the college courses I have attended. Everyone is in agreement that understanding natural selection is important, so much so that it often gets its own lecture, but apparently it is not important enough to have professors memorize relevant examples of it.
I have seen it happen over and over again. The major points of evolution by natural selection are outlined (usually between 4 and 8 concepts, with…
laelaps | October 12, 2008
There were a lot of books I had intended to read that I didn't get to this summer. Between work, a summer class, and my own writing projects, I didn't have the time to sit down and hastily devour books like I did last year or the year before. Many of the books on my list were technical volumes, like Fins Into Limbs and Gaining Ground: The Origin and Early Evolution of Tetrapods, but there were a few fiction titles, too. One of them was The Relic by Douglas Preston & Lincoln Child, and I decided to pick it up again even though the traditional season for it is long gone.
I first picked up…
laelaps | October 11, 2008As has been pointed out by many over the past week, the current race to the White House between John McCain and Barack Obama is increasingly being punctuated by angry outbursts from conservative crowds. In the past, Democratic candidates were often mocked at Republican rallies (and vice versa), but there appears to be an increasing amount of anger permeating public appearances by McCain and his VP-pick, Sarah Palin.
It seems that many conservatives are upset that McCain hasn't really "let Obama have it," and lots of jeering and booing can be heard at these rallies when anything deemed "left-…
laelaps | October 10, 2008Two days ago I mentioned some good news I had to share with all of you, and I have been impatiently keeping it under my hat. Now I can finally let the cat out of the bag. I am proud to say that Smithsonian magazine has just launched a new dinosaur blog called Dinosaur Tracking, and I am one of the contributing authors!
At the new blog I'll be covering everything from the latest peer-reviewed dinosaur research to campy comic books and b-movies (so long as they feature some Mesozoic monsters, of course). There are only a few posts up at the moment, including one I wrote about Albertonykus, but…
laelaps | October 10, 2008Eight years before the publication of On the Origin of Species, J. Stanley Grimes issued his book Phreno-Geology: The Progressive Creation of Man, Indicated by Natural History, and Confirmed by Discoveries That Connect the Organization and Functions of the Brain With Successive Geological Periods. It seems to have been forgotten, perhaps because the "science" of phrenology fell out of favor, but as we approach the "evolution year" it is profitable to look back on other ideas of evolution that have largely been forgotten. Charles Darwin was not the first to think that organisms evolve, even if…
laelaps | October 9, 2008
There are few scientific figures as misunderstood as the English anatomist Richard Owen. More often than not, he is portrayed as a sort of Grinch, brooding in his museum and muttering "I must stop this 'evolution' from coming, but how?" Not only was he a severe and vicious old man, generally disliked by all who knew him, but his brilliance was marred by a reliance on the Bible, which caused him to lash out at anyone who dared suggest that life might evolve.
So goes the story, anyway. Owen was a figure of such importance to biology in Victorian England that it is impossible to ignore him, yet…