Brian Switek
Brian Switek is an ecology & evolution student at Rutgers University.
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Posts by this author
October 28, 2008
As explained in Narratives of Human Evolution (and outlined in an early chapter of Bones of Contention), scientific descriptions of human evolution have often been shaped by a belief in progress and our* superiority. Even today, when descriptions are often more objective on the surface, there are…
October 28, 2008
The Richard Gilder Graduate School, housed at the American Museum of Natural History, is now taking applications for Fall 2009 enrollment. It's an accelerated, 4-year Ph.D. program which places the vast collections of the AMNH at grad student's fingertips, but if you're interested you have to act…
October 28, 2008
A polar bear (Ursus maritimus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
October 27, 2008
Two down, one to go. Sort of. Even though it took longer than I thought, I am setting aside the dinosaurs and birds chapter for a bit to work on the section on human evolution. To get myself in the spirit of things I picked up Bones of Contention yesterday, although I also have a stack of academic…
October 27, 2008
A ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
October 26, 2008
A California sea lion pup (Zalophus californianus), photographed at the Bronx Zoo.
October 25, 2008
From ZooBorns (the only site I know of that regularly causes cute overload).
[Coincidentally, I'm heading to the Bronx Zoo today, in spite of the weather, so I should return with some new photographs.]
October 25, 2008
A white-breasted nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis), photographed at a friend's residence in New Jersey.
October 24, 2008
There's now one week left before the end of this year's DonorsChoose Challenge here at ScienceBlogs, and those of us involved this year just got some good news. SEED has generously donated $15,000 (or $715 for each participating blogger) for us to distribute among the projects as we see fit.
That…
October 24, 2008
Now this is some pretty cool news. The HMS Beagle Project announced yesterday that NASA has agreed to track the progress of the reconstructed HMS Beagle as she makes her way around the globe. According to a press release issued about the joint venture, this partnership will not only benefit the…
October 24, 2008
Raspberries (Rubus idaeus), photographed at a friend's residence in New Jersey.
October 23, 2008
I finally did it. After a number of delays due to scheduling and new discoveries (i.e. Aerosteon, Epidexipteryx) I have nearly completed the dinosaurs/birds chapter. It still requires one more edit (from a low of 25 pages it ballooned back up to 30), but it is essentially complete.
Writing the…
October 23, 2008
In the spirit of today's post about James Ussher and the date of creation, here's an all-too-true pie chart that made me laugh;
more music charts
And the worst part? While Whitney was the first to patent his particular kind of "modern" cotton gin, cotton gins had been invented previously in India…
October 23, 2008
On this date, six thousand and eleven years ago (give or take a little due to the vagaries of how calendars are kept), the creation of the universe had just begun. That's according to the 1650 chronology determined by the Anglican Bishop of Armagh James Ussher, anyway, published in his Annales…
October 23, 2008
The skull of a white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), photographed at a friend's residence in New Jersey. It is now a part of my osteological collection.
October 22, 2008
Tomorrow is certainly a very important day, although you won't get any help from your calendar. Any guesses as to what it is?
[I'll give you a hint; it's a very important date for creationists.]
October 22, 2008
Two white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) sparring, photographed at a friend's residence in New Jersey.
October 21, 2008
As soon as you have anything to do with the gorilla the fascination of studying him begins to grow on you and you instinctively begin to speak of the gorilla as "he" in a human sense, for he is obviously as well as scientifically akin to man. - Carl Akeley
There are few places that I find as…
October 21, 2008
Peppers, photographed at a friend's residence in New Jersey.
October 20, 2008
Are you a college student? Have you been blogging during the past year? Then you definitely want to check out the 3rd annual Blogging Scholarship. The grand prize is $10,000 for tuition, books, and all the other stuff you need to continue your education. (There are two $1,000 runner-up prizes, too…
October 20, 2008
Some days I just want to scream. For years I believed what the textbooks and teachers told me about the history of science, taking in their arguments from authority, but when I started to look into the same events myself I found they were much more complex than I had previously known. I cherish the…
October 20, 2008
A white-breasted nuthatch (Sitta carolinensis), photographed at a friend's residence in New Jersey.
October 19, 2008
The skulls of two juvenile, male white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), photographed at a friend's residence in New Jersey.
October 18, 2008
A Huon tree kangaroo (Dendrolagus matschiei), photographed at the Bronx zoo.
And if you need an overload of cute, check out the new website ZooBorns (to which the guys from Zooillogix contribute to!)
October 17, 2008
I had not expected it to be this difficult to edit the chapter about birds and dinosaurs. I have gone through it several times and I'm still about 11 pages over my target number, and a lot of material is going to have to be excised or collapsed. In fact, I'm afraid that as I make finishing touches…
October 17, 2008
Last week I wrote about an obscure little book called Phreno-Geology by J. Stanley Grimes which, surprisingly, proposed a mechanism of evolution that combined Lamarckism with natural selection. Since I wrote it, I have been informed that this particular work is significant to the history of science…
October 17, 2008
A Wolf's guenon (Cercopithecus wolfi), photographed at the Bronx zoo.
October 16, 2008
I'm going to be working on editing my book for most of the day today, but with Halloween coming up I thought I would put up an open thread about monster movies. For me, it has always been a tradition to wait until it gets dark, pop some popcorn, and put on a favorite creature feature around this…
October 16, 2008
A Coquerel's Sifaka (Propithecus coquereli), photographed at the Bronx zoo.
October 15, 2008
... and this time he called him "Senator Government." It was the first time I've laughed during this entire debate series.
(McCain seemed be having a good time, though. He cracked himself up after he tried to get the last word in edgewise about school vouchers. I think I even heard a snort.)