Brian Switek
Brian Switek is an ecology & evolution student at Rutgers University.
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Posts by this author
January 31, 2008
Two grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) playing in a pool at the Bronx zoo.
January 30, 2008
Update: Darren has now posted a more detailed summary of this controversy. Other bloggers will likely weigh-in on the subject throughout the day, and I'll soon have something up on why the issue has gotten to the point of appearing in Nature rather than being settled earlier.
Some time ago Darren…
January 30, 2008
"Evolution Sunday" is fast approaching, and even though it's still about 2 weeks off I thought I'd just put up a note that I'll be speaking to the Congregation for Humanistic Judaism of Morris County for the event. My talk will primarily focus on contingency, human evolution, and where those…
January 30, 2008
Just in case any of you haven't heard yet, tomorrow night the Science Communication Consortium is going to hold its next meeting on "emerging media outlets" & science communication. The SCC was formed by my fellow Scibling Kate (among others), and Carl Zimmer will be speaking on the panel…
January 30, 2008
If you're going to be in the Rockford, Illinois area (or within a reasonable distance of it) on March 1st and 2nd, the Burpee Museum is going to be host to a paleo-festival that you won't want to miss out on. Over the course of two days there will be activities and events for both children and…
January 30, 2008
Over at Wired, Thomas Hayden kicks off his brief piece "Why Things Suck: Science" with the following nugget (what it's a nugget of, I'll leave up to you);
Morality, spirituality, the meaning of life -- science doesn't handle those issues well at all. But that's cool. We have art and religion for…
January 30, 2008
When I first started attending Rutgers in the fall of 2001, the football coach had to come and practically beg the incoming freshmen to come to a football game. Promises of free t-shirts and plenty of seating were doled out to try and get attendance up, but the fact of the matter was that we didn't…
January 30, 2008
The black-and-white ruffed lemur (Varecia variegata) is one of two species of ruffed lemur (Varecia sp.), although there may be as many as three subspecies of the black-and-white variety. Like many other lemur species, the black-and-white ruffed lemur is presently endangered, populations existing…
January 30, 2008
I started in on The Structure of Evolutionary Theory last night and got about 32 pages in, although I hope to cover more ground today. I've been especially fixated upon a brief paragraph involving the interplay of archetypes and ancestors (on pg. 12, I think it was), something that I intend to…
January 30, 2008
Since I've left my old blog on wordpress I've generally left it to mutate on its own, by which I mean I haven't paid much attention to the comments accumulating over there since October. From what I can tell, though, creationists stop by every now and then and have left a number of arm-waving,…
January 29, 2008
Given that so many of us are picking up Stephen Jay Gould's The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, I thought I would post an interview he gave on the Charlie Rose Show about his book Full House. (The sound and video become a bit disconnected during the video, unfortunately);
Most of what is said…
January 29, 2008
[Note: For fuller and more technical summaries of the Anthropocene and why it just doesn't fit (at least not yet), please read Chris' and Greg's posts. Likewise, naming new periods of time for perceived changes in our species or our impact in the world isn't anything new, i.e. the older concept of…
January 29, 2008
It seems that we have something of a book club starting up here on Sb. Razib has started to blog his way through Stephen Jay Gould's "magnum opus" The Structure of Evolutionary Theory, and it looks like John is going to join in, too. I purchased the book after seeing at the AMNH about two years…
January 29, 2008
Gobiconodon ostromi was a triconodont mammal found in both North America and Asia during the early Cretaceous. It was rather large for an early Cretaceous mammal, the skull being about 10 cm long.
January 28, 2008
I can only imagine how many people are going to banging on this machine in futility with cries of "Don't hold out on me, man!"
January 28, 2008
The skeleton of an Irish Elk (Megaloceros giganteus) at the AMNH.
Discussions of mass extinctions nearly always give rise to heated debates as to the mechanism(s) behind the disappearance of so many taxa in a short amount of time, and one of the most active debates still surrounds the extinction…
January 28, 2008
Yes... and no. Shelley isn't going to be keeping up with Retrospectacle anymore, nor is Steve going to keep blogging away at Omni Brain, but the two of them are going to team-up to bring us a new super blog! There's just one problem; they need a name. If you've got some ideas head to either of the…
January 28, 2008
It may not be perfectly framed, but I still love the intensity of the stare of the Amur leopard (Panthera pardus orientalis) in this photo. In the wild this subspecies of leopard exists essentially as a remnant population, only about 40 being left in the wild. Conservation efforts to shore up…
January 27, 2008
The New York Review of Books has a new article up about blogging, and although much of what Sarah Boxer says is familiar it seems that science blogs have a different sort of existence on the web than what's described in the piece. I'll keep my grumbling that the recently published Open Laboratory…
January 27, 2008
An early reconstruction of Megalosaurus, as alluded to by William Buckland in the text below. (Image source)
Yesterday a 1st edition copy of Francis Buckland's Curiosities of Natural History (1857) appeared in my mailbox, and it has proven to be a most delightful book. If you can find this book…
January 27, 2008
Will has the latest edition of The Boneyard up at The Dragon's Tales. Check out some of the best paleo-posts from the last two weeks and keep your eyes open for new ones; the carnival will be over at Greg's place on February 9th.
[As an aside, yesterday was also the birthday of Roy Chapman Andrews…
January 27, 2008
One of the three Amur tiger (Panthera tigris altaica) cubs born last year at the Philadelphia Zoo (photo taken in September).
January 26, 2008
Assimilation into ScienceBorg.com ScienceBlogs.com has been rather rapid as of late, and I'm very pleased to announced that Kevin Z of The Other 95% is now on board over at Deep Sea News. Hell, the new banner alone is worth a look (you might need to refresh the page once or twice to cycle it up),…
January 26, 2008
I'm still trying to figure out how to best divide up my term paper from last semester about the evolution of hunting behavior in primates and hominids, but one thing that I learned was that a number of living primates will eat meat or catch prey if given the opportunity to do so. Chimpanzees have…
January 26, 2008
The ring-tailed lemur (Lemur catta) is the most well-known (or at least most recognizable) of the living lemurs, probably because it is diurnal species and spends a lot of time on the ground. Just because this species is relatively easy to study does not mean it's any less interesting, though. One…
January 25, 2008
More below the fold...
I don't know how well the Nissin hypothesis stands up to new evidence, though...
January 25, 2008
It might be a bit tenuous to base a post on something I saw in a cheesy 80's monster movie (complete with a synthesizer- and drum machine-driven montage), but the film Monster Squad got me thinking about science education. In an early scene, two monster-obsessed young boys are called into the main…
January 25, 2008
On November 23rd, 1858, T.H. Huxley wrote one of the most famous letters in the history of science to Charles Darwin. While the letter is perhaps most widely known for Huxley's staunch support of On the Origin of Species by Natural Selection against the opposition both were sure would come out…
January 25, 2008
My post on whether natura non facit saltum is an accurate depiction of evolution has turned into a hopeless monster, so while I try and rescue it why don't you check out the newest addition to the ScienceBlogs family, DrugMonkey?