loom | February 20, 2006In tomorrow's New York Times, I have an article about how new species evolve. It describes new research into how a population can split into two species. The idea that species can evolve when populations get geographically isolated is well-supported by evidence, but the idea that individuals living side by side can split apart (called sympatric speciation) has sparked more controversy. The late biologist Ernst Mayr was the lead champion of the geographic isolation mechanism, and he was always skeptical of claims of sympatric speciation. But, as he said in this 2001 interview, he was…
loom | February 20, 2006You and an oak tree have something in common: you're both big. Unlike viruses and bacteria, you and an oak tree are both made up of trillions of cells. There's something else you and an oak tree have in common: you both began as an individual cell, which then divided again and again, its daughter cells differentiating along the way to produce tissues. In your case, they turned into bone, muscle, liver, and such. In the oak's case, the cells became bark, leaf, root.
You and an oak tree have a third thing in common: you evolved from single-celled ancestors. By analyzing DNA from a wide range of…
loom | February 17, 2006Randy Olson, director of the movie, Flock of Dodos has sent in some thoughts regarding the ongoing conversation here about his movie. A lot of commenters were offering opinions on how evolutionary biologists should communicate with the rest of us. I thought I'd publish his entire comment here in a post of its own. (Added note: Randy is fielding questions and opinions in the comment thread if you want to join in.)
Hi - A big thanks to Carl for such a nice write up about the screening (which was a huge amount of fun). At each of the panel discussions for the first round of screenings of "Flock…
loom | February 16, 2006The nominees for the 2005 Koufax Awards: Best Expert Blog have been posted. Many thanks to whoever put the Loom on the list. The voting hasn't started yet, but please keep this blog in mind when it does. I don't hold out too much hope, since the list contains quite a lot of impressive bloggers.
But I will claim one title. I'm assuming that Carl and Ben "Language Log" Zimmer are the only siblings on the list.
loom | February 13, 2006My post on zombie roaches and brain surgeon wasps seems to have hit a nerve. There have been well over 100,000 hits on that post alone, and 175 comments have been posted. I imagine that most people haven't read through all 175 (many of which have more to do with God than wasps). But I would urge any interested readers to check out
this one from Gal Haspel, who spent seven years in grad school contemplating the sinister glory of Ampulex compressa.
Update 2/15: Gal is now fielding questions in the comment thread, discussing new research on matters such as how the wasp knows where in the brain…
loom | February 13, 2006Last night I drove into New Haven, Connecticut, to catch an advanced screening of Flock of Dodos, a movie about evolution and intelligent design. Afterwards I took part in a panel discussion. It was an interesting evening, not only because the movie was quite good, but because it provoked a noisy discussion.
I don't want to give away too much of Flock of Dodos, because I would prefer that a lot of people get a chance to see it for themselves. Randy Olson, the creator of the film, spoke after the film and explained that the version we saw was still a bit rough around the edges, and he's…
loom | February 11, 2006Over at DailyKos, DarkSyde has been interviewing science bloggers. Here's our exchange. Greetings to visitors from DailyKos--make yourself at home. If you're looking for a few samplers of the stuff I write, you may want to check out the "Starting Points and Old Favorites" list in the righthand column. I had hoped to respond to comments at DailyKos, but for some reason I can't set up an account. (And yet I still have the audacity to claim to be a blogger....) In the meantime, I'm happy to field any questions through the comments here.
loom | February 10, 2006Congratulations to Dan Vergano of USA Today, Michelle Nijhuis of High Country News for winning the 2006 journalism awards from the American Geophysical Union. The AGU is the country's leading organization of Earth scientists. Both reporters won for articles on global warming.
You can read Vergano's article here, and Nijhuis's here, here, and here.
I imagine that George Deutsch is looking for some things to do to fill the time he once spent censoring NASA scientists about global warming. As an ex-journalism major, he might be interested in reading some reporting that scientists recognize for…
loom | February 8, 2006Peter Brown, one of the discoverers of Homo floresiensis a k a the Hobbit (previous posts here), had a few interesting remarks in an article in today's Oregon Daily Emerald:
Though the hobbit people were very small -- the adult stood as tall as a 3-year-old human child and had a brain the size of a newborn human baby -- they had incredible strength, Brown said.
"Chimpanzees have an arm strength four times that of a human; the hobbits were similarly as strong, we think," Brown said. "You wouldn't want to arm wrestle one, that's for sure. It would probably snap your arm off."
Since the…
loom | February 8, 2006The movie Flock of Dodos, which takes a look at the evolution-creationism struggle, will have a free showing on Monday in New Haven, Connecticut. I'll be there as part of a panel discussion after the movie, moderated by Michael J. Donoghue, the director of Yale's Peabody Museum. The panel will also include Randy Olson, the director of "Flock of Dodos"' John Hare, a theologian at the Yale Divinity School; and Richard Prum, a Yale evolutionary biologist who specializes on the evolution of birds. Not having seen the movie, I can't offer a review, but I certainly am curious to see it.
Details…
loom | February 8, 2006Dinosaur paleontologists don't look for fossils simply because dinosaurs are cool. They want to solve evolutionary mysteries. Like all living things, dinosaurs form groups of species. You've got your long-necked sauropods, your head-shield-sporting ceratopsians, and so on. The distinctiveness of a group can make it difficult to determine how it evolved from an ancestor. Whales may be mammals (they nurse their young, for example), but they're all fish-shaped.
Some of the best clues to the origins of these groups come from transitional fossils, which are formed by species that evolved some,…
loom | February 6, 2006I know what you're thinking.
You're thinking, I need more stories about leeches. I want to find out what scientists are learning about how leeches evolved.
And I know that's not all you want.
You want to watch a leech video.
And you want a podcast about leech evolution.
Well, you're in luck.
Here's the story, which I wrote for tomorrow's New York Times. It's a profile of Mark Siddall, hirundologist extraordinaire at the American Museum of Natural History. His motto: We are always the bait.
The story inspired the video team at the Times to film Siddall, who explains why we really shouldn't…
loom | February 2, 2006I collect tales of parasites the way some people collect Star Trek plates. And having filled an entire book with them, I thought I had pretty much collected the whole set. But until now I had somehow missed the gruesome glory that is a wasp named Ampulex compressa.
As an adult, Ampulex compressa seems like your normal wasp, buzzing about and mating. But things get weird when it's time for a female to lay an egg. She finds a cockroach to make her egg's host, and proceeds to deliver two precise stings. The first she delivers to the roach's mid-section, causing its front legs buckle. The brief…
loom | January 25, 2006I've got an article in tomrrow's New York Times about the discovery of a remarkable case of convergence: an ancient relative of today's crocodiles and alligators that evolved a dinosaur's body--80 million before the dinosaurs evolved it. Here's the paper.
Update, 1/26 7 am: Here's Seth Sean Murtha's nice sketch of Effigia okeeffeae. A bigger version is here.
Update, 2/1 9 am: Be sure to check out Carl Buell's croc gallery.
loom | January 25, 2006My review of the Darwin show at the American Museum of Natural History is in the new issue of Discover. You can read the full text here.
loom | January 17, 2006Are brain parasites altering the personalities of three billion people? The question emerged a few years ago, and it shows no signs of going away.
I first encountered this idea while working on my book Parasite Rex. I was investigating the remarkable ability parasites have to manipulate the behavior of their hosts. The lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum, for example, forces its ant host to clamp itself to the tip of grass blades, where a grazing mammal might eat it. It's in the fluke's interest to get eaten, because only by getting into the gut of a sheep or some other grazer can it…