loom | October 25, 2005Back in the 1600s, when neurology was born, it wasn't scientists who were looking at brains. The word scientist didn't exist. Instead, those visionary folks would have called themselves natural philosophers. As I researched this chapter of scientific history for my book Soul Made Flesh, I was struck by the way philosophers--and philosophical questions--are now making their way back into the scientific study of the brain. Last year in Discover I wrote about the work of the philosopher/neuroscientist Joshua Greene, who studies how we make moral judgments. But it turns out that neuroscientists…
loom | October 25, 2005The science writer/blogging panel I was on over the weekend is now available on Contentious.
loom | October 24, 2005Tomorrow I'll be giving a talk in Westport, Connecticut, based in part on my new book on human origins. I'll be talking about Hobbits, natural selection in our own time, and more (accompanied by visuals). The talk is part of the Westport Library's excellent lecture series. It will be at 7:30 and is free. Hope to see some readers of the Loom there.
loom | October 23, 2005You may have heard about a petition that was being signed by scientists earlier this month against the teaching of intelligent design. The inspiration came from another petition drafted by the Discovery Institute opposing evolution. It garnered 400 signatures of scientists in four years. R. Joe Brandon, an archaeologist, decided to see how many signatures he could get from scientists in just four days by spreading the word from his web site.
The answer: 7,733.
"During my short, four-day experiment, I recieved about 20 times as many signatures at a rate 690,000% higher than what the…
loom | October 23, 2005I'm back from Pittsburgh, where the blogging-meet-science writing workshop went very well. Science writers are definitely curious, although you could hear some moans about the end of dead-tree publishing (a bit premature, in my opinion). Amy Gahran, my fellow panelist, is going to post a podcast on her blog, Contentious. I will update the post with a link when it is available.
UPDATE: PODCAST AVAILABLE HERE
I will be getting back to blogging about new research this week once I've settled back in at home. In the meantime, I'm trying to clean up the comments, which continue to be a bit buggy.…
loom | October 17, 2005I'm going to be part of two workshops in the space of a couple weeks that will deal with the intersection of blogging and science writing. The first will be this Saturday at the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers in Pittsburgh, and the second will be hosted Tuesday November 1 by the Science Writers of New York at the New York Academy of Sciences. (There's no link yet to the New York event, but Link here.) The panel will include Sarah Tomlin from Nature and Sreenath Sreenivasan, Columbia's resident tech journalism guru.
I'm glad that more science writers are…
loom | October 16, 2005There was a time not that long ago when sequencing a single gene would be hailed as a scientific milestone. But then came a series of breakthroughs that sped up the process: clever ideas for how to cut up genes and rapidly identify the fragments, the design of robots that could do this work twenty-four hours a day, and powerful computers programmed to make sense of the results. Instead of single genes, entire genomes began to be sequenced. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of the first complete draft of the entire genome of a free-living species (a nasty little microbe…
loom | October 15, 2005My post on the cognitive dissonance in Florida about evolution brought a lot of comments, including one from David. Although he seems to be attacking other commenters rather than post itself as far as I can tell, he makes three points that are worth addressing.
1. "...most of you have no clue as to what ID/Creationists really believe."
"ID/Creationists" is an interesting phrase, given how Intelligent Design advocates keep telling us over and over again that ID is not creationism. Are these ID folks lying?
2. According to David, "ID/creationists" see a difference "between mirco-evolution [sic…
loom | October 14, 2005
Finally, more brains.
On Tuesday I wrote about how the second batch of Homo floresiensis bones had at last seen the scientific light of day. Today the critics who don't think the Hobbit is a new species are making their way into scientific journals as well. They're saying that the Hobbit brain looks an awful lot like a human brain.
Last year, as I described here, Dean Falk of Florida State University and her colleagues reported on a scan they had made of the braincase of Homo floresiensis. They compared it to the braincase of normal humans, of a human born with a congenital defect called…
loom | October 11, 2005Finally: more bones.
Last October the world marveled at the announcement of the discovery of a new species of hominid, Homo floresiensis, in a cave called Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores. One conclusion was more shocking than the next. First, this hominid stood only three feet high, earning it the nickname The Hobbit. Second, it lived as recently as 18,000 years ago, which was some 30,000 years after our own species had already been in southeast Asia for 30,000 years or more. The scientists argued that Homo floresiensis was a separate species that might have descended from Homo…
loom | October 10, 2005I've got a piece in tomorrow's New York Times on new research into the evolution of penguins. There's new work going on with penguin DNA and penguin fossils, such as this lovely 60-million-year old critter from New Zealand. It stood upright like living penguins, but still had wings it could bend at the elbow. In other words, just what you'd expect as flying ancestors evolved into full-blown penguins. While it's amusing to have a little fun with pundits who try to use penguins as role models for family values, writing about real science is always more satisfying.
(This picture is copyright the…
loom | October 10, 2005When it comes to evolution, the nation's attention is focused these days on Dover, Pennsylvania, where parents are suing the local board of education for introducing creationism into the classroom. It's certainly an important case, but if you really want to get a sense of what's at stake in the struggle over evolution, I suggest you turn your attention south, to the sunshine state. Florida is trying to have it both ways when it comes to creationism, and sooner or later something's going to have to give.
Two weeks ago, governor Jeb Bush broke ground on what he has called "a defining moment in…
loom | October 8, 2005I've got a stack of new books that I want to get to this fall, although it's not going to be easy. If your interests run in the same currents, you may be interested in some of them...
Us and Them, by David Berreby. Berreby takes a look at how we put ourselves in groups, and put others outside them. I read it when Berreby asked me to give it a blurb, but I would like to return to it to really delve into all the rich material he's brought together, from history, neuroscience, and a range of other disciplines.
The Pterosaurs: From Deep Time. I've always thought these flying reptiles have gotten…
loom | October 5, 2005If you live in the New Haven area, I hope you'll consider joining me tomorrow at 5 pm for a talk at the Yale Medical School about my book Soul Made Flesh.
The talk will be at 5 pm, Thursday October 6, in the Beaumont Room at the Sterling Hall of Medicine, 333 Cedar Street. It is free and open to the public. If you need directions, here's a map.
I can promise lots of cool images to accompany my talk, of stuff like excorcisms, miraculous resurrections of murderers, and alchemy. All the normal things you'd expect from a seventeenth-century powerpoint.
loom | October 4, 2005In July Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna wrote an eyebrow-raising op-ed in the New York Times that favored Intelligent Design over evolution. Now, as far as I can tell from this Reuters story, he's claiming he was misunderstood.
"Maybe one did not express oneself clearly enough or thoughts were not clear enough," he said. "Such misunderstandings can be cleared up."
Now he's saying that evolution's fine as long as biologists don't conclude that evolution proves there's no creator. Darwin's theory is "one of the very great works of intellectual history."
Compare this with his claim in…
loom | October 3, 2005Thanks to Scientific American for awarding one of its Science & Technology Web Awards to the Loom as one of their 25 favorite sites on the web, for "enchanting readers with every post."
Congrats also to three other sites that are on my RSS: Panda's Thumb, Real Climate, and Chris Mooney's The Intersection.
loom | October 3, 2005
This year's Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology was announced this morning. Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren won for discovering that ulcers can be caused not by stress or genes but by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori (shown here). As my fellow Corantean, Derek Lowe, observes, this story follows the classic arc from, "You're completely bonkers" to "You're going to Stockholm." But it also illustrates a point that I made when last year's Nobelists were announced: it demonstrates how intimately woven evolutionary biology is becoming with medicine.
It turns out that Helicobacter…
loom | September 29, 2005Just a technical note: Corante has been upgrading to a new version of Movable Type, and they're still working out a few glitches. Some readers have already reported trouble posting comments. You can vent any other sort of frustration in my direction, and I'll let the powers that be know. I assume everything will be sorted out shortly.
loom | September 25, 2005This Wednesday, I'll be coming to Swarthmore College to give a public lecture about human evolution. I had originally planned to focus on some of the cutting-edge discoveries I include in my upcoming book, from brain genes to enigmatic hobbits. But now that the big creationism trial is scheduled to get underway a couple hours away in Dover, Pa., on Monday, I'll talk about that as well--in particular how scientists continue to find evidence of human evolution, despite what some op-ed writing politicians may claim.
Scroll down for information on my talk here. It's at 7:15 at Scheuer Room,…
loom | September 22, 2005The National Academy of Sciences just announced its 2005 Communications Awards. Gareth Cook, Pulitzer prizewinner from the Boston Globe, won the Newspaper/Magazine/Internet category for his must-read series of articles on stem cells. I was named one of two finalists, for a group of pieces about evolution that appeared during 2005 in Discover, The New York Times, and right here. I knew I might be taking a risk by including some posts from The Loom, but I was very proud of them. It's nice to see that blogs are taking seriously by the likes of the National Academy of Sciences.