loom | February 27, 2007This morning I noticed that on top of my blog there's an ad for an upcoming show on the Discovery Channel that claims to reveal the tomb of Jesus and his family. I haven't seen a preview of the show, and from an article in this morning's NY Times, I have very little interest in doing so:
The filmmakers commissioned DNA testing on the residue in the boxes said to have held Jesus and Mary Magdalene. There are no bones left, because the religious custom in Israel is to bury archeological remains in a cemetery.
However, the documentary's director and its driving force, Simcha Jacobovici, an…
loom | February 26, 2007I suspect poking around Conservapedia will become one of my new tools for procrastination. You're guaranteed a jaw drop within a couple minutes of searching on this Wikipedia for conservatives. It occurred to me that I had not yet bothered to look up "creationism." The entry is a whiplash of a read, with critics and backers of creationism having it out, sometimes within a single paragraph. What really struck me was the section on "Attempts to Criticize Creationism." The history page shows that it is authored by "Aschlafly"--presumably Andrew Schlafly, founder of the entire site. It is marked…
loom | February 26, 2007My ancestry forms a smear across northern and central Europe, a region of the world where many people have a peculiar gift: they can drink milk as adults. Almost all people can digest milk sugar (lactose) as babies, but in many parts of the world they lose this ability after they stop nursing. The change is due to an enzyme called lactase, which breaks down lactose into digestible fragments. Most people stop making lactase as they grow up. If they drink milk, the lactose builds up in their guts, where it can be devoured by microbes that produce gas and other discomforts. (It's not so…
loom | February 26, 2007Tomrrow I'm heading down to New York to take part in the "Inside Out" speaker series at New York University's Department of Journalism. John Rennie, editor-in-chief at Scientific American, and I will try to answer the question, "Can two prominent magazine journalists find happiness blogging?" The inquisition, run by LA Times reporter and NYU writer-in-residence Lee Hotz is open to journalism students and faculty. It will take place the fifth floor atrium of 10 Washington Place, at 6 p.m on Tuesday. See you there.
loom | February 23, 2007Loyalty, teamwork, cruel deception: welcome to robot evolution.
Living things communicate all the time. They bark, they glow, they make a stink, they thwack the ground. How their communication evolved is the sort of big question that keeps lots of biologists busy for entire careers. One of the reasons it's so big is that there are many different things that organisms communicate. A frog may sing to attract mates. A plant may give off a chemical to attract parasitoid wasps to attack the bugs chewing its leaves. An ant may lay down pheromone trails to guide other ants to food. Bacteria emit…
loom | February 23, 2007The Koufax awards are among the biggest honors out here in the blogmos. It just came to my attention that the Loom has been nominated in the category of best writing. Of course, I'm packed in with lots of excellent blogs, so if you plan to vote, you've got lots of reading ahead of you. When voting does open up, prepare for a not-so-subtle reminder...
Best Writing Nominations | The Koufax Awards
loom | February 22, 2007There was a time--in the 1960s and 1970s--when the phrase "Man the Hunter" enjoyed a lot of popularity. Some researchers claimed that the evolution of hunting played a key role in the origin of our lineage. That's what we made tools for, and that's how we got all the extra energy to fuel our big brains. Much of our anatomy, according to the Man-the-Hunter theory, was the result of adaptations for hunting. You have to stand tall above the savannah grass, for example, to spot your game. You need to make weapons. And a bloody-minded psychology helped too. In the 1976 book The Hunting Hypothesis…
loom | February 21, 2007Behold conservapedia, which calls itself "an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America"--and where we don't like Wikipedia at all. My fellow Sciencebloggers have been finding all sorts of factual troubles with the site over the past few days. I didn't think I had all that much to add, until I started entering a few basic science terms in the search engine and detected a certain pattern...
Geology
The study of the earth's history as revealed in the rocks that make up the earth.[1]
1. Wile, Dr. Jay L. Exploring Creation With General Science. Anderson:…
loom | February 19, 2007Darwin gave a lot of thought to the strangest creatures on this planet, wondering how they had evolved from less strange ancestors. Whales today might be fish-like warm-blooded beasts with blowholes and flukes, but long ago, Darwin argued, their ancestors were ordinary mammals that walked on land with legs. His suggestion was greeted with shock and disbelief; neverthless, scientists have found bones from ancient walking whales. Humans, Darwin argued, evolved from apes, most likely in Africa where chimpanzees and gorillas are found today. And today scientists have found about twenty different…
loom | February 7, 2007The latest joy from the Discovery Institute: an attempt to make dodos look scary.
loom | February 7, 2007There are six and a half billion human stomachs on this little planet of ours, and over half of them are home to a microbe called Helicobacter pylori. Scientists have known about the bacteria since the late 1800s, but it wasn't until the 1980s that Australian doctors noticed that H. pylori was in the stomachs of just about everyone with an ulcer. A swig of antibiotics turned out to be a great way to make ulcers disappear. Scientists have since demonstrated that H. pylori strikes up an uneasy truce with its human hosts. In most cases, H. pylori lives amicably in our stomachs. When the truce…
loom | February 6, 2007In celebration of Darwin's 198th birthday, there will be lots of events--talks, etc.--going on around the world next week. I'll be doing my part, heading to the Rockies to talk at Western State College in Gunnison, Colorado. My talk is entitled, "The Descent of Man, From Darwin to DNA." I'll be speaking at 7 on Tuesday, February 13, in the Kebler Ballroom at the College Union Building. It's free and open to the public. (Map)
Here's a guide to a lot of the planned events at the official Darwin Day site. (Full disclosure: I'm on the board of advisors.) This year is distinguished by a big roll-…
loom | January 31, 2007Speaking of hobbits, the paperback edition of my human evolution book is just about to come out, and you can order it now on Amazon. And if you prefer the resounding thwack of hard covers, the hardback edition is still available. For information on the innards of the book, see this post from last year.
loom | January 29, 2007
Could 2007 see some new hobbits? I certainly hope so.
In October 2004, a team of scientists announced they had found bones of a hominid from the Indonesian island of Flores. They came to the astonishing conclusion that the bones belonged to a new species, which they called Homo floresiensis, which stood only three feet tall, lived as recently as 12,000 years ago, had a chimp-sized brain, and could use stone tools to hunt.
That announcement launched an extraordinary debate, with scientists arguing in favor of tiny hominids (nicknamed Hobbits), or a dwarf with a birth defect, or an unusually…
loom | January 22, 2007The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is about to release its newest edition of its report on global warming. In this AP report, one of the scientists who co-authored part of the IPCC study promises that it will contain much more than a smoking gun. It will contain "a batallion of intergalactic smoking missiles."
The IPCC has been strengthening its conclusions about human responsibility for the rise in global temperatures for a few years now. One thing that apparently will set this new edition apart will be a section that looks at the impact global warming is having on nature--plants…
loom | January 17, 2007Mark Twain once discovered to his horror that his story "The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County" had been hideously translated into French. He went so far as to publish the original story, the translation, and his own retranslation of the French back to English to show just how badly it had been abused. "I claim that I never put together such an odious mixture of bad grammar and delirium tremens in my life," he declared.
I was reminded of Twain's experience when a reader drew my attention to a creationist attack published yeserday against an article I recently wrote for National Geographic. It…
loom | January 15, 2007Over at Blog around the Clock, Bora has the details on the new science blog anthology book he has put together and which is now for sale. (My posts on eye evolution (1, 2) are included.)
Bora apparently got the idea for his book three weeks ago, and now he's got an honest-to-goodness tome between covers. I got the idea for my own book in 2005, and if I'm lucky, it'll be out in a year. Strange business.
loom | January 9, 2007Cancer, many biologists aruge argue, is an evolutionary disease. It is a burden of being multicellular, and a threat against which natural selection has only managed mediocre defenses. Making matters worse, cancer cells can borrow highly evolved genes for their own deadly purposes. And even within a single tumor, cancer cells get nastier through natural selection.
I've been following the study of evolution and cancer for some time now, and have blogged on the Loom about it here, here, and here. But it was a review in Trends in Ecology and Evolution that spurred me to launch a full-blown…
loom | January 9, 2007On the last day of December, I turned in the final draft of my book about E. coli and the meaning of life. This is the sixth time around for me, and I'm getting familiar now with the havoc the experience wreaks on my nerves. In the final few weeks, the book becomes a monster that follows me around to every room of the house, out on the walks I take with my family. It crouches in the movie theaters and restaurants where I go with my wife to take a break. It just sits there, rumbling and wheezing, making me aware that it is still with me. I work late into the night, trying to get it out of the…
loom | December 29, 2006One reason I love writing about biology is that it has so many levels. Down at the molecular scale, proteins flop and twist. Higher up, cells crawl and feed and divide. They organize into animals and plants and other big organisms, which must obey their own rules in order to survive. For some organisms, a day is a lifetime. Others must weather centuries. When millions of organisms get together, they form ecosystems that wax and wane in ways that could not be predicted from lower levels. And over the course of generations, genes take on a new personality, no longer passive bits of code, but…