loom | March 23, 2006I have a fondness for collecting brain lore--memes about the wonders of the human brain that race around the world for decades. The classic of brain lore is the "ten-percent myth." As I wrote here, people often claim we only use ten percent of our brain, implying that we'd be supergeniuses if we could just switch on the rest. But that's just based on a misinterpretation of some studies in the 1930s. Actually, the energy consumed by the cortex is only enough to power one percent of its neurons at any time.
In a press release descibing the work of Stanford bioengineer Kwabena Boahen, I…
loom | March 22, 2006Kate Wong, Scientific American's excellent paleo reporter has a two-parter on the latest dish on Homo floresiensis a k a the Hobbit. No cymbal crashes, I'm afraid, but interesting nonetheless.
loom | March 19, 2006Check out Pharyngula on the new paper that uses penguin fossils to time the evolution of living bird groups. In October I posted this picture of a reconstruction of the penguin in question, which now has a name: Waimanu. I'd just add to PZ's run down that this fossil is also important because it is part of the transition from flying ancestors to flightless living penguins. Its wings could still bend at the elbows.
loom | March 17, 2006Randy Olson, who sparked a massive discussion here a couple weeks ago in connection to his movie, Flock of Dodos and how to explain evolution, sends an update:
Hello Carl -
Big news here -- the official World Premiere of "Flock of Dodos: the evolution-intelligent design circus," will be at Robert De Niro's Tribeca Film Festival on the evening of Sunday, April 30 in New York City, followed by three more screenings during the following days. We will have details on our website next week on how to get tickets. Here's the Tribeca announcement: http://www.indiewire.com/ots/2006/03/…
loom | March 14, 2006Harper has put up a new page on Amazon for the reissued paperback of Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. It will include an introduction I've written that surveys some of the important developments in both the science and politics of evolution in the five years since the book was published. The Amazon page doesn't show the cover yet, but it's in the fall catalog--a subset of these lovely eyes. The publication date is scheduled for November (cough...Christmas gifts...cough).
loom | March 14, 2006Last October, a lawsuit was leveled against an evolution web site at UC Berkeley, based on the claim that government funds had been used to promote religious belief. I contributed the section on the history of biological thought. Judy Scotchmoor, the project's coordinator, just dropped me an email letting me know that the judge has dismissed the case. One less frivolous lawsuit clogging the courts. I've got to run, but if I get more information later, I'll update this post.
Update: Berkeley press release here.
loom | March 13, 2006Natural selection can favor genes that allow children to grow up healthy. But in order to grow up healthy, they need nurturing from their mothers, both before and after birth. If a baby's development puts a strain on a mother, she may end up having fewer children. That means she may spread fewer copies of her genes to later generations . That creates conditions in which natural selection may also genes that allow mothers to restrain their children. Our particular way of having kids puts genes in conflict.
I have an article in tomorrow's New York Times on these conflicting genes, focusing on…
loom | March 13, 2006How do we know that we are kin to chimpanzees and howler monkeys and the other primates? For one thing, it's by far the best explanation for the fossil record. For another, our DNA shows signs of kinship to other primates, much like the genetic markers that are shared by people from a particular ethnic group. There's a third line of evidence that I find particularly fascinating: the viruses carried by humans and other apes.
Every day, viruses traffic in and out of human bodies. They invade people's cells, make new copies of themselves, and then, if they're lucky, infect a new host. Some…
loom | March 11, 2006In trying to navigate the new ethical territory of blogging, I've decided to delete part of one of my posts. The full explanation is below.
Last week the story about the Turkish "quadruped" family was in circulation. I pointed to an article in which a Turkish scientist made an accusation of unethical payments against English scientists and a television company. When one of the English scientists, Nicholas Humphrey, complained in the comments that I was spreading "empty gossip," I updated the post with a partial retraction, apologizing for not following up on the accusation. However, I rebuted…
loom | March 10, 2006I take a look at two new books on global warming in Sunday's New York Times Book Review. The International Herald Tribune has already posted it on their site (which has no subscription wall to boot). (Update: NYTBR link.) The books are The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery and Field Notes From a Catastrophe by Elizabeth Kolbert. Both are very good (though not perfect) books, and I suspect that they may have a noticeable effect on the discourse about global warming. I will be curious (in a kind of staring-at-a-car-wreck way) to watch the reaction of the global warming denial crowd. Flannery's…
loom | March 10, 2006Mike Lemonick, Time's excellent senior writer on science, has started a blog. I can't think off the top of my head of another staff science writer at a big magazine or newspaper who has a blog (as opposed to us itinerant science scribes). So welcome to Mike.
One quibble: why no comments? A journalist who doesn't let blog readers comment is...well, I won't use bad language here (but I will here).
Perhaps that's the downside of life on staff--lots of lawyers hovering about.
loom | March 10, 2006Loyal readers need no introduction to this bit of entomological "Faces of Death." Others who think this must be some sort of hoax, read this (or this).
Courtesy of Dr. Fred Liebersat, oracle of the emerald cockroach wasp.
loom | March 10, 2006The Discovery Channel picked up my cockroach zombie story and interviewed Dr. Fred Liebersat on his research. They included some cool footage of the roach and its sinister wasp brain surgeon. To watch, go to their archives and scroll to "Roach-o-rama."
Unfortunately, there's no footage of young wasps poking their heads out of their cockroach hosts, but perhaps that was too hard to catch. Or maybe just too disturbing...
loom | March 9, 2006 Enceladus, a tiny moon of Saturn, suddenly gets interesting. It may be spewing liquid water. And since the only life we know of needs liquid water--and since Enceladus may now be the second place we know of in the solar system with liquid water--I want to buy a ticket there. Details and pictures here.
loom | March 9, 2006I've revisited the wrist walker story after a scientist involved accused me of spreading "empty gossip." I don't agree with that charge, but I do think I should retract some of what I wrote. But I've still got some nagging questions about the whole affair. Check it out.
loom | March 8, 2006I've been in low-blogging mode for a few days as I try to fire off a few dead-tree articles. But I wanted to write up a quick post to draw your attention to threetwo very interesting pieces of human evolution in the news.
1. Modern evolution. A new paper presents the results of a systematic scan for human genes that have experienced natural selection in the past few thousand years. An impressive 700 regions turned up. The fact that humans have been evolving during recorded history is not new. The ability to digest lactose in milk as an adult, resistance to malaria, and other traits have long…
loom | March 3, 2006
Scientists are probably centuries away from drawing the full tree of life. For one thing, they have only discovered a small fraction of the species on Earth--perhaps only ten percent. They are also grappling with the relationships between the species they have discovered. Systematists (scientists who study the tree of life) rely mainly on DNA these days to figure out how species are related to one another. They compare the similarities and differences in a given gene in several different species to figure out which ones share the closest kinship. But they have actually sequenced DNA from…
loom | February 27, 2006This image came out a couple months ago in Nature, but I just came across it today. I quite like the way it sums up the history of life--something that's maddening hard to do, since the time scales are so vast. It shows how life's diversity has been accumulating for billions of years. This chart shows the timing of the earliest paeolontological evidence for different kinds of life, ranging from fossils to chemical markers. A few definitions may help. Phototrophic bacteria can harness sunlight to grow. Cyanobacteria are also known as blue-green algae (aka pond scum). Eukaryotes are species…
loom | February 22, 2006Go back far enough in our history--maybe about 650 million years--and you come to a time when our ancestors were still invertebrates. That is, they had no skulls, teeth, or other bones. They didn't even have a brain.
How invertebrates became vertebrates is a fascinating question, made all the more fascinating because the answer tells us something about how we got to be the way we are. In order to reconstruct what happened, scientists can study several different kinds of evidence. They can look at the bodies of invertebrates to find the ones that share traits with vertebrates not found in…