loom | September 21, 2005My brother Ben is now a respectable consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary, but when he was a kid, he was a puzzle freak, pure and simple. In fourth grade he'd spend hours paging through a big unabridged Webster's, looking for obscure words that he could use to create a fiendish rebus. Little did I know that one day one of his favorite puzzles--the doublet--would become useful to me in thinking about evolution.
The challenge of a doublet is to turn one word into another. You are allowed to change one letter at a time, but each change must produce a real word. Here's a doublet that suits…
loom | September 19, 2005Last year I was contacted by a team of scientists and museum exhibit designers to help put together a show about evolution. The result is Exploring Evolution, which is now opening at a string of state science museums in the midwest. (The list of participating museums is here.) The exhibit may not have a laser light show or a 100-foot long robotic dinosaur, but it does offer a look at seven examples of how scientists study evolution, from HIV to walking whales. Cornelia Dean includes the exhibit in an article in the New York Times on evolution-themed museum displays.
loom | September 15, 2005A lot of people think of viruses and bacteria in our bodies as nothing more than pests. It's certainly true that a lot of them do an excellent job of making us ill. But some viruses and bacteria merged with our ancestors over the course of billions of years, and if you were to have them removed from your body today, you'd die faster than if you'd gotten a massive dose of Ebola.
In order to breathe, we depend on sausage-shaped blobs in our cells called mitochondria. When I say we, I mean not just humans or animals, but a vast group of species known as eukaryotes, which also includes plants,…
loom | September 14, 2005"March of the Penguins," the conservative film critic and radio host Michael Medved said in an interview, is "the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing." --from an article describing how some religious leaders and conservative magazines are embracing the blockbuster documentary.
Well, it's 2010, and what a remarkable five years it's been. The blockbuster success of March of the Penguins in 2005 triggered a flood of wonderful documentaries about animal reproduction, all of which provide us with inspiring…
loom | September 13, 2005(Warning: this post contains some journalistic/blogging inside-baseball material.)
Back in the dark ages (otherwise known as the 1990s), writing about science felt a bit like putting messages in a bottle. I'd write an article, a few weeks or months later it would appear in a magazine, and a few weeks or months later I might get a response from a reader. In some cases, an expert might point out an error I made. In other cases, she or he might explain the real story which I had missed. The delay could make for some disconcerting experiences. The first time I met the late Stephen Jay Gould, to…
loom | September 12, 2005I'm back from a computer-free vacation, and of course I have returned to mountains of emails and a long chain of fascinating new links. In place of any original thoughts of my own, let me just point you to a few things that look interesting (if you have any mental space not presently occupied by the horrors of Katrina).
1. Over the past couple years I've enjoyed watching Chris Mooney's blogging and articles evolve into a full-blown book, The Republican War on Science, which has just come out. Tonight he hits the big time tonight on the Daily Show.
2. Mooney is actually just part of the…
loom | August 31, 2005Clint, the chimpanzee in this picture, died several months ago at a relatively young age of 24. But part of him lives on. Scientists chose him--or rather, his DNA--as the subject of their first attempt to sequence a complete chimpanzee genome. In the new issue of Nature, they've unveiled their first complete draft, and already Clint's legacy has offered some awesome insights into our own evolution.
The editors of Nature have dedicated a sprawling space in the journal to this scientific milestone. The main paper is 18 pages long, not to mention the supplementary information kept on Nature's…
loom | August 29, 2005
Our genes are arrayed along 23 pairs of chromosomes. On rare occasion, a mutation can change their order. If we picture the genes on a chromosome as
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
a mutation might flip a segment of the chromosome, so that it now reads
ABCDEFGHISRQPONMLKJTUVWXYZ
or it might move one segment somewhere else like this:
ABCDLMNOPQRSTUEFGHIJKVWXYZ
In some cases, these changes can spread into the genome of an entire species, and be passed down to its descendant species. By comparing the genomes of other mammals to our own, scientists have discovered how the order of our genes has been…
loom | August 27, 2005Sometimes a picture can tell you a lot about evolution. This particular picture has a story to tell about how two species--in this case a fly and an orchid--can influence each other's evolution. But the story it tells may not be the one you think.
Coevolution, as this process is now called, was one of Darwin's most important insights. Today scientists document coevolution in all sorts of species, from mushroom-farming ants to the microbes in our own gut. But Darwin found inspiration from the insects and flowers he could observe around his own farm in England.
Darwin's thoughts about…
loom | August 24, 2005Well, Dr. Chopra has given us part two of his ruminations on evolution with a post that will make physicists cringe as much as biologists.
My favorite line: "Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the universe."
Excuse me while I chat with my flashlight.
loom | August 24, 2005From an article on how John McCain may be positioning himself for a presidential run in The Arizona Star:
McCain told the Star that, like Bush, he believes "all points of view" should be available to students studying the origins of mankind.
"Available" is a wonderfully vague word.
Senator, Senator, a follow-up question please? Just a clarification? Do you mean that teachers just drop some pamphlets by the door that explain how we were designed by aliens? Or should that be on the final exam?
loom | August 24, 2005Scientists have been making some remarkable discoveries about viruses recently that may change the way we think about life. One place to start understanding what it all means is by looking at this picture.
You can't help put see a bright triangle with its three corners sitting on top of the black circles. But the triangle exists only in your mind. The illusion is known as a Kanisza triangle, and psychologists have argued that it plays on your brain's short-cuts for recognizing objects. Your brain does not bother to interpret every point of light that hits your retina in order to tell what you…
loom | August 23, 2005Here is an error-filled post about evolution by Deepak Chopra, frequent poster to the lefty blog, Huffington Post. I don't have time to point out the many ways in which Chopra mangles his description of biology, but PZ Myers has. Clear evidence that scientific illiteracy does not respect political boundaries.
loom | August 23, 2005
The red blob in this picture is a human red blood cell, and the green blob in the middle of it is a pack of the malaria-causing parasites Plasmodium falciparum. Other species of the single-celled Plasmodium can give you malaria, but if you're looking for a real knock-down punch, P. falciparum is the parasite for you. It alone is responsible for almost all of the million-plus deaths due to malaria.
How did this scourge come to plague us? In a paper to be published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, scientists have reconstructed a series of molecular events…
loom | August 21, 2005New branches on the tree of life have just turned up in Africa. Some are cuter than others.
In Madagascar, our primate family was enlarged by two adorable species of mouse lemurs. Meanwhile, other scientists made an uglier discovery in the small country of Djibouti, in the Horn of Africa. They found a surprising diversity of bacteria that cause tuberculosis. When most people think about the joys of biodiversity, they probably don't think about the hidden expanses of parasites waiting to be discovered. But in cases such as this one, they can have a fascinating story to tell--one that may…
loom | August 20, 2005This article in the New York Times is a pretty useful overview of the political and financial support behind the Discovery Institute, the main anti-evolution think tank. It describes how the Institute has spent $3.6 million dollars to support fellowships that include scientific research in areas such as "laboratory or field research in biology, paleontology or biophysics."
So what has that investment yielded, scientifically speaking? I'm not talking about the number of appearances on cable TV news or on the op-ed page, but about scientific achievement. I'm talking about how many papers have…
loom | August 18, 2005Those interested in my upcoming talks may want to visit my main web site. I've started to post information about the talks, as well as bringing the archive of my articles up to date. Nothing more depressing than a stale web site.
loom | August 15, 2005In today's New York Times I have an article about the quest to create a virtual organisma sort of digital Frankenstein accurate down to every molecular detail. The creature that the scientists I write about want to reproduce is that familiar denizen of our gut, Escherichia coli.
There are two things about this enterprise I find particularly delicious. One is that this little microbe is just too complex for today's computers to handle. For now scientists are just laying the groundwork for a day that might come in 10 or 20 years when they have enough processing power to handle E. coli. Another…
loom | August 14, 2005Mole rats are a pretty ugly, obscure bunch of creatures. They live underground in Africa, where they use their giant teeth to gnaw at roots. Those of you who know anything about mole rats most likely know about naked mole rats, which have evolved a remarkable society that is more insect than mammalian, complete with a queen mole rat ruling over her colony. But according to a paper in press at the Journal of Human Evolution, mole rats are important for another reason. Their evolution and our own show some striking parallels that may shed light on how our ancestors diverged from other apes.
The…
loom | August 11, 2005It's bad enough to see basic scientific misinformation about evolution getting tossed around these days. USA Today apparently has no qualms about publishing an op-ed by a state senator from Utah (who wants to have students be taught about something called "divine design") claiming there is no empirical evidence in the fossil evidence that humans evolved from apes. I'm not sure what we're supposed to do with the twenty or so species of hominids that existed over the past six million years. Perhaps just file them away under "divine false starts."
But history takes a hit as well as science.…