loom | August 8, 2005I've got two stories in tomorrow's New York Times about getting sick.
One is about malaria. I've always been fascinated by how parasites can manipulate their hosts for their own ends, and much of my book Parasite Rex is dedicated to explaining how this creepy remote control works. I've come across many new examples from time to time. Now a new study shows that the parasite that causes malaria can alter us humans to turn us into good mosquito bait. As with most stories about life, this one is ultimately about evolutionin this case, how parasites repeatedly have evolved ways to boost their own…
loom | August 5, 2005I'll close the week with an open letter to President Bush just released by the American Astronomical Society's president, Prof. Robert Kirschner, to express disappointment with his comments on bringing intelligent design into the classroom. Astronomers may not deal with natural selection or fossils, but as a general principle, they don't like seeing non-science and science getting confused.
Washington, DC. The American Astronomical Society is releasing the text of a letter concerning "intelligent design" and education that was sent earlier today to President George W. Bush by the President…
loom | August 3, 2005A statement from the National Science Teachers' Association on Bush's remarks about Intelligent Design:
NSTA Disappointed About Intelligent Design Comments Made by President Bush
2005-08-03 - NSTA
The National Science Teachers Association (NSTA), the world's largest organization of science educators, is stunned and disappointed that President Bush is endorsing the teaching of intelligent design - effectively opening the door for nonscientific ideas to be taught in the nation's K-12 science classrooms.
"We stand with the nation's leading scientific organizations and scientists, including Dr.…
loom | August 2, 2005The American Geophysical Union just issued a press release in response to Bush's comments about intelligent design. It's not online at their web site yet, so I've posted it here. (Update: It's on line now.) This is not the first time that the 43,000 members of the AGU have spoken out against creationism. They protested the sale of a creationist account of the Grand Canyon in National Park Service stores, and condemned the airing of a creationist movie about cosmology at the Smithsonian Institution. But this is the first time they've taken on the President.
American Geophysical Union 2 August…
loom | August 2, 2005After a day-long road trip from Ohio, I finally had the chance to read the news that President Bush thinks that schools should discuss Intelligent Design alongside evolution, so that students can "understand what the debate is about."
As Bush himself said, this is pretty much the same attitude he had towards creationism when he was a governor. His statements back in Texas didn't actually lead to any changes in Texas schools, and I doubt that these new remarks will have much direct effect, either. But, like Chris Mooney, I'm a journalist, and like him I would have loved to have been in the…
loom | August 1, 2005I've been on hiatus for quite a while, in part because of some surgery (more on that later), but I just wanted to write a quick post to point you to my latest article in tomorrow's New York Times, about how birds can sing like cricket. It's a wonderful example of how sexual selection can alter bodies, not for simple survival but to lure the opposite sex.
loom | July 12, 2005I've got an article in today's New York Times about one of my perennial fascinationsmusical hallucinations. One of the reasons that I find this condition so interesting is that it gives us a look under the neurological hood. Our brains do not simply take in objective impressions of the world. They are continually coming up with theories, and they test them against perceptions every moment of our waking lives. It would be impossible to test them against a complete picture of reality, because the world is simply too complex and ever-changing. Instead, the brain makes quick judgments on scraps…
loom | July 8, 2005
I've been fascinated by this picture since I first saw it over the weekend. It's a hint of how we may be visualizing life in years to come.
As Darwin was trying to figure out how new species could evolve from old species, he began to think of evolution as a tree. He scribbled some simple branches in a notebook, and then published a more elaborate one in The Origin of Species. Darwin didn't actually put any animals or plants on the branches of these trees; he was just thinking about the process itself. Today, though, evolutionary trees are a common sight in scientific journals, whether…
loom | July 5, 2005How long can an idea stay tantalizing?
Back in 2003, I blogged about an experiment that suggested, incredibly enough, that our long-term memories are encoded by prions the misfolded proteins that are generally accepted to be the cause of mad cow disease. The evidence came from studies of a protein (known as CPEB) that plays a key role in laying down memories in neurons. Scientists found that it had a structure much like prions. When a normal protein misfolds and becomes a prion, it acquires the ability to lock onto other proteins and force them to misfold in the same way. The misfolding can…
loom | June 30, 2005Science Magazine is celebrating its 125th anniversary with 125 big questions that scientists will face in the next 25 years. You can read them all for free here. For the 25 biggest questions, the editors commissioned short essays. I addressed the minor matter of how and where life began.
Fortunately, I get to ask the question. I don't have to provide the final answer. A science writer's prerogative.
loom | June 30, 2005This week a few more tantalizing clues about the origin of language popped up.
I blogged here and here about a fierce debate over the evolution of language. No other species communicates quite the way humans do, with a system of sounds, words, and grammar that allows us to convey an infinite number of ideas. While particular languages are the products of different cultures, the basic capacity for language appears to be built into our species. Some scientists argue that language is primarily the product of natural selection working within the hominid lineage over the past few million years.…
loom | June 28, 2005Last year I went to a fascinating symposium in honor of the great evolutionary biologist George Williams. The March issue of the Quarterly Review of Biology ran a series of papers written by the speakers at the meeting that offered much more detail on how Williams had influenced them in their various fields. Randolph Nesse of the University of Michigan gave one of the most interesting talks at the meeting on maladaptation and what it means to human medicine. You can download the pdf from his web site.
To whet your appetite, here's a nice passage on the eye:
"It works well when it works, but…
loom | June 23, 2005In the comments, Doug gets exasperated with some recent posts of mine:
Isn't it amazing how everything seems to provide evidence for evolution? The brain shrinks in some form of pygmy homo erectus. Thats evolution! Ancient genes survive millions of years unchanged. That's evolution?! Women have orgasms. That's evolution! Although not all women have orgasms and they still manage to reproduce hmm luckily with the right spin...That's evolution! We live in a civil society with people working for cooperative goals. That's evolution! Unfortunately some people murder and rape. Just an unfortunate…
loom | June 21, 2005Back in 1986 a biologist named Cindy Lee Van Doverwas poking around the innards of shrimp from the bottom of the sea. They came from a hydrothermal vent in the Atlantic, where boiling, mineral-rich water came spewing up from cracks in the Earths crust and supported rich ecosystems of tube-worms, microbes, crabs, and other creatures. The animals that lived around these vents were generally blind, which wasnt surprising considering that no sunlight could reach them. But Van Dover noticed that they had two flaps of tissue running along their backs that connected to nerves. Closer inspection…
loom | June 21, 2005
Ive got an article in todays New York Times about jellyfish and their kinknown as cnidarians. Cnidarians look pretty simple, which helped earn them a reputation as simple and primitive compared to vertebrates like us, as well as insects, squid, and other creatures with heads and tails, eyes, and so on (known as bilaterians). But it turns out that a lot of the genes that map our complex anatomy are lurking in cnidarians, too. Scientists are now pondering what all that genetic complexity does for the cnidarians. Theyre also using these findings to get a better idea of how the major groups of…
loom | June 16, 2005In October 2004 Australian and Indonesian announced they had discovered a three-foot tall species of hominid, Homo floresiensis, that was still alive no earlier than18,000 years ago. As Ive detailed in previous posts, this claim has inspired a lot of debate, much which revolves around whether the fossils, found on the Indonesian island of Flores do in fact represent a new species, or whether they were human pygmies. This week a new study was published in the journal Biology Letters (link to come) that puts this debate in the proper evolutionary frame. The paper is not about hominids, however…
loom | June 15, 2005
So lets recap: Its been almost eight months now since scientists announced the discovery of Homo floresiensis, the diminutive people that some claim belong to a new branch of hominid evolution and skeptics claim were just small humans. We seem to have entered a lull in the flow of new scientific information about Homo floresiensis. The last thing we heard from its discoverers came in March, when they published scans of the Homo floresiensis braincase, which bolstered their case that the skull they found didnt happen to belong to someone with a birth defect. The skeptics have made various…
loom | June 9, 2005I've been meaning to get around to writing about female orgasms.
Philosopher of science Elizabeth Lloyd just published a new book in which she rejects the idea that they are an adapation. Then a paper was just published tying variation in the experience of orgasms to genes.
Unfortunately, I've been hideously overworked this week. Fortunately, Elizabeth Lloyd herself is no stranger to the blogosphere, and she's written an interesting post on the paper. Her conclusion: heritability does not equal adaptation, and some scientists need to think more carefully about the evolutionary implications of…
loom | June 5, 2005
Its strange enough that beetles grow horns. But its especially strange that beetles grow so many kinds of horns. This picture, which was published in the latest issue of the journal Evolution, shows a tiny sampling of this diversity. The species shown here all belong to the genus Onthophagus, a group of dung beetles. The colors in this picture, which are false, show which parts of the beetle body the horns grow from. Blue horns grow from the back of the head, red from the middle of the head, and purple from the front of the head. Green horns grow from the center of the body plate directly…
loom | May 19, 2005Today in Science scientists reported a potentially big advance in creating embryos that can be used for stem cell transplants. Briefly put, they figured out how to take skin cells from patients, inject them into donated eggs emptied of their own DNA, and nurture them along until they had divided into a few cells. The cells were able to develop into a wide range of cell types, their chromosomes were normal, and they were so similar to the cells of the indvidual patients that they would not be rejected as foreign tissue. The research stopped there, but the dream behind this work is to heal your…