loom | March 16, 2005I can't remember the first time I saw the dinosaur fossils at the American Museum of Natural History, but they've been good friends for over thirty years. We've all changed a lot over that time. I've grown up and gotten a bit gray, while they've hiked up their tails, gotten a spring in their step, and even sprouted feathers.
I plan to take my daughters to see the new exhibit at AMNH, Dinosaurs: Ancient Fossils, New Discoveries, this spring, and it will be strange to watch them get to know these dinosaurs all over again. In January I got a chance to slink around the exhibit while it was still…
loom | March 7, 2005Last week my editor at the New York Times asked me to write an article about the evolution of crying, to accompany an article by Sandra Blakeslee on colic. Both articles (mine and Blakeslee's) are coming out tomorrow. As I've written here before, human babies are by no means the only young animals that cry, and there's evidence that natural selection has shaped their signals, whether they have feathers or hair. Among animals, there's a lot of evidence that infants can benefit from manipulating their signals to get more from their parents. On the other hand, evolution may sometimes favor "…
loom | March 3, 2005At 1 p.m. today I listened by phone to a press conference in Washington where scientists presented the first good look inside a Hobbit's head. The view is fascinating. While it may help clear up some mysteries, it seems to throw others wide open.
Last October, a team of Australian scientists declared that they had found a new species of hominid that lived as recently as 12,000 years ago. It was short--maybe three and a half feet tall--and had a brain they estimated to be about the size of a chimp's. Its bones were found along with stone tools, suggesting that it made good use of its scant…
loom | March 1, 2005I've got an article in today's New York Times about animal personalities.
Update: I'm not ashamed to admit I'm a regular visitor to the gossip site Gawker. But I have to say I was surprised to see the personality article turn up there. Will hordes of New York hipsters discover the strange joys of evolution, of comparative psychology? We can only hope.
loom | March 1, 2005In my last post, I traced a debate over the evolution of language. On one side, we have Steven Pinker and his colleagues, who argue that human language is, like the eye, a complex adaptation produced over millions of years through natural selection, favoring communication between hominids. On the other side, we have Noam Chomsky, Tecumseh Fitch, and Marc Hauser, who think scientists should explore some alternative ideas about language, including one hypothesis in which practically all the building blocks of human language were already in place long before our ancestors could speak, having…
loom | February 25, 2005Earlier this month I wrote two posts about the evolution of the eye, a classic example of complexity in nature. (Parts one and two.) I'd like to write now about another case study in complexity that has fascinated me for some time now, and one that has sparked a fascinating debate that has been playing out for over fifteen years. The subject is language, and how it evolved.
In 1990, Steven Pinker (now at Harvard) and Paul Bloom (now at Yale) published a paper called "Natural Selection and Natural Language." They laid out a powerful argument for language as being an adaptation produced by…
loom | February 24, 2005The Sydney Morning Herald reports today that the bones of Homo floresiensis, aka the Hobbits, have at last been returned to the team that originally discovered them.
The team, made up of Indonesian and Australian scientists, discovered the bones on the Indonesian island of Flores. Last October they declared that they had found a new species of diminutive, small-brained hominid that existed just 12,000 years ago. Then, in November, the bones wound up in the hands (or, rather, the locked safe) of the Indonesian paleoanthropologist Teuku Jacob. Jacob claims that a member of the Hobbit team…
loom | February 16, 2005In my last post, I went back in time, from the well-adapted eyes we are born with, to the ancient photoreceptors used by microbes billions of years ago. Now I'm going to reverse direction, moving forward through time, from animals that had fully functioning eyes to their descendants, which today can't see a thing.
This may seem like a ridiculous mismatch to my previous post. We start out with the rise of eyes, a complex story with all sorts of twists and turns, with gene stealing, gene borrowing, gene copying; and then we turn to a simple tale of loss, of degeneration, of a few genes mutating…
loom | February 15, 2005(The first of a two-part post)
The eye has always had a special place in the study of evolution, and Darwin had a lot to do with that. He believed that natural selection could produce the complexity of nature, and to a nineteenth century naturalist, nothing seemed as complex as an eye, with its lens, cornea, retina, and other parts working together so exquisitely.The notion that natural selection could produce such an organ "seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest possible degree," Darwin wrote in the Origin of Species.
For Darwin, the key word in that line was seems. He realized that…
loom | February 15, 2005Over the next week or so, I'm going to post a couple two-part posts. I've gotten mildly obsessed with two big topics in evolution: eyes and language. There's been so much fascinating work done on both subjects in the past year or so that a single post just won't do for either of them. I know that the blog genre lends itself well to quick hits, but I'm going to stretch things a bit. We'll see how it works.
loom | February 12, 2005Readers of the Loom may recall an earlier post about how creationists (including proponents of Intelligent Design) misleadingly cite peer-reviewed scientific research in order to make their own claims sound more persuasive. I mentioned that when the scientists themselves find out their research has been misrepresented, they groan and protest.
In case you thought I was exaggerating, check out National Academy of Science president's Bruce Albert's letter to the editor of the New York Times in response to Michael Behe's recent creationist Op-Ed. Behe quoted Alberts describing his early…
loom | February 8, 2005Scientists studying people in minimally conscious states have published the results of brain scans showing that these people can retain a surprising amount of brain activity. The New York Times and MSNBC, among others, have written up accounts.
I profiled these scientists for a 2003 article in the New York Times Magazine, when they were at an earlier stage in their research. Things certainly have changed since then. When my article came out, hardly anyone had heard of Terri Schiavo, the Florida woman in a permanent vegetative state who is at the center of a battle between her parents, who…
loom | February 7, 2005Growing up as I did in the northeast, I always assumed that the really weird life forms lived somewhere else--the Amazonian rain forest, maybe, or the deep sea. But we've got at least one truly bizarre creature we can boast about: the star-nosed mole. Its star is actually 22 fleshy tendrils that extend from its snout. For a long time, it wasn't entirely clear what the moles used the star for. The moles were so quick at finding food--larvae, worms, and other creatures that turn up in their tunnels--that some scientists suggested that the star could detect the electric fields of animals.
That…
loom | January 28, 2005Thanks to the many people who left comments on my recent post about some recent work on the intersection of stem cells and human evolution. I noticed that several people expressed variations on the same theme, one which deserves a response. To recap briefly: a great deal of research indicates that a couple million years ago, our hominid ancestors lost the ability to make one of the main sugars that coat mammal cells, called Neu5Gc. This ancient chapter in our history turns out to have a big effect on current research on embryonic stem cells. When human stem cells are raised on a substrate…
loom | January 27, 2005Recently I assisted the folks at Soundprint with an hour-long radio documentary about how humans are driving evolution in new directions. Here's the show, available on Real Player.
loom | January 23, 2005Last October, word leaked out that something might be seriously amiss with the embryonic stem cell lines approved by President Bush for federally funded research. Today, the full details were published on line in Nature Medicine. It's an important paper, and not only because it points out a grave problem with the current state of stem cell research. It also shows how scientists who do cutting-edge medical research are looking back at two million years of human evolution to make sense of their work. At a time when antievolutionists are trying hard to wedge creationist nonsense into science…
loom | January 21, 2005My thanks to Nova for becoming my first blog sponsor. I've always been leery of the random scattershoot of ads you see on many blogs, and so I was relieved that I wound up with a better fit. (Full disclosure: I wrote the companion book to the big series on evolution that the Nova/WGBH team put together a couple years back.) I checked out their ScienceNow link, and they've got some cool items over there, including some clips of their show.
If anyone else is interested in sponsorship, and thereby reaching an incredibly desirable demographic (my dear readers), let me or the good people at…
loom | January 18, 2005The Guardian has a long but disjointed report about the dispute over Homo floresiensis. Articles like these rarely give a very good picture of scientific disputes, since all parties involved only get a couple catchy quotes apiece. I've been particularly puzzled by Teuku Jacob, the elderly Indonesian paleoanthropologist who sparked the controversy by taking possession of the bones and locking them away from the Indonesian and Australian researchers who found them. So I was pleased when my brother, a linguistic anthropologist who does research in Indonesia, passed on this link to a translation…
loom | January 14, 2005Unscrewing the Inscrutable has been updating progress of the Huygens probe as it screeches towards the surface of Titan. So far (8:20 am) it still seems to be going well. The first real data will come later this morning. Of course, the really exciting stuff for us bio-freaks will come in a few months.
Correction: 9:52 am: Unscrewing--not Screwing. Insert your foul joke here.