loom | November 22, 2004In tomorrow's issue of the New York Times, I have an essay that grew out of a meeting I went to earlier this month on natural history illustrations through the ages. The essay is accompanied by some of the cooler images I saw there, some of which are also included in the web version. Here's one that wasn't--one of the first illustrations of the legendary Victoria Regia water lily, so big that a single leaf could support a grown man. I explain in the essay why this picture was the 1854 equivalent of a high-resolution digital scan.
loom | November 19, 2004There are lots of news stories today (as well as PZ Myers' take) about the fabulous new discovery in Spain of Pierolapithecus catalaunicus, a 13-million year old fossil close to the common ancestor of all living great apes.
The early evolution of apes is where some of the most interesting developments are emerging. Until the recent discoveries of fossils of Pierolapithecus catalaunicus and other early species, the fossil record from this period of our history was pretty scanty. These new fossils are starting to shed light on some pretty major questions, such as how our upright stance came…
loom | November 19, 2004Apparently so.
...Actually, this new Gallup report shows that 35% of people believe that Darwin's theory of evolution is not supported by the evidence, while another 29% don't know enough to say, and 1% have no opinion. So perhaps I should say, wrong or uninformed.
loom | November 18, 2004A little more horn-tooting: The Loom has just been named a winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science's 2004 Science Journalism Award. The judges considered three pieces: Hamilton's Fall, Why the Cousins Are Gone, and My Darwinian Daughters. Here's the press release. Thanks to the judges--it's gratifying to see that it's possible for a little blog to swim with the big online sharks.
On the other hand, the news is a bit embarrassing, coming as it does while I've left the Loom woefully neglected over the past couple weeks. I've been working on a lot of articles, such as a…
loom | November 10, 2004Soul Made Flesh made Amazon.com's Editor's Pick list of the ten best science books of 2004. It's an honor, although it seems a little premature to call 2004 over!
loom | November 3, 2004Thanks to Wired for excerpting my post on what DNA has to say about one-man-one-woman marriage. When the editors told me that they were going to run the excerpt, I thought at first that it might be a bit stale by the time the magazine came out. But it seems today that the proper form of marriage is on the nation's mind again...
loom | November 3, 2004 It's obvious from yesterday's vote that embryonic stem cells will continue to split the country (California versus Washington DC, for one thing). But in an ironic bit of timing researchers at the Reproductive Genetics Institute have just published some results at Reproductive BioMedicine Online that could--possibly--short-circuit some of the arguments against using embryonic stem cells.
The RGI researchers have figured out how to derive stem cells from a four-day old embryo--a stage known as a morula. Until now, scientists have been using older blastocysts, and have been destroying them in…
loom | October 29, 2004The good folks at Corante are rejiggering the design of their blogs, The Loom included. Some stuff has yet to make the transition as of this writing, but before too long it will all be back in place.
loom | October 26, 2004
Get to know that little skull. Scientists are going to be talking about it for centuries.
As researchers report in tomorrow's issue of Nature, the skull--and along with other parts of a skeleton--turned up in a cave on the Indonesian island of Flores. Several different dating methods gave the same result: the fossil is about 18,000 years old. (Additional bones from the same cave date back to about 38,000 years.) If all you had was the 18,000 year figure and this picture to go on, you might assume that the skull belonged to a small human child. After all, there is plenty of evidence that Homo…
loom | October 25, 2004I've written a piece for Newsweek about how to program a cell. (The Newsweek International edition comes out this week; the US edition comes out next week.) I find the ongoing research exciting, but sometimes I wonder how much of its promise will become real. Programmable cells, for example, are an illustration of the exciting frontiers that can be explored with stem cells. It may be possible to wire the genetic circuits of a stem cell to make it grow into a particular sort of organ, produce a certain sort of hormone, etc. But it's hard to see how any of that will come to pass if stem cell…
loom | October 21, 2004Last month I blogged about my Scientific American review of Dean Hamer's new book, The God Gene. I was not impressed. It's not that I was dismissing the possibility that there might be genetic influences on religious behavior. I just think that the time for writing pop-sci books about the discovery of a "God gene" is after scientists publish their results in a peer-reviewed journal, after the results are independently replicated, and after any hypotheses about the adaptive value of the gene (or genes) have been tested.
Apparently Time doesn't agree. In fact, juding from this week's issue,…
loom | October 18, 2004I have an article in tomorrow's New York Times about the mystery of autumn leaves. Insect warning? Sunscreen? The debate rages. The one thing I was sad to see get cut for space was the statement by one of the scientists that the answer might be "all of the above." This sort of multitasking is the cool--and sometimes maddening--thing about living things. Very important, and very hard to sort out.
loom | October 17, 2004
Last week I blogged about the strange story of our past encoded in the DNA of lice. We carry two lineages of lice, one of which our Homo sapiens ancestors may have picked up in Asia from another hominid, Homo erectus. I always get a kick imagining human beings, having migrated out of Africa around 50,000 years ago, coming face to face with other species of upright, tool-making, big-brained apes. It's pretty clear that it happened in Europe, which was occupied by both humans and Neanderthals for several thousand years. But encountering Homo erectus would be even weirder. Studies on DNA…
loom | October 16, 2004Here's the most important thing about The Ancestor's Tale that I couldn't fit in my review. I kept noticing how little Richard Dawkins mentioned the other celebrity evolutionary biologist of our time, Stephen Jay Gould. After all, Gould was a prominent character in many of Dawkins's previous books, cast as the brilliant paleontologist misled by leftist ideology.
Gould was famous for his attacks on adaptationism--the notion that the creative powers of natural selection are behind all sorts of fine points of nature, from jealousy to 11-year cicada cycles. Dawkins was an ultra-Darwinian…
loom | October 16, 2004The New York Times is running my review of Richard Dawkins's new book The Ancestor's Tale this weekend.
I'm particularly grateful at times like these to have a blog, where I can add extra information and the occasional correction.
Towards the start of the review I mention a remarkable tree of 3,000 species. You can download a pdf here. It's files like these that the zoom function were made for.
Towards the end of the review, I say that jellyfish and humans share a common ancestor that lived perhaps a billion years ago. There's plenty of debate about early animal evolution, but a billion years…
loom | October 15, 2004Yesterday I blogged about how the National Park Service is selling a young-Earth creationist book about the Grand Canyon in its stores. Today the Washington Post wrote an article on the subject. It contains a response from the National Park Service, which I find pretty unbelievable. They claim that they are in fact reviewing the matter. The review was supposed to be done in February, but it's been delayed while lawyers at the Interior and Justice Departments "tackle the issue." No deadline is set for the decision, and the book will continue to be sold until one is made.
Tackle the issue? Do…
loom | October 13, 2004David Appell points to some depressing news about how our government deals with science.
In August 2003, the Grand Canyon National Park Superintendent tried to block the sale of a book in National Park Service stores. The book claims that the Grand Canyon formed in Noah's Flood. No vague ambiguity of the sort you hear from Intelligent Design folks--just hard-core young Earth creationism, claiming that the planet is only a few thousand years old. The folks at National Park Service headquarters stopped the administrator from pulling the book. Geologists cried foul, and NPS promised to review…
loom | October 11, 2004A lot of readers have commented on my recent post about a study that suggests we all share a common ancestor who lived 2,300 years ago. Some people doubted that isolated groups could share such a recent ancestry.
One of the study's authors, Steve Olson (also the author of the book Mapping Human History) sent me the following email yesterday:
"Ensuring a recent common ancestor doesn't take long-range migrations (although contact between the Polynesians and South Americans certainly speeds things up). All it really requires is that a person from one village occasionally mates with a person…
loom | October 11, 2004In March, I wrote a post on some tantalizing new findings about the secrets of human evolution lurking in our genome. In brief, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania studied a gene called MYH16 that helps build jaw muscles in primates. In our own lineage, the gene has mutated and is no longer active in jaw muscles. Perhaps not coincidentally, we have much smaller, weaker jaws than other apes. The researchers estimated that the gene shut down around 2.4 million years ago--right around the time when hominid brains began to expand. They suggested that shrinking jaw muscles opened up room…
loom | October 4, 2004Contempt is never wise in biology. The creature that you look down on as lowly, degenerate, or disgusting may actually turn out to be sophisticated, successful, and--in some cases--waiting to tell you a lot about yourself. That's certainly the case for lice.
The human body louse, Pediculus humanus, has two ways of making a living--either dwelling on the scalp, feeding on blood, or snuggling into our clothes and come out once or twice a day to graze on our bodies. For lice, we humans are the world. They cannot live for more than a few hours away from our bodies.Only by crawling from one host…