loom | March 23, 2004Attention Virginian readers of the Loom: I'll be heading to warmer climes later this week to speak in Charlottesville at the Virginia Festival of the Book. On Thursday at 4 I'll be speaking on a panel about science and society. On Friday at 4 I'll be speaking again on scientific discoveries and how they change us. I'm looking forward to listening to my fellow panelists, who include Robin Marantz Henig and James Shreeve. See you there.
loom | March 22, 2004I've posted a new batch of reviews for Soul Made Flesh on my web site. The newest is from Ross King, the author of Brunelleschi's Dome and Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling. His review in yesterday's Los Angeles Times is a rare sort--he likes the book (which he calls "thrilling") for what the book really is, rather than as a projection of some phantom in his own mind.
A review of a different sort comes from Simon Conway Morris of the University of Cambridge. Conway Morris is a first-rate paleontologist who has shed a lot of light on how the major groups of animals alive today emerged in the…
loom | March 22, 2004Last week I wrote about an important new study showing that three very different groups of species--plants, butterflies, and birds--have all been declining at the same alarming rate for over 40 years in Great Britain. The authors concluded that if the pattern is global, it may mean that we are entering one of the biggest bouts of mass extinctions in the past 500 million years.
The media handled the story pretty well, although some reports got ahead of the science. Here's a story that may give you the impression that the study documented the extinction of entire species, for example. The…
loom | March 18, 2004When I ask scientists what's the biggest misunderstanding people have about their work, they often talk about how they know what they know. People tend to think that a scientist's job is to gather every single datum about something in nature--a mountain, a species of jellyfish, a neutron star--and then, simply by looking at all that information, see the absolute truth about it in an instant. If science departments were filled with angels, that might be the case. But they're staffed by humans with finite brains, with tight research budgets, and with only so many years left before retirement or…
loom | March 17, 2004Three weeks ago, I gave a talk at Stanford University about my new book Soul Made Flesh. A wonderful crowd turned out and peppered me with excellent questions afterwards, each of which could have become new talks of their own. CSPAN was there to film it, and they'll be broadcasting the talk this Saturday, March 20, at 9 am EST on BookTV.
You may want to check out this little RSS a commenter forwarded to me that converts the BookTV schedule to any time zone. Also, if you miss the talk, it will probably repeated on another weekend, so check back to their site.
Here's an added incentive to…
loom | March 17, 2004In one of the weirdest attempts to pretend that creationism is a real science, a student at Harvard Law School wrote a favorable review in the Harvard Law Review of a book about Intelligent Design. You'd think that this would be so irrelevant that it would vanish off the cultural radar in a flash. But it has ballooned into something of a blogospheric hurricane, mainly because the National Review Online wants to pretend that criticism of the review is an Inquisition-style persecution. It's a cute way to distract attention from the basic issue of whether creationism in any of its manifestations…
loom | March 15, 2004For over two centuries, opponents of evolution have searched for examples of natural complexity that could have only been created by design. Reverend William Paley was fond of the eye, with its lens, retina, and other components all beautifully fine-tuned to work with one another. These days, the Intelligent Design camp tries to invoke blood clotting cascades or the flagella that bacteria use to move around in the same way. (See here for some refutations of these arguments.) Ironically, one of the most successful, intricate examples of complexity in nature is something creationists never…
loom | March 12, 2004I have been grievously mum in response to the many comments that readers have been sending to the Loom. My silence is not hostile--it is the result of way too much traveling, too much magazine writing, and the standard sleep deprivation that comes with life with two young daughters. In fact, reading comments is one of the favorite things I like about this blog.
As a case in point, today Nick at talkdesign.org explored the link between the subject of two recent posts: the ongoing adaptation of bacteria to manmade pollutants and the ongoing pollution of biology education with creationist…
loom | March 10, 2004Ohio's Board of Education has taken a big step towards forcing its students to waste their time on creationist pseudo-objections to evolution. PZ Meyers has a good round-up of this sad situation.
loom | March 9, 2004When George Bush quietly dismissed two members of his Council on Bioethics on the last Friday in February, he probably assumed the news would get buried under the weekends distractions. But ten days later, its still hotsee, for example, two articles in Slate, and an editorial in the Washington Post, as well as Chris Mooney's ongoing coverage at his blog. Bush failed to appreciate just how obvious the politics were behind the move. The two dismissed members (bioethicist William May and biochemist Elizabeth Blackburn) have been critical of the Administration. Their replacements (two political…
loom | March 9, 2004Over on my web site I've posted an article I've just written for the Sunday Telegraph Magazine in England about an eerie brain disorder called musical hallucinosis. You've probably had a tune stuck in your head for an hour at least once in your life. Now imagine that the tune played all day and night--and imagine that it sounded as real as if a marching band was standing by your window.
Here's how it starts:
Janet Dilbeck clearly remembers the moment the music started. Two years ago she was lying in bed on the California ranch where she and her husband were caretakers. A mild earthquake woke…
loom | March 4, 2004The Austin Chronicle has an interesting piece today on blogs, which marks the first time anyone's ever interviewed me about the Loom. Conclusion: no money, uncertain future, but much fun.
loom | March 4, 2004Probing the origins of humanity is actually a lot like being a dentist. The bones of our hominid ancestors tend to fall apart, leaving behind a smattering of shards. But teeth, made of enamel, can do a better job of withstanding the ravages of time. And teeth--particularly those of mammals--are not just tough but interesting. Mammals--us included--have several kinds of teeth, each of which is covered with distinctive bumps, cusps, and roots. All those details vary from one species to another. So even if you find a fragment of a tooth, you may be able to figure out what species it belongs to.…
loom | March 2, 2004I was puzzled by an article in today's New York Times called "Researchers rewrite first chapter for the history of medicine." William Honan, the reporter, announced that "an art historian and a medical researcher say they have pushed back by hundreds of years the earliest use of a medicinal plant." Until now, he wrote, the oldest evidence dated back to 1000 BC, but now researchers had discovered a picture 3500 years old showing a Greek goddess overseeing crocus flowers being made into medicines.
This painting will certainly tell historians a lot about medicine in ancient Greece, but the…
loom | March 2, 2004If you want to hear about brain science at its birth and today, check out the public radio show Tech Nation, this week. In the first half of the show, I'll be talking about Soul Made Flesh. In the second half, Steven Johnson will be talking about his excellent new book, Mind Wide Open. You can find out where and when you can listen to the show at the program's web site, or listen to it on their site archive.
(A note to subscribers: sorry for the mysterious email address that appeared on your notification. I have yet to fully master the mysteries of Movable Type.)
loom | March 1, 2004In my last post, I wrote about how our genes work in networks, much like circuits made of elements wired together in various ways. As genes are accidentally duplicated, mutated, and rewired, old networks can give rise to new ones. It's pretty clear our ancestors could have never become particularly complex if not for this sort of network evolution. As they acquired nerves, muscles, and other tissues, animals needed to organize more and more genes into new circuits. But in saying this I don't mean to imply that single-celled microbes, such as bacteria, live without gene networks. Far from it.…
loom | February 29, 2004As biologists figure out more about how life is, they can then figure out how it got to be that way. First there were genes. Mendel noticed that somehow the wrinkles on wrinkled peas could be transmitted down through the generations, even if some of those generations had no wrinkles at all. It turned out that the wrinkles were the result of a gene; a different version of the gene produced smooth peas. For much of the twentieth century, evolutionary biologists worked out how changes in genes produced evolutionary change. A mutation that alters one position in a gene (or chops out a whole chunk…
loom | February 26, 2004Apologies for the long radio silence. Travelling and the obligatory pre-travelling frenzy shut down the blogging assembly line for a couple weeks. Having wrapped up my west-coast jaunt (thanks to the great crowd that came out for the CSPAN taping at Stanford), I can write a bit about some of the new science that has caught my eye.
Crouching on top on the pile are howler monkeys. Howlers have become frequent visitors to the Loom, much to my surprise. For some reason they've recently started to have a lot to say about evolution--particularly, as odd as it may seem, about the evolution of our…
loom | February 18, 2004If you live in the Bay Area, please join me noon on Monday, February 23, at Stanford University for a talk about Soul Made Flesh. (Here are all the details.)
The talk is sponsored by the Stanford University Center for Biomedical Ethics and the Stanford Brain Research Institute. It's gratifying that such great organizations that are dedicated to twenty-first century neuroscience are interested in the adventures of a motley crew of seventeenth century alchemists and natural philosophers.
The talk is free and open to the public. And if that's not incentive enough, CSPAN will be there to film…
loom | February 12, 2004My wife and I have two lovely daughters: Charlotte is two and a half, and Veronica is seven weeks. And we are tired. We think of ourselves as being on the losing end of a tag-team wrestling match--particularly at about seven in the morning, after Veronica has gone through a few hours of pre-dawn nursing, squirming, groaning, crying, spewing, and nursing. Just when she has faded off into angelic sleep, Charlotte wakes up from a long restful night and wants to eat Cheerios, do some jumping jacks, and type on my laptop pretty much all at the same time. It's like the Destroyer giving the Crusher…