loom | February 9, 2004I'll be on Fresh Air with Terry Gross today, talking about Soul Made Flesh. If you miss it today, it will be archived at the show's web site.
loom | February 6, 2004Abominable is not the sort of word that most people may associate with flowers, but for Darwin, it was a perfect fit. He saw life on Earth today as the result of millions of years of victories and defeats in the evolutionary arena. Flowering plants, by that reasoning, were among the greatest champions of all. There are some 250,000 known species of flowering plants, and the total is probably double that. The closest living relatives of flowering plants (pine trees, firs, gingkos, and the likecollectively known as gymnosperms) make up a grand total of just over 800. These numbers are all the…
loom | February 5, 2004A while back I had the pleasure to join a team of scientists and teachers to build web site that explains evolution. Funded by the National Science Foundation and the Howard Hughes Medical Foundation, it charts the history of evolutionary thought (both before and after Darwin), and lays out the different lines of supporting evidence for evolution, as well as its relevance to everyday life. It addresses some of the common misconceptions about evolution, and lays out the nature of scientific inquiry. Science teachers can also find ideas for lesson plans and tips for answering common student…
loom | February 5, 2004Georgia's State Schools superintendent Kathy Cox has backed down from her ban on the word evolution.
While this is excellent news, Georgia is still left with an incompetent superintendent. For one thing, she thinks Intelligent Design is an acceptable theory to teach in schools. For another, she justified removing the word evolution from state science standards by saying: ""By putting the word in there, we thought people would jump to conclusions and think, 'OK, we're going to be teaching the monkeys-to-man sort of thing.' Which is not what happens in a modern biology classroom."
In a sense I…
loom | February 5, 2004"Conservative board members said they wanted to make sure that schools teach sound science, arguing that evolution is a flawed theory that cannot be proven."
--"In Kansas, key decision on teaching evolution" Associated Press, August 12, 1999.
If the new fad of "sound science" takes hold in Washington, I bet we'll see creationists taking it up again as well, challenging the government funding of "unsound" research into evolution. Stay tuned.
loom | February 5, 2004Check out Chris Mooney's post on the latest move in Washington to gut government science, which cloaks itself in bogus terms like "sound science." This dreadful campaign probably won't get much attention in the national media, but its effects--on conservation, climate change policy, and so on--could be profoundly bad.
loom | January 30, 2004Charles Darwin had no great hope of witnessing natural selection at work in his own time. He assumed that it would operate as slowly and imperceptibly as the water that eroded cliffs and canyons. He would have been delighted to discover that he was actually wrong on this count. By the mid-1900s, scientists were running selection experiments in laboratories and beginning to document the effects of natural selection in the wild, such as the rise of insects that were resistant to pesticides. Still, the work has been slow and painstaking. Peter and Rosemary Grant of Princeton have done some of…
loom | January 26, 2004If you're in New York, you've got two chances on Tuesday January 27 to hear me talk about Soul Made Flesh. At 5:30 I'll be giving a talk in the "Mind Over Body" lecture series at New York Public Library's Science and Industry Branch at 188 Madison Ave. I'll then be heading to the East Villiage to talk in the more intimate setting of KGB (85 E. 4th St.) at 7:30. Both events are free.
loom | January 26, 2004Last week I wrote a post about some new research that suggests that global warming could trigger large-scale extinctions in the next few decades. In particular, I dissected some of the objections that were leveled at the study, pointing out how irrelevant they are to the actual science at hand. Some people who posted comments raised a question that I didn't talk much about: how did biodiversity respond to rapid climate change in the not-so-distant past?
After all, in the past 2.5 million years (known as the Quaternary Period) Earth's climate has become particularly jumpy. It has swung in and…
loom | January 23, 2004If you'd like an example of the latest rhetorical tricks being used by antievolutionists, you can't do better than this press release issued today from the Discovery Institute. The Minnesota legistlature has to choose between two drafts of state science standards written by a committee. A minority of the committee wrote the second draft, which requires that "weaknesses" of evolution be taught. The Discovery Institute (a well-funded cryptocreationist outfit) is trying to mess with biology class, as it has in states across the country.
DI would like to convince us that science is like politics…
loom | January 23, 2004Sometimes when you take a look at life on Earth, it seems like evolution might be able to produce anything you could ever imagine. Can a mammal become so adapted to swimming in the ocean that it never comes back on dry land? Check. Can a squid evolve eyes as big as dinner plates? Check. Can a mole evolve a nose that acts like a hand? Check. But what about the fact that no ape has ever grown antlers? Or that no bird has ever reached a fifty foot wingspan? Or that, so far as anyone can tell, no animal has acquired hydrogen-producing bacteria in its gut and floated off like an airborne balloon?…
loom | January 19, 2004At noon today in New York I'll be at the Makor Center of the 92nd St. Y at 35 W. 67 St. to talk about Soul Made Flesh.
loom | January 19, 2004If you've ever been to a Central American forest, you've probably heard the hoots and wails of a howler monkey. But these creatures deserve our attention for more than their howls. They turn out to tell us a lot about the evolution of our own senses. We and some of our close primate relatives are remarkable for having powerful color vision. What triggered the evolution of this adaptation some 25 million years ago? Some researchers have proposed that as the global climate cooled, our ancestors were forced to shift from a diet of fruit to leaves. An ability to detect red and green colors would…
loom | January 14, 2004The emotions that other species summon up in the human brain are perplexing. A lion inspires awe and respect. It is the king of the jungle, a great name for a football team, a noble guardian of the entrance to the New York Public Library. A tapeworm, on the other hand, summons disgust mixed with a little contempt. You will never find yourself cheering for the Kansas City Tapeworms. But are these species really so different? Both animals get their nutrition from the bodies of other animals, and tapeworms are arguably more sophisticated in the way they get their food than a lion. Tapeworms…
loom | January 14, 2004Based on some feedback from subscribers and my own nosing around, I've decided to switch the subscription system to Bloglet. While this requires you to create a user name over at bloglet.com, the result of this minor chore seems better to me. The main attraction is that links and such don't turn into ugly, unreadable HTML. I will continue to send out the pre-bloglet notifications to those who have it, but you may want to switch over to the new system. Please drop me a note to let me know if you want to be taken off the old notification list.
Any further comments you may have will be most…
loom | January 12, 2004Last week I briefly mentioned some stark estimates about the potential extinctions that could be triggered by global warming. Since then, some global warming skeptics have tried to pour cold water on these results by making some dubious claims about natural selection and extinctions. While I have reported about global warming from time to time, I leave blogging on the subject to others (particularly David Appell over at Quark Soup). But in this case, evolution is drawn into the mix.
Here, in a nutshell, is what the scientists wrote last week in their Nature paper (which the editors have made…
loom | January 12, 2004Today I'll be talking for an hour about Soul Made Flesh on Minnesota public radio. You can listen to the broadcast live online at 11 am EST (the show will be archived). At 2 pm EST, you can listen online again when I talk on the Glen Mitchell show on Dallas public radio.
Some thoughts on the intersection of evolution and global warming coming this afternoon. In the meantime, check out Pharyngula's check-box comparison of the similarities between Soul Made Flesh and Quicksilver. Damn, why did I leave out those pirate neurologists...?
loom | January 11, 2004It's been a month since I've joined Corante, and my deep thanks go out to the many new readers who have visited the Loom. Daily visits reached a new high this Friday, January 9, with 900 pairs of eyeballs pointed this way. Please be sure to enter your email address in the subscription box in the lefthand column so that I can notify you of new posts.
loom | January 9, 2004Oliver Sacks muses on how we construct our perceptions of reality. (Via ALDaily.)
loom | January 7, 2004I'm en route to Washington DC to talk tonight about Soul Made Flesh. If you're in the District, please come to Reiter's Bookstore at 2021 K Street NW at 6:30. On my web site I'm posting all my talks and radio interviews as they get confirmed.
In lieu of a blog of my own, let me point to a couple interesting items.
--At Quark Soup, David Appell gets righteously indignant about a new paper that predicts a major wave of extinction due to global warming. Actually, the paper could turn out to be a conservative underestimate (not to be confused with certain politically conservative underestimates…