loom | November 13, 2003Over the past couple years, a few pounds of rock from Australia have been the subject of a fierce scientific battle between geologists and paleontologists. Some paleontologists have claimed that microscopic marks in the 3.5 billion year old rocks are the oldest fossils of life yet found. Some geologists have recently argued that the marks are just odd mineral formations that could have been created without the help of life. Today in Science, the geologists have struck again. A team from Spain and Australia mixed up some silica, carbonate, barium, and other compounds that can be found in the…
loom | November 13, 2003In February I wrote an article in Science about what Craig Venter's up to these days. In the late 1990s Venter made his mark by challenging the government human genome project to a race, promising to beat them to the full sequence for a fraction of their budget. Ultimately the race was a tie, and before too long Venter had been shown the door from his company. (I highly recommend James Shreeve's upcoming The Genome War for all the grisly details.) But he had also been working with the genomes of other organisms--particularly microbes--for years, and he went back to his first love. Not…
loom | November 12, 2003Time always marches forward, of course, but does evolution?
It's certainly easy to impose a march of progress on the course of evolution. That's why the sequence of apes transforming into humans as they march from left to right is so universal. Of course, there are also pictures in which Homo sapiens, having risen up to noble, upright proportions, begins to crouch back down again, until he (never a she, I've noticed) is crouching in front of a computer or a television or facing some other ignoble end. As I wrote in Parasite Rex, this anxiety--an anxiety mostly about ourselves and not about…
loom | November 11, 2003A lot of work has gone into reconstructing an entire human being in a computer. Computer scientists put in the precise dimensions of a person's body, factor in biomechanics, mimic facial expressions and so on. This work gets huge amounts of hype in the press, but for all the effort and all the attention, the results so far have left me pretty unimpressed. Does watching Kevin Bacon running around without his skin in Hollow Man really make all that work worthwhile?
Frankly, I'm much more impressed with work going on in places such as the Genetic Circuits Research Group at the University of…
loom | November 7, 2003Chris Mooney, CalPundit, Signal+Noise and others have been doing a great job of keeping track of the woeful textbook battles down in Texas. The Board of Education there has been arguing over how evolution should be presented in the textbooks they're about to buy for the state's high school students. The Discovery Institute, the headquarters of "Intelligent Design" proponents, has been lobbying them hard to present their ideas on equal footing with those of evolutionary biology. It looks this morning like they've lost (again).
The conservative members of the board are disappointed--they say…
loom | November 7, 2003The other day I (among others) came down on Gregg Easterbrook for his poor grasp of science. Finding myself procrastinating today, I wandered over to his blog and had yet another good laugh. In a post today, he actually displays some interest in evolutionary biology. After discussing some work suggesting that wine might be able to prolong life, he gets into the evolution of longevity. I raised my eyebrows at this point, thinking perhaps he'd moved away from the muddled stuff he's written about evolution in the past. But then the goofiness returns.
First he describes how experiments to extend…
loom | November 4, 2003My hotel here in Wisconsin has a great high-speed connection and I have some downtime, and so I'll post on a really interesting paper that just came out that may tell us a lot about how we got so complex.
When I say "we," I'm speaking very broadly. Humans, other mammals, reptiles, birds, amphibian, and fish are all very complex, particularly compared to our closest invertebrate relatives. The picture I've attached here is of Ciona, one of these closest relatives. Little more than a small sleeve-shaped filter feeder, it's not too impressive. In particular, its body is not too complicated. It…
loom | November 2, 2003I'll be off blogging duty for a couple days while I head out to Wisconsin to give a couple talks at UW. I'll be talking about what chimp DNA can tell us about ourselves. I wrote about the topic last year for Natural History, but I'll be focusing on some newer work that has come out since then. I hope any Wisconsinites (sp?) reading this can come.
On my return later this week, I'll put up a post about some of the most interesting new research about the chimp within.
loom | October 31, 2003Last week a region of the brain called the insula was in the news. As I described in my post, scientists found that physical pain and social rejection both activate the insula in much the same way. The insula returns now for a disgusting encore that gives a glimpse at how we get inside other people's heads.
European scientists had people sniff vials that gave off different odors while they were being scanned with MRI. Disgusting smells triggered a distinct constellation of neurons in the insula. Then the researcers showed the subjects videos of people smelling vials of their own. In some…
loom | October 30, 2003Books have been bubbling up from the comments cauldron. Jim Harrison has asked what I think of Simon Conway Morris's Life's Solution. Web Webster says Cosmos was his first favorite science book and asks for suggestions. Humboldt and Feyerband make an appearance too. It's ironic that two forms of reading that are competing furiously these days for my free time--books and blogs--meet at this crossroads.
Let me just say that I have four books on my desk, that I am trying to dig into. They're either just out or about to come out. For the most part, I can't tell you that they're great or lousy,…
loom | October 29, 2003Evolution is nature's great R&D division. Through mutation, natural selection, and other processes, life can find new solutions for the challenge of staying alive. It's possible to see a simplified version of this problem solving at work in the lab. The genetic molecule RNA, for example, can evolve into shapes that allow it to do things no one ever expected RNA to do, like join together amino acids. Over millions of years, evolution can solve far bigger problems. How can a mammal became an efficient swimmer? How can a bug fly?
Humans would like to build ocean-going vehicles as efficient…
loom | October 28, 2003Loyal denizens of the blogosphere will forgive me if I begin this post by sketching out the details of the recent Gregg Easterbrook affair for those who haven't kept up with the details. Easterbook, a senior editor at the New Republic, started up a blog recently where he cranked out postings at a feverish pace about all sorts of stuff ranging from politics to religion to science. Recently, he questioned the conscience of Jewish movie executives who allowed Quentin Tarantino's movie, Kill Bill, to be made. A furor ensued, and Easterbrook lost his column with ESPN Magazine (owned by Disney, the…
loom | October 26, 2003When Charles Darwin was thrashing out his theory of evolution, he would doodle sometimes in his notebooks. To explain how new species came into existence, he wrote down letters on a page and then connected them with branches. In the process, he created a simple tree. Across the top of the page, he wrote, "I think."
That single tree has given rise to the thousands of trees that are published in scientific journals these days. A particular tree may show that humans are more closely related to chimpanzees than gorillas. It might show how the SARS virus in humans descends from viruses in other…
loom | October 23, 2003After years at a slow burn, the controversy over Terri Schiavo has hit the national news. Schiavo lost consciousness in 1990 after a cardiac arrest, and her husband recently won a lawsuit to have her feeding tube removed, over the objection of her family. Then on Tuesday, Governor Jeb Bush ordered that her tube be reattached, using powers given to him by the Florida legislature the day before.
If ever there was an argument for a living will, the Schiavo case is one. She supposedly told her husband she wouldn't want to be kept alive artificially, but never wrote anything down. If she had, the…
loom | October 21, 2003The Great Lakes of East Africa swarm with fish--particulary with one kind of fish known as cichlids. In Lake Victoria alone you can find over 500 species. These species come in different colors and make their living in many different ways--sucking out eyeballs of other cichlids, scraping algae off of rocks, and so on. What's strange about all this is that the Great Lakes of East Africa are some of the youngest lakes on Earth. By some estimates, Lake Victoria was a dry lake bed 15,000 years ago. All that diversity has evolved in a very short period of time.
East African cichlids are therefore…
loom | October 17, 2003Science is so specialized these days that it's hard for scientists to look up beyond the very narrow confines of their own work. Biologists who study cartilage don't have much to say to biologists who study retinas. Astronomers who study globular clusters probably can't tell you what's new with planetary disks. But sometimes scientists from different specialties can come together and integrate their work into something truly impressive. A case in point comes from some ongoing research into the evolution of language.
No species aside from our own can use language. Chimpanzees and other…
loom | October 17, 2003My book Soul Made Flesh will be coming out in January, but in the meantime, I've posted an excerpt on my web site. You can read it online or print out a pdf.
loom | October 15, 2003In the comments to my post yesterday about Nanoarchaeum equitans, an ancient parasite, the discussion took an interesting turn.
Web Webster wrote: "So in a way, N. equitans is both 'smarter' in that it uses more of its total capabilities (versus humans and the old '10% of the brain thing') and 'more efficient' in the way it works."
To which Brent M. Krupp responded: "That 'old "10% of the brain thing' is complete and utter rubbish. Not a grain of truth to it, nor was there ever. Sorry to go off on this pet peeve of mine, but it's unclear if you were serious in your reference to that myth."
I…
loom | October 13, 2003Biologists these days can paint many different portraits of the same organism. They can follow the tried and true style of Aristotle and paint with a broad brush, describing what they can see with the naked eye--number of legs, color of hair, live young or eggs. Or they can paint a creature at the cellular level--the twist and turns of collagen fibers in a horse hoof or the poison-producing organelles of a rattlesnake. In the past few years a new kind of portrait has been hung in the biological museum: a portrait of the genome. In the thousands or millions of DNA base pairs, genomes can…
loom | October 10, 2003There's been a fair amount of press about a new paper in Science that shows how the brain responds to social rejection. The kicker is that a region of the brain known as the insula becomes active. As I mentioned yesterday, that's the same area that responds to pain and physical distress. It's an interesting paper with historical dimensions that are missing from the news reports--historical in both the human and evolutionary sense. There's a lot of back-story behind the word "heartache."
A common theme in evolution is the way a structure or a system takes on new functions over time. In our "…