Books
laelaps | January 19, 2009
This blog has been a little quiet over the last few days, but I was simply having too much fun at the Science Online '09 conference to find the time to sit down and blog. I got to meet some of my favorite bloggers, too many to mention them all here (I would undoubtedly forget some if I tried to make a list), but I was certainly glad to catch up with old friends and make some new ones.
I didn't go just to hang out with other science writers, though. The primary reason I was at the conference was to co-moderate two sessions. The first, on using the web to teach college science with Andrea…
jwhitfield | January 19, 2009Mathematicians and physicists speak of a result 'falling out of the equations', implying that if you set things up properly, the rest takes care of itself. Chapter 4 of the Origin, 'Natural Selection', is where evolution falls out of the machinery that Darwin has spent the three previous chapters assembling.
And I hate to say it, but it's a bit of an anticlimax.
In retrospect, it's difficult to see how it could be otherwise. Darwin has manoeuvred us into position so carefully, showing the power of artificial selection, the mutability of species and nature's cutthroat struggle, that we're…
jlynch | January 16, 2009It is always cute when the anti-evolutionists (in all their guises) try to do history; witness here, for example. Veteran observers are not surprised to find them trying to warp history (see here, here, here & here for that). Nowhere is this warping more evident than in how DI-hacks such as John West & Richard Weikart have promulgated a meme linking Darwin to Haeckel to Nazism. This has been clearly dealt with by a number of historians (see references herein and read Robert Richards’ latest book on Haeckel). Equally as resilient is the idea (also held by West & Weikart) that…
jwhitfield | January 16, 2009If, so far, you've been finding Mr Darwin's book tough going (it's OK, there's no shame in admitting it), here's what you should do: skip all that flannel about variation, and start here. This is where it gets serious.
Chapter 3 of the Origin, as its opening pages explain, faces in two directions. In chapters one and two, we've established the fact of variation, and the fluidity of living forms -- both in space, as shown by the blurry boundaries between species, and in time, as shown by the effect of artificial selection on domestic species. In the chapter to come, says Darwin, we'll be…
sheril | January 14, 2009Because he's too humble to blog it, I hope readers will join me in congratulating Chris for being honored tonight by American Meteorological Society, the nation's leading professional society for those working in the atmospheric and related sciences. Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming has won the 2009 Louis J. Battan Author's Award.
Mooney's book is being honored as "an accurate and comprehensive overview of the evolving debate on the impacts of global warming on hurricanes that illustrates the complexities of this significant scientific problem." The…
jwhitfield | January 14, 2009Here's a project for a playful biology grad student with some time on his or her hands. Take chapter 2 of the Origin of Species, 'Variation Under Nature', and modernize the language. Toss in a few figures and some contemporary citations. Give the result a title like 'A routemap for biodiversity research 200 years after Darwin', put your name on it and submit to Trends in Ecology and Evolution. I'm not promising anything, but you might get lucky.
In his first chapter on domestic species, Darwin spent a lot of time worrying about questions that, thanks especially to molecular genetics, we now…
drorzel | January 13, 2009Or, Brian Greene Writes a Kid's Book...
This is a very odd book. It's printed on boards, like a book for very small children, but the story is a bit beyond what I would imagine reading to a normal kid of the age to want books of that format. It's too short and simple, though, to have much appeal to significantly older children, aside from the fact that the story is written over the top of 15 absolutely gorgeous reproductions of pictures of astronomical objects.
This is probably one of those objects whose cool appearance is the only real reason for the thing to exist. The pictures really are…
ddobbs | January 13, 2009
William J. Broad's Times piece on the new National Geographic "Ocean - An Illustrated Atlas gives a nice look at both the book -- and gives long-overdue and well-deserved attention to oceanographer Sylvia Earle, who co-authored the Atlas.
. Earle's passion extends to the far horizon. In the atlas, she reports that some 90 percent of deep-sea creatures use bioluminescence in their life strategies and that the eerie glows may turn out to constitute the planet's most common form of communication.
jwhitfield | January 12, 2009
Man, this guy didn't know anything.
I don't mean that as an insult. Darwin, as he admits, knew almost nothing about inheritance, about how variation is produced, or about the origins and history of domesticated plants and animals. You'd think that would be a handicap in using domestication as an analogy for evolution.
And yet, in chapter 1 of the Origin, 'Variation Under Domestication', Darwin uses what little knowledge he has so deftly that nowhere do you feel his conclusions are outstripping his data. This, believe me, is quite a skill, both in a scientist and a writer. What, he asks, is…
jlynch | January 11, 2009
I've had the pleasure of working behind the scenes in a number of natural history museums. While a grad student, I had an office in the Natural History Museum in Dublin, spent a good deal of time every year in the collections of the Royal Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, and a month at the Natural History Museum in London. As anyone who has spent time behind the scenes will tell you, not only are all the really cool specimens kept away from public view, but museums are populated with some very strange people! Richard Fortey's latest book, Dry Storeroom No. 1: The Secret Life of the Natural…
grrlscientist | January 11, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…
jwhitfield | January 9, 2009Among the small thrills of encountering canonical works for the first time - Homer, say, or the King James Bible, or Star Wars - are the moments when you come across some turn of phrase so well-used it has been worn flat into the surface of everyday speech and think: so that's where that comes from. I'm thinking that the same might be true of the Origin, but in a different way.
For example, what's the first living thing that Darwin names? Turns out it's "the woodpecker, with its feet, tail, beak and tongue so admirably adapted to catch insects under the bark of trees".
This got me thinking…
jlynch | January 8, 2009John hasn't read Origin. Not *this* John. And certainly not this one. It's this one - and what he proposes to do is blog while he reads the first edition of that work. I have to say I approve of the use of the first edition - subsequent editions are a little murkier and lack the freshness of expression that makes the first such a wonderful read.
John expresses some slight shame at having not read Origin before. I don't think that's really a problem (or surprising). Biology students rarely read Origin and similarly physics students rarely crack open Principia; scientific education rarely…
pharyngula | January 8, 2009This could be cool: an evolutionary biologist is going to read Darwin's Origin of Species for the first time and post chapter-by-chapter discussions of the book right here on Scienceblogs between now and Darwin Day. Get your own copy and follow along with John Whitfield!
Another reading suggestion: Wilkins writes about Darwin worship. It's going to be a tricky balancing act this year — Darwin was a great scientist and his contributions were immense, but he is not an object of veneration. The difficult job will be to maintain a balance between hero worship and reactionary criticism, and to…
sb admin | January 7, 2009Hi! My name is John. I've got a PhD in evolutionary biology, and I've spent much of the past decade writing about evolutionary ideas, as applied to everything from literary criticism, to language, to anti-terror policy, and even on occasion to biology. And I've got a confession - I've never read the Origin of Species.
Do I shock you? Good.
I am not proud of this (really, I'm not), but if my professional life has been less stellar than it might have been, it's not for want of reading Darwin. Here's why. Darwin was working at the dawn of biology. He had none of the specialist knowledge and…
jwhitfield | January 7, 2009Hi! My name is John. I've got a PhD in evolutionary biology, and I've spent much of the past decade writing about evolutionary ideas, as applied to everything from literary criticism, to language, to anti-terror policy, and even on occasion to biology. And I've got a confession - I've never read the Origin of Species.
Do I shock you? Good.
I am not proud of this (really, I'm not), but if my professional life has been less stellar than it might have been, it's not for want of reading Darwin. Here's why. Darwin was working at the dawn of biology. He had none of the specialist knowledge and…
pharyngula | January 5, 2009Everyone is also asking me for a list of children's books on evolution, and it's always hard to come up with any titles. I am now saved: Charlie's Playhouse has a list of 89 kids' books on evolution!
You know, Darwin Day is coming up, and we could create a new tradition of educating young'uns on 12 February…
laelaps | January 4, 2009
The best thing about Frank Peretti's 2005 novel Monster was that it was over quickly. I was able to zip through the 419-page yarn in about five hours, although after about five minutes I felt I had wasted too much time on this anti-evolution screed.
I was loaned the novel by a friend who thought I might enjoy it, but I already knew I was in trouble when I glanced at the Acknowledgments page;
Jonathan Wells, postdoctoral biologist and senior fellow at the Discovery Institute, whose book, Icons of Evolution, first got my creative wheels turning, and who helped me clarify my main idea over a…
grrlscientist | January 4, 2009tags: Birdbooker Report, bird books, animal books, natural history books, ecology books
"One cannot have too many good bird books"
--Ralph Hoffmann, Birds of the Pacific States (1927).
The Birdbooker Report is a special weekly report of a wide variety of science, nature and behavior books that currently are, or soon will be available for purchase. This report is written by one of my Seattle birding pals and book collector, Ian "Birdbooker" Paulsen, and is edited by me and published here for your information and enjoyment. Below the fold is this week's issue of The Birdbooker Report which…
laelaps | January 3, 2009I am proud to announce that my post, "Who scribbled all over Darwin's work?", was selected for inclusion in the 3rd (2008) edition of The Open Laboratory. You can see a list of all the winners here , and I am pleased to see that my post will be printed alongside work from many of my favorite science bloggers. Congratulations are also due to Bora, Jennifer Rohn, and the judges, who have worked so hard on this project!
[As an aside, I am glad that this year I had no idea when the winning entries would be announced. Last year I was pacing the floor the night the results were scheduled to be…