loom | June 16, 2004Love demands an explanation. Less than 5% of mammal species live monogamously, with males and females staying together beyond mating, and fathers helping mothers care for babies. We humans aren't the most monogamous species of the bunch, but we're closer to that end of the spectrum than the other end, where mating is little more than ships bumping into each other in the night.
A biological explanation for love--as with any biological explanation--has two levels. On one level are the molecular circuits that produce love, and on another level are the evolutionary forces that favor the…
loom | June 15, 2004In the New York Times this morning, the poet Diane Ackerman has written an essay about the brain, in which she waxes eloquent about its ability to discern patterns in the world. The essay is distilled from her new book, An Alchemy of the Mind, which I've just reviewed for the Washington Post. I didn't much like the book, although it took me a while to figure out what was bothering me about it. If you read the essay, you can get the flavor of the book, not to mention Ackerman's general style in her previous books (which have taken on subjects such as endangered species and the senses).…
loom | June 3, 2004A press release turned up in the comments for a couple of my posts. While that's not as bad as Viagra-ad spam, it's not in the spirit of blogosphere. If you post a press release, it will be deleted. Post a comment in your own words, and it will stay.
loom | June 3, 2004One of the most exciting lines of research in evolution today is how parasites have become so good at making us sick. A case in point appears in the latest issue of Genome Biology (full text of paper here). It appears that parasites have stolen one of our best lines of defense and now use it against us.
When bacteria or other pathogens try to invade our bodies, we marshall an awesome system of biochemistry to ward them off. Recently, a group of French and German molecular biologists took a look at a key piece of that system, a molecule studding the surface of our cells called alpha-2-…
loom | June 1, 2004I always like book reviews that combine books that might not at first seem to have that much in common. In the new issue of Natural History, the neuroscientist Williams Calvin reviews Soul Made Flesh along with The Birth of the Mind, a fascinating book by Gary Marcus of NYU. If you haven't heard of Marcus's new book--which explores how genes produce minds--definitely check it out.
loom | June 1, 2004Do you know who George Williams is? If you don't, let me introduce you to one of the most influential evolutionary biologists ever to ponder natural selection. If you do know who he is, you may still be interested in my article in this week's Science about a symposium that was recently held in Williams's honor. Scientists studying everything from pregnancy to economic decision making explained how Williams's remarkably clear thinking about the nature of adaptation helped them in their research.
A pdf of the article is also available.
loom | June 1, 2004It's strange enough hearing yourself talking on the radio. It's stranger still to see a transcript someone makes of you talking on the radio. Recently I was interviewed about Soul Made Flesh on Australian Broadcasting Corporation's show "All in the Mind." Instead of an audio archive, ABC has posted a transcript of the show. While I can't claim I spoke in perfect paragraphs, we had an interesting talk about how the brain became the center of our existence.
loom | June 1, 2004I was asked a couple weeks ago to contribute a piece to a special series of articles in Newsweek about the future of Wi-Fi. I must admit that a fair amount of the stuff that's on the Wi-Fi horizon seems a little banal to me. It's nice to know that I will be able to swallow a camera-pill that will wirelessly send pictures of my bowels to my doctor, but it hardly cries out paradigm shift. On the other hand, I've been deeply intrigued and a little disturbed by the possibility that the next digital device to go Wi-Fi is the human brain. Here's my short essay on the subject.
loom | May 18, 2004Please accept my apologies for the vile spam comments that keep showing up here. I hope that the folks at Corante and I can find a way to permanently shut down the flow of craven obscenity.
I've been traveling again, and now I'm racing against a slew of deadlines, which leaves precious little time to blog. I hope to get back in the swing next week. More blogging, less spam is my goal for the Loom.
loom | May 4, 2004Jack Szostak, a scientist at Harvard Medical School, is trying to build a new kind of life. It will contain no DNA or proteins. Instead, it will based on RNA, a surprisingly mysterious molecule essential to our own cells. Szostak may reach his goal in a few years. But his creatures wouldn't be entirely new. It's likely that RNA-based life was the first life to exist on Earth, some 4 billion years ago, eventually giving rise to the DNA-based life we know. It just took a clever species like our own to recreate it.
My cover story in the June issue of Discover has all the details.
loom | May 3, 2004On the east coast, we're bracing for the howling emergence of a massive brood of 17-year cicadas in a couple weeks. Here's a nice piece in the Washington Post about the evolution of this strange life history.
loom | April 22, 2004There are only a few places on the surface of Earth where you can find really old rocks--and by old, I mean 3.5 billion years old or older. The rest have gotten sucked down into the planet's interior, cooked, scrambled with other rocks, and pushed back up to the growing margins of continental plates. The few formations that have survived are mere fragments, some the size of a football field, some a house. And generally they're are mess, shot through with confusion such as intrusions of lava from more recent volcanoes. Paleontologists are drawn and repulsed by these rocks, because they may…
loom | April 21, 2004My book Soul Made Flesh looks at the roots of neuroscience in the 1600s. The first neurologists saw their work as a religious mission; they recognized that it was with the brain that we made moral judgments. In order to finish the book, I looked for living neuroscientists who carry on those early traditions today. I was soon fascinated by the work of Joshua Greene, a philosopher turned neuroscientist at Princeton. Greene is dissecting the ways in which people decide what is right and wrong. To do so, he poses moral dilemmas to them while he scans their brains. I mentioned Greene briefly in…
loom | April 21, 2004John Maynard Smith has died.
While many people know who Stephen Jay Gould was or Richard Dawkins is, Id bet few would be able to identify Maynard Smith. Thats a shame, because he played a key role in building the foundations of modern evolutionary biology. (Underlining this point, I only learned about his death from Science's online new service. As far as I can tell, no one else has run an obituary.)
Maynard Smith came to evolution from a previous career as an engineer. In World War II he measured the stress on airplane wings. When he moved to evolution, he brought with him a gift to see the…
loom | April 21, 2004No, I didnt get hit by a car. Instead, I got hit by your typical crush of deadlines, traveling, and a bout of laryngitis. But tranquility is returning, and Im firing up the blogotron again.
loom | April 3, 2004This week I am in England to give some talks about Soul Made Flesh, which has just been published here. In addition to talking on the BBC, I'll be talking at Blackwell's in Bristol on Tuesday, and at the Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University on Wednesday. I've posted details and links to even more details on the talks page of my web site.
It's a bit daunting coming here, the very place where much of my book is set. But the response has been kind so far. This morning the eminent historian Lisa Jardine wrote a generally good review in the Sunday Times. Meanwhile, stateside,…
loom | March 29, 2004I'm in Cambridge at the MIT/Harvard Brain Boot Camp this week, so blogging will be light for a few days.
loom | March 24, 2004A great blog is born: The Panda's Thumb is a multi-authored blog that blasts a firehose of reason at distortions of evolution.
loom | March 24, 2004Our ancestors branched off from those of chimpanzees some six million years ago. Since then, our lineage became human--and distinctly unlike other apes. Figuring out how that difference evolved is one of the grand challenges of biology. Until now, scientists have gotten most of their clues by looking at the fossils of extinct hominids. These fragments of bones only preserve a little information, but it's not a random smattering of data. It's more like a scaffolding on which other clues can be fixed, so that a picture of how we became human can gradually emerge. That's because the changes…
loom | March 24, 2004In February I wrote an article in Popular Science about a project to implant electrodes in a monkey's brain allowing the monkey to control a robot arm with its mind. The goal of this work is to let paralyzed people operate prosthetic limbs by thought alone. Now the research team has announced another big step in that direction: their first work on humans.
They implanted their electrodes into the brains of people undergoing surgery for Parkinson's disease and tremor disorders, and then had the patients play a video game with a joystick. (In brain surgery, patients don't get general anasthesia…