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Tomorrow I'll be on the radio show Science and Society at 4:20 PM EST. It's my second time on the show. Last time around we talked about the past six million years of hominid evolution (podcast here). This time we're hoping to cover just a bit more ground: the past 600 million years of vertebrate…
At the Loom we believe that the path to wisdom runs through the Land of Gross.
We do not show you pictures of worms crawling out of frog noses merely to ruin your lunch. We do not urge you to check out these freaky videos of worms crawling out of frog mouths and fish gills merely to give you…
On Thursday I wrote about a new paper reporting the reconstruction of a 450-million year old hormone receptor, and experiments indicating how it evolved into two receptors found in living vertebrates such as ourselves.
On Friday I took a look at the initial response to the paper from intelligent…
Yesterday I blogged about a new study in which scientists reconstructed 450 million year old proteins in order to trace the evolution of some receptors for hormones. The paper itself does not comment on the implications these results have for intelligent design, which claims that some biological…
Over the last few years, scientists have figured out how to recreate biological molecules that were last seen on Earth hundreds of millions of years ago. Until now, scientists have reconstructed ancient proteins to gather clues about life was like long ago. But now some scientists at the University…
Mark Siddall, the leech hunter, is on another quest. He's posting updated from his journeys through Australia in search of new leeches. Read them at Blood Lust II.
My blog had some serious troubles while I was away for a few days, but I should have everything up and running smoothly today, including comments (aside from those concerining poker and drugs).
Tiktaalik: music to my ears.
Tiktaalik is the lilting name of a newly discovered fossil fish with fingers. It lived 380 million years ago in the northern reaches of Canada, back when the northern reaches of Canada were tropical coastal wetlands not far from the equator. Tiktaalik's discoverers (Ted…
A couple weeks ago I wrote about the 98,000 viruses that have permanently pasted their genes into our genome over the past 60 million years. What makes these viruses doubly fascinating is that scientists are making new discoveries about them all the time. Over at the open-access journal PLOS…
No, there's nothing wrong with your RSS feed. This blog has just gone very quiet as I've become insanely busy with an upcoming talk and my new book project (more on both later). I don't expect to have time to blog till the first week in April. But I'll have some delicious items to discuss then.
I have a fondness for collecting brain lore--memes about the wonders of the human brain that race around the world for decades. The classic of brain lore is the "ten-percent myth." As I wrote here, people often claim we only use ten percent of our brain, implying that we'd be supergeniuses if we…
Kate Wong, Scientific American's excellent paleo reporter has a two-parter on the latest dish on Homo floresiensis a k a the Hobbit. No cymbal crashes, I'm afraid, but interesting nonetheless.
Check out Pharyngula on the new paper that uses penguin fossils to time the evolution of living bird groups. In October I posted this picture of a reconstruction of the penguin in question, which now has a name: Waimanu. I'd just add to PZ's run down that this fossil is also important because it…
Randy Olson, who sparked a massive discussion here a couple weeks ago in connection to his movie, Flock of Dodos and how to explain evolution, sends an update:
Hello Carl -
Big news here -- the official World Premiere of "Flock of Dodos: the evolution-intelligent design circus," will be at Robert…
Harper has put up a new page on Amazon for the reissued paperback of Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea. It will include an introduction I've written that surveys some of the important developments in both the science and politics of evolution in the five years since the book was published. The…
Last October, a lawsuit was leveled against an evolution web site at UC Berkeley, based on the claim that government funds had been used to promote religious belief. I contributed the section on the history of biological thought. Judy Scotchmoor, the project's coordinator, just dropped me an email…
Natural selection can favor genes that allow children to grow up healthy. But in order to grow up healthy, they need nurturing from their mothers, both before and after birth. If a baby's development puts a strain on a mother, she may end up having fewer children. That means she may spread fewer…
How do we know that we are kin to chimpanzees and howler monkeys and the other primates? For one thing, it's by far the best explanation for the fossil record. For another, our DNA shows signs of kinship to other primates, much like the genetic markers that are shared by people from a particular…
In trying to navigate the new ethical territory of blogging, I've decided to delete part of one of my posts. The full explanation is below.
Last week the story about the Turkish "quadruped" family was in circulation. I pointed to an article in which a Turkish scientist made an accusation of…
I take a look at two new books on global warming in Sunday's New York Times Book Review. The International Herald Tribune has already posted it on their site (which has no subscription wall to boot). (Update: NYTBR link.) The books are The Weather Makers by Tim Flannery and Field Notes From a…
Mike Lemonick, Time's excellent senior writer on science, has started a blog. I can't think off the top of my head of another staff science writer at a big magazine or newspaper who has a blog (as opposed to us itinerant science scribes). So welcome to Mike.
One quibble: why no comments? A…
Loyal readers need no introduction to this bit of entomological "Faces of Death." Others who think this must be some sort of hoax, read this (or this).
Courtesy of Dr. Fred Liebersat, oracle of the emerald cockroach wasp.
The Discovery Channel picked up my cockroach zombie story and interviewed Dr. Fred Liebersat on his research. They included some cool footage of the roach and its sinister wasp brain surgeon. To watch, go to their archives and scroll to "Roach-o-rama."
Unfortunately, there's no footage of young…
Enceladus, a tiny moon of Saturn, suddenly gets interesting. It may be spewing liquid water. And since the only life we know of needs liquid water--and since Enceladus may now be the second place we know of in the solar system with liquid water--I want to buy a ticket there. Details and pictures…
I've revisited the wrist walker story after a scientist involved accused me of spreading "empty gossip." I don't agree with that charge, but I do think I should retract some of what I wrote. But I've still got some nagging questions about the whole affair. Check it out.
I've been in low-blogging mode for a few days as I try to fire off a few dead-tree articles. But I wanted to write up a quick post to draw your attention to threetwo very interesting pieces of human evolution in the news.
1. Modern evolution. A new paper presents the results of a systematic scan…
Scientists are probably centuries away from drawing the full tree of life. For one thing, they have only discovered a small fraction of the species on Earth--perhaps only ten percent. They are also grappling with the relationships between the species they have discovered. Systematists (scientists…
This image came out a couple months ago in Nature, but I just came across it today. I quite like the way it sums up the history of life--something that's maddening hard to do, since the time scales are so vast. It shows how life's diversity has been accumulating for billions of years. This chart…
Go back far enough in our history--maybe about 650 million years--and you come to a time when our ancestors were still invertebrates. That is, they had no skulls, teeth, or other bones. They didn't even have a brain.
How invertebrates became vertebrates is a fascinating question, made all the more…