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Back in the 1600s, when neurology was born, it wasn't scientists who were looking at brains. The word scientist didn't exist. Instead, those visionary folks would have called themselves natural philosophers. As I researched this chapter of scientific history for my book Soul Made Flesh, I was…
The science writer/blogging panel I was on over the weekend is now available on Contentious.
Tomorrow I'll be giving a talk in Westport, Connecticut, based in part on my new book on human origins. I'll be talking about Hobbits, natural selection in our own time, and more (accompanied by visuals). The talk is part of the Westport Library's excellent lecture series. It will be at 7:30 and is…
You may have heard about a petition that was being signed by scientists earlier this month against the teaching of intelligent design. The inspiration came from another petition drafted by the Discovery Institute opposing evolution. It garnered 400 signatures of scientists in four years. R. Joe…
I'm back from Pittsburgh, where the blogging-meet-science writing workshop went very well. Science writers are definitely curious, although you could hear some moans about the end of dead-tree publishing (a bit premature, in my opinion). Amy Gahran, my fellow panelist, is going to post a podcast on…
I'm going to be part of two workshops in the space of a couple weeks that will deal with the intersection of blogging and science writing. The first will be this Saturday at the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers in Pittsburgh, and the second will be hosted Tuesday…
There was a time not that long ago when sequencing a single gene would be hailed as a scientific milestone. But then came a series of breakthroughs that sped up the process: clever ideas for how to cut up genes and rapidly identify the fragments, the design of robots that could do this work twenty-…
My post on the cognitive dissonance in Florida about evolution brought a lot of comments, including one from David. Although he seems to be attacking other commenters rather than post itself as far as I can tell, he makes three points that are worth addressing.
1. "...most of you have no clue as…
Finally, more brains.
On Tuesday I wrote about how the second batch of Homo floresiensis bones had at last seen the scientific light of day. Today the critics who don't think the Hobbit is a new species are making their way into scientific journals as well. They're saying that the Hobbit brain…
Finally: more bones.
Last October the world marveled at the announcement of the discovery of a new species of hominid, Homo floresiensis, in a cave called Liang Bua on the Indonesian island of Flores. One conclusion was more shocking than the next. First, this hominid stood only three feet high,…
I've got a piece in tomorrow's New York Times on new research into the evolution of penguins. There's new work going on with penguin DNA and penguin fossils, such as this lovely 60-million-year old critter from New Zealand. It stood upright like living penguins, but still had wings it could bend at…
When it comes to evolution, the nation's attention is focused these days on Dover, Pennsylvania, where parents are suing the local board of education for introducing creationism into the classroom. It's certainly an important case, but if you really want to get a sense of what's at stake in the…
I've got a stack of new books that I want to get to this fall, although it's not going to be easy. If your interests run in the same currents, you may be interested in some of them...
Us and Them, by David Berreby. Berreby takes a look at how we put ourselves in groups, and put others outside them…
If you live in the New Haven area, I hope you'll consider joining me tomorrow at 5 pm for a talk at the Yale Medical School about my book Soul Made Flesh.
The talk will be at 5 pm, Thursday October 6, in the Beaumont Room at the Sterling Hall of Medicine, 333 Cedar Street. It is free and open to…
In July Cardinal Christoph Schoenborn of Vienna wrote an eyebrow-raising op-ed in the New York Times that favored Intelligent Design over evolution. Now, as far as I can tell from this Reuters story, he's claiming he was misunderstood.
"Maybe one did not express oneself clearly enough or thoughts…
Thanks to Scientific American for awarding one of its Science & Technology Web Awards to the Loom as one of their 25 favorite sites on the web, for "enchanting readers with every post."
Congrats also to three other sites that are on my RSS: Panda's Thumb, Real Climate, and Chris Mooney's The…
This year's Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology was announced this morning. Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren won for discovering that ulcers can be caused not by stress or genes but by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori (shown here). As my fellow Corantean, Derek Lowe, observes, this story…
Just a technical note: Corante has been upgrading to a new version of Movable Type, and they're still working out a few glitches. Some readers have already reported trouble posting comments. You can vent any other sort of frustration in my direction, and I'll let the powers that be know. I assume…
This Wednesday, I'll be coming to Swarthmore College to give a public lecture about human evolution. I had originally planned to focus on some of the cutting-edge discoveries I include in my upcoming book, from brain genes to enigmatic hobbits. But now that the big creationism trial is scheduled to…
The National Academy of Sciences just announced its 2005 Communications Awards. Gareth Cook, Pulitzer prizewinner from the Boston Globe, won the Newspaper/Magazine/Internet category for his must-read series of articles on stem cells. I was named one of two finalists, for a group of pieces about…
My brother Ben is now a respectable consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary, but when he was a kid, he was a puzzle freak, pure and simple. In fourth grade he'd spend hours paging through a big unabridged Webster's, looking for obscure words that he could use to create a fiendish rebus. Little…
Last year I was contacted by a team of scientists and museum exhibit designers to help put together a show about evolution. The result is Exploring Evolution, which is now opening at a string of state science museums in the midwest. (The list of participating museums is here.) The exhibit may not…
A lot of people think of viruses and bacteria in our bodies as nothing more than pests. It's certainly true that a lot of them do an excellent job of making us ill. But some viruses and bacteria merged with our ancestors over the course of billions of years, and if you were to have them removed…
"March of the Penguins," the conservative film critic and radio host Michael Medved said in an interview, is "the motion picture this summer that most passionately affirms traditional norms like monogamy, sacrifice and child rearing." --from an article describing how some religious leaders and…
(Warning: this post contains some journalistic/blogging inside-baseball material.)
Back in the dark ages (otherwise known as the 1990s), writing about science felt a bit like putting messages in a bottle. I'd write an article, a few weeks or months later it would appear in a magazine, and a few…
I'm back from a computer-free vacation, and of course I have returned to mountains of emails and a long chain of fascinating new links. In place of any original thoughts of my own, let me just point you to a few things that look interesting (if you have any mental space not presently occupied by…
Clint, the chimpanzee in this picture, died several months ago at a relatively young age of 24. But part of him lives on. Scientists chose him--or rather, his DNA--as the subject of their first attempt to sequence a complete chimpanzee genome. In the new issue of Nature, they've unveiled their…
Our genes are arrayed along 23 pairs of chromosomes. On rare occasion, a mutation can change their order. If we picture the genes on a chromosome as
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
a mutation might flip a segment of the chromosome, so that it now reads
ABCDEFGHISRQPONMLKJTUVWXYZ
or it might move one…
Sometimes a picture can tell you a lot about evolution. This particular picture has a story to tell about how two species--in this case a fly and an orchid--can influence each other's evolution. But the story it tells may not be the one you think.
Coevolution, as this process is now called, was one…
Well, Dr. Chopra has given us part two of his ruminations on evolution with a post that will make physicists cringe as much as biologists.
My favorite line: "Consciousness may exist in photons, which seem to be the carrier of all information in the universe."
Excuse me while I chat with my…