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Blogging will be light for a few days because my hard drive devoured itself last night. I just wanted to mention a couple brain-related items. First off, I've got a profile in today's New York Times of Michael Gazzaniga, one of the most fascinating people involved in science today. His research on…
Judging from fossils and studies on DNA, the common ancestor of humans, chimpanzees, and bonobos lived roughly six million years ago. Hominids inherited the genome of that ancestor, and over time it evolved into the human genome. A major force driving that change was natural selection: a mutant…
Evolutionary psychologists argue that we can understand the workings of the human mind by investigating how it evolved. Much of their research focuses on the past two million years of hominid evolution, during which our ancestors lived in small bands, eating meat they either scavenged or hunted as…
On Thursday I predicted that pundits would make the rediscovery of the Ivory-billed woodpecker an opportunity to criticise predictions that humans are causing mass extinctions--while conveniently ignoring evidence that goes against their claims. Today I came across the first case I know of, which…
Thanks to the various readers who have noticed the creationist Google ads that pop up on some of the Loom's pages. Such are the hazards of letting robots handle ads. I will talk with the good people at Corante about this.
The feud over Homo floresiensis, the little people of Indonesia, centers on whether they were an extinct diminutive species that evolved from some ancient hominid, such as Homo erectus, or whether they were just pygmy humans, perhaps suffering from some disease. The leading skeptic,…
From time to time, scientists discover that a species that was once thought to have become extinct is actually surviving in some remote place. If the species is a salamander or a lemur, it gets a quick headline and then promptly goes back to its obscure, tenuous existence. But here's one…
In the new issue of Smithsonian, I've got an article about life on Mars. I'm not writing about anything NASA has actually found, but instead about the difficulty of just recognizing life, even if the evidence is in your hand (or in your rover's spectrometer). While the chances of life existing…
This morning the New York Times reported that the National Geographic Society has launched the Genographic Project, which will collect DNA in order to reconstruct the past 100,000 years of human history.
I proceeded to shoot a good hour nosing around the site. The single best thing about it is an…
I have a weakness common to many bloggers--I like to check my site meter to see who's coming to my blog, and from where. Often I wind up discovering intriguing sites run by people whose interests run along the same lines as mine, such as evolutionary biology. Today, however I was surprised to see a…
I've been catching up on my online reading, and a couple days ago John Hawks offered this tantalizing hint that Homo floresiensis a k a the Hobbit may be a pathological specimen. Such claims have been made before based on the small skull of the hominid, but they've been pretty powerfully rebutted.…
I've got an article in tomorrow's New York Times about a startling new way to control the nervous system of animals. Scientists at Yale have genetically engineered flies with neurons that grow light-sensitive triggers. Shine a UV laser at the flies, and the neurons switch on. In one experiment, the…
Two of the most important stages in hominid evolution were the origin of the entire hominid branch some six to seven million years ago and the first movement of hominids out of their African birthplace. This week we now get a new look at both.
On the cover of Nature, the editors splashed the first…
I'm guessing it's only a matter of time before this guy gets a show on cable. Bryan Fry is a biologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia, and he spends a lot of his time doing this sort of thing--messing with animals you really really shouldn't mess with. In addition to being telegenic,…
Spring is finally slinking into the northeast, and the backyard wildlife here is shaking off the winter torpor. Our oldest daughter, Charlotte, is now old enough to be curious about this biological exuberence. She likes to tell stories about little subterranean families of earthworm mommies and…
I'll be a guest tonight at 7 PM EST on NPR's talk show On Point, talking about the new wave of dinosaur science. Jack Horner will be on as well, delivering the dirt about his mind-blowing discovery of soft tissue from a T. rex. Should be interesting.
Update, 3/29/05 9:30 am: The show is now…
Today Gregor Mendel is a towering hero of biology, and yet during his own lifetime his ideas about heredity were greeted with deafening silence. In hindsight, it's easy to blame his obscurity on his peers, and to say that they were simply unable to grasp his discoveries. But that's not entirely…
Panda's Thumb has an update on the ongoing drama over teaching creationism in public schools taking place in York, Pennsylvania. Last year a group of residents donated 58 copies of a creationst book called Of Pandas and People to the local school. The board of education reviewed them and gave them…
Readers were busy this weekend, posting over fifty comments to my last post about HIV. Much of the discussion was sparked by the comments of a young-Earth creationist who claims that the evolutionary tree I presented was merely an example of microevolution, which--apparently--creationists have no…
You may have heard last month's news about an aggressive form of HIV that had public health officials in New York scared out of their professional gourds. They isolated the virus from a single man, and reported that it was resistant to anti-HIV drugs and drove its victim into full-blown AIDS in a…
I can't remember the first time I saw the dinosaur fossils at the American Museum of Natural History, but they've been good friends for over thirty years. We've all changed a lot over that time. I've grown up and gotten a bit gray, while they've hiked up their tails, gotten a spring in their step,…
Last week my editor at the New York Times asked me to write an article about the evolution of crying, to accompany an article by Sandra Blakeslee on colic. Both articles (mine and Blakeslee's) are coming out tomorrow. As I've written here before, human babies are by no means the only young animals…
At 1 p.m. today I listened by phone to a press conference in Washington where scientists presented the first good look inside a Hobbit's head. The view is fascinating. While it may help clear up some mysteries, it seems to throw others wide open.
Last October, a team of Australian scientists…
I've got an article in today's New York Times about animal personalities.
Update: I'm not ashamed to admit I'm a regular visitor to the gossip site Gawker. But I have to say I was surprised to see the personality article turn up there. Will hordes of New York hipsters discover the strange joys of…
In my last post, I traced a debate over the evolution of language. On one side, we have Steven Pinker and his colleagues, who argue that human language is, like the eye, a complex adaptation produced over millions of years through natural selection, favoring communication between hominids. On the…
Earlier this month I wrote two posts about the evolution of the eye, a classic example of complexity in nature. (Parts one and two.) I'd like to write now about another case study in complexity that has fascinated me for some time now, and one that has sparked a fascinating debate that has been…
The Sydney Morning Herald reports today that the bones of Homo floresiensis, aka the Hobbits, have at last been returned to the team that originally discovered them.
The team, made up of Indonesian and Australian scientists, discovered the bones on the Indonesian island of Flores. Last October…
In my last post, I went back in time, from the well-adapted eyes we are born with, to the ancient photoreceptors used by microbes billions of years ago. Now I'm going to reverse direction, moving forward through time, from animals that had fully functioning eyes to their descendants, which today…
(The first of a two-part post)
The eye has always had a special place in the study of evolution, and Darwin had a lot to do with that. He believed that natural selection could produce the complexity of nature, and to a nineteenth century naturalist, nothing seemed as complex as an eye, with its…
Over the next week or so, I'm going to post a couple two-part posts. I've gotten mildly obsessed with two big topics in evolution: eyes and language. There's been so much fascinating work done on both subjects in the past year or so that a single post just won't do for either of them. I know that…