Marc Hauser, the star psychologist and morality researcher accused of fraud, has resigned his position at Harvard. Appropriately, the Globe’s Carolyn Johnson, who covered this story better than anyone, breaks the story: Marc Hauser, a well-known Harvard psychology professor who has been on leave since an internal investigation found him guilty of eight counts of […]
Continue reading →I bring here the sixth entry in my partial serialization of my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which finds Louis Agassiz facing off against Asa Gray in a decisive argument over Darwin’s theory of evolution. I first ran this excerpt back on April 28, independently, before I began […]
Continue reading →If asked to trace the roots of modern Western science, most educated Westerners will point to the scientific revolution that flowered in Europe following the Renaissance, with Copernicus’s 1543 “On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres” the main marker. There and then, it is thought, science began asserting an account of nature separate from that of […]
Continue reading →This, the fifth in a series of posts extracted from my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, introduces the book’s main figure, Alexander Agassiz. In the book I track Alex from birth. In this abridged serialization, I skip that and we pick him here as a 12-year-old boy. Abandoned […]
Continue reading →This is the third of several installments of my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral. The first two brought us Louis Agassiz, Alexander’s father, who yearned to be “the first naturalist of his generation,” and the Rumble at Glen Roy, in which the young Louis, wielding ice, bests a […]
Continue reading →This is the second of several excerpts from my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral. This is from Chapter Two. Series explained below; go here for context on this repub experiment. 2. Rumble at Glen Roy from Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral © David Dobbs, all […]
Continue reading →Alert readers will remember the scuffle that broke out last summer December over the “arsenic-is-life” paper by Felisa Wolfe-Simon and colleagues that claimed to have found that a bacterium from Mono Lake had been coaxed into substituting arsenic for phosphorous in its DNA. Many, including me, criticized both the paper and its presentation: the paper […]
Continue reading →Below is the first in a series of self-standing excerpts from my book Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral (Pantheon, 2005), that, in an experimental act of re-publishing, I will run a dozen or so of these over the next several weeks, partially serializing the book. Each post will stand on […]
Continue reading →On Father’s Day three years ago, biologist Jonathan Eisen decided he’d like to republish all his father’s papers. His father, Howard Eisen, a biologist and a researcher at the National Institutes of Health, had published 40-some-odd papers by the time that he died by suicide at age 45. That had been in Febuary 1987, while […]
Continue reading →Lots of news has broken lately about Marc Hauser, the Harvard psychology professor famous first for studies of morality and cognition in nonhuman primates, and then, starting last summer, for being found guilty of scientific misconduct by Harvard. No one seems quite sure what to make of all these subtle movements and shifts, and whether […]
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