Reef Madness 6: The Death of Louis Agassiz

This is the sixth installment of an abridged version of my book Reef Madness: Alexander Agassiz, Charles Darwin, and the Meaning of Coral. The prior installment described how Charles Darwin seduced Harvard botanist Asa Gray, enlisting him in defeating Alexander’s father, the famous creationist zoologist Louis, in a series of debates about Darwin’s theory of evolution. […]

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Asa Gray Goes Postal

Asa Gray, who keeps coming up this blog lately, has been honored without place on one of the lovelier first-class stamps I have seen come out of the U.S. Postal Service lately. It’s good to see gray honored this way. As far as I know, he is the first scientist honored by a stamp for […]

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I’ll Be on NPR Saturday, Looking After My Dunbar Number

I’ll be on NPR’s All Things Considered this Saturday afternon as part of a short segment about “Dunbar’s number,” the vital network of 150-or-so social relations that evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar says we must each maintain to live successfully. (We do it mainly by talking, especially gossip; monkeys do it mainly by grooming.) I’ve written […]

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