Author’s: This post is an expansion of a feature I published a few weeks ago in New Scientist. It draws from research for a book I’m now writing, The Orchid and the Dandelion (Crown; ETA 2015). I originally explored this subject, at more length (and with monkeys) in a November 2009 Atlantic article, “Orchid Children.” A few years ago, […]
Continue reading →Evolutionary anthropologist John Hawks, eagle-eyed as ever, calls out a common mistake made by one expert in a response to findings in the gorilla genome: The Nature News story on the gorilla genome includes this section relevant to the evolution of hearing in gorillas and humans: [from the Nature story:] Some of these rapid changes […]
Continue reading →To start the new year, Andy Revkin, over at Dot Earth at the New York Times, wondered what traits we humans might be able to develop so that we “fall forward rather than down” as we try to deal with resource limits: The things we don’t know are easily as important as those we do. In such […]
Continue reading →The web’s delights abound and a-blend — rats among them. Last night I bumped into an 11-year-old Peter Hessler story about eating rats in Asia. (“‘Do you want a big rat or a small rat?’ the waitress asked.”) Fresh on the tasty tail of Hessler’s memorable meal comes Razib Khan, cribbing from a new paper on […]
Continue reading →This is the 11th installment of an abridged version of my book Reef Madness: Alexander Agassiz, Charles Darwin, and the Meaning of Coral. (Earlier installments are listed at bottom.) Here Darwin hatches the theory of coral reef formation that will start a decades-long argument with Alexander Agassiz — and create a template for his species theory. © […]
Continue reading →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. […]
Continue reading →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 […]
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 →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 […]
Continue reading →The history of science lives. Today it came to life over at the Atlantic, which just posted a key document in the fight over Darwin’s theory of evolution: a review of Darwin’s Origin of Species by Harvard botanist Asa Gray, which originally ran in the Atlantic in July 1860. Gray’s review provided a pivotal victory for […]
Continue reading →