Novelist and blogger Robin Sloan had something he wanted to say about three things he loves — writing, reading, and the Internet. He wanted people to really absorb it. Seems safe to say he wanted us to love it. The usual path to such love is to write a great blog post, then track the […]
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 →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 →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 →1. The race for May’s top spot wasn’t even close: Free Science, One Paper at a Time, my rescued feature about how too much of science is trapped in an increasingly archaic journal structure, easily drew the most hits, running well into 5 figures to become one of Neuron Culture’s Top Ten hits ever. I’m […]
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 →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 →