Best wishes to you for the new year and the new decade!
2019 was busy for those of us who write about biology. Human evolution alone took up much of my time. When it comes to human origins, we had an entirely new species of Homo to contend with, new glimpses at our Denisovan cousins from Siberia and (amazingly) Tibet, and an ancient skull of our species in Europe over 210,000 years ago.
Looking to our biology today, scientists made some surprising discoveries. They investigated mysterious rings of DNA in our cells, along with a protein we make that could potentially shield us from dementia or even boost cognition.
Beyond our own species, there were zombie-making fungi to contend with, along with mind-shaping microbes, contagious cancer cells spreading to shellfish around the world, staggering migrations of insects, electric grids made of bacteria, mysterious fossils of what might be the first animals, and clues in fossils of fungi and genomes of algae for how life colonized land up to a billion years ago.
Scientists expanded our concepts of biology, creating extra letters for the genetic alphabet, using CRISPR to give flies the ability monarch butterflies have to withstand poison, reprogramming bacteria to attack tumors, building miniature versions of human brains called organoids, and rewriting an entire genome,
Unfortunately, writing about biology these days also means writing about the beginning stages of what may prove to be the sixth mass extinction of the past half billion years. And unlike the previous five, we’re responsible for this one.
For my last column of 2019, I wrote about how scientists have resurrected the genome of the extinct Carolina parakeet, a beautiful parrot found across the eastern United States until early 1900s. The genome may help scientists figure out how exactly we rendered them extinct. One possibility is that a pathogen on a chicken farm. Another human-borne pathogen–this one a fungus–has been driving frogs extinct in recent decades, and this year scientists realized it was a lot worse than previously thought.
Along with diseases, we are also devastating wildlife by doing things such as fragmenting their habitats, and scientists are figuring out why fragmentation is more dangerous in some parts of the world than others. And while it’s always an honor to write a front page story for the New York Times, it’s a grim one when the subject is the vast die-off of birds across the United States.
Looking back over a decade, the stories of science have also been mixed. We should mourn the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people felled by malaria each year, for example. But we should also rejoice that its devastation has dropped.. In 2018, the World Health Organization estimated that 405,000 people died of malaria in 2018, but that’s down from 585,000 in 2010. It’s possible that vaccines and other innovations may help drive down that number even more in the decade to come.
On the other hand, the climate story was bad in 2010, and ten years later it’s a lot worse. The concentration of carbon dioxide was 389 parts per million in 2010, and 410 parts per million at the end of 2019. The impacts of all this heat-trapping gas seemed far away in 2010, but now we’re living through them. If we can manage to cut carbon emissions dramatically in the decade to come, we can spare ourselves the worst that climate change has to offer. But right now the world is heading in the opposite direction. I hope that in 2030 there will be better news to report.
On the book front, I felt very grateful for what 2019 brought. The third edition of the evolution textbook I co-authored with Doug Emlen came out, complete with cute snowshoe hare cover. I got to talk to more audiences about She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, in Australia, Denmark, and across the United States. Conversations with folks such as Annalee Newitz, Bill Nye, and David Quammen were particular pleasures. And I was deeply honored to accepted prizes for the book from the National Academy of Sciences and the National Association of Science Writers.
In 2020, I will be spending a lot of time working on my next book. It’s on life–what it is, what it can be, and why it’s so hard to define. For a sample of the stuff I’ve been exploring, you can check out this podcast series I released earlier this year. If all goes according to plan, it will come out in 2021. I’ll post updates (cover, etc.) as they come.
January 20, 2020 Los Angeles, Aloud (with cosmologist Sean Carroll). Details to come.
More talks to be announced.
My latest book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, is now out in paperback. You can order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.
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Best wishes, Carl
Originally published January 3, 2020. Copyright 2020 Carl Zimmer.