Science, June 5, 2009

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For Darwin, sex was a big question mark. “We do not even in the least know the final cause of sexuality; why new beings should be produced by the union of the two sexual elements,” he wrote in 1862. “The whole subject is as yet hidden in darkness.”

Today, biologists understand the molecular nuts and bolts of sex fairly well. Each new human being (or bird or bee) needs a set of chromosomes from each parent. But that’s the how. The why of sex is still fairly mysterious. Bacteria don’t have to search for a mate; they just grow and divide in two. An aspen tree can simply send out shoots that grow into new trees. No muss, no fuss with finding a partner, fertilizing an egg, and joining two genomes.

Continue reading “On the Origin of Sexual Reproduction” →

The New York Times, May 18, 2009

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Discover, May 15, 2009

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Four decades ago, an MIT neuroscientist named Jerry Lettvin had a sudden inspiration about how our brains make sense of the world. What if each of us had a special set of neurons in our head whose only job was to recognize a particular person, place, or thing? It was a strange idea, but given what Lettvin knew about the brain, it was plausible. To describe his idea to his students, he made up a story [pdf].

The story was about Alexander Portnoy, the protagonist of Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint, which had just been published. The novel is a long monologue delivered by Portnoy as he lies on the couch of his psychoanalyst.

Continue reading “Can a Single Neuron Tell Halle Berry From Grandma Esther?” →

The New York Times, May 4, 2009

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Yale Environment 360, April 20, 2009

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In the gentle hills outside York, England, a controversial experiment is quietly unfolding. It began in the summer of 2000 when Steven Willis, a biologist at the University of Durham, and his colleagues drove to a wildlife preserve called Wingate Quarry. In the back of their car was a cage full of butterflies called Marbled Whites. Willis and his colleagues removed the cage from the car, opened it, and let 500 butterflies flutter away across the scrubby meadows.

Marbled Whites are common in Europe and southern England, but in 2000 the northern edge of their range was 65 kilometers south of Wingate Quarry. Yet Willis and his colleagues suspected that they might do well there. Thanks to global warming, Wingate Quarry might now be mild enough for the butterflies to survive.

Continue reading “As Climate Warms, Species May Need to Migrate or Perish” →