Author: Lori Jia
Photographer Justine Cooper has taken a haunting series of photographs behind the scenes at the American Museum of Natural History. Seed Magazine has posted a slideshow of her work, and I’ve written an accompanying essay on the hidden world that lies behind the dioramas. Check it out.
Originally published February 12, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Okay, you’re approaching Darwin saturation, I know. But how about Darwin’s impact on the English language? The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with the first use of 144 words. Did you know Darwin was the first person to use the word alfalfa in English? Or rodeo? Check out this post from my brother Ben for more. And be sure to read to the end to catch the most surprising neologism of all.
Originally published February 12, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
I am hanging out at the airport, having just missed my flight to Raleigh, but free wireless makes it just an extra office. I’ve just read a few complaints on my post about visualizing the tree of life. Some commenters are not pleased that the tree I illustrated the post with does a grave disservice to the overwhelming diversity of the bacterial world. It is certainly true that bacteria (and archaea) are staggeringly diverse. In a spoonful of soil there may be 10,000 species of microbes. By comparison, there are only about 5,000 mammal species. A lot of the diversity in microbes is ancient, since they’ve been around a lot longer than mammals, or even animals.
This week of all things Darwin seemed like a good time to share some news about a project I’ve been working on for the past few months. It’s a book called The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution.
The inspiration for the book came from a conversation I had last year with the folks at Roberts & Company, a publishing company. They had noticed a growing number of classes about evolution for non-biology-majors, and asked if I’d be interested in writing a textbook for them. I was excited by the prospect of being able to bring together the things I’ve learned and written about over the past few years, as evolutionary biologists have made a string of surprising new advances in understanding the history of life (many of which I’ve written about here at the Loom).
There are perhaps ten million species on Earth, joined together by common ancestry. But even 3000 species are practically impossible to represent on a single evolutionary tree. So how shall we ever see the tree of life (especially if it’s also a web in parts)? That’s the subject of my latest article in tomorrow’s New York Times, “Crunching Data for the Tree of Life.” It’s one of a set of stories the Times is publishing in observation of Darwin’s birthday. Check them all out.