More thoughts on the origin of life, over at the Year of Science web site.
Originally published January 10, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
Author: Lori Jia
I moderate the comments for this blog, but only lightly. Over the past five years, I’ve had 8,720 comments posted on this blog. Out of all the people who left comments on the Loom, I can only recall banning two.
I don’t block comments from people just because they believe the Earth is a few thousand years old or have some other non-scientific notion of how the world works. I don’t mind being told I’m wrong (even if I’m right). It’s also fine with me if commenters get fierce in their exchanges with each other. I’m not going police writing style.
But I do get bored with comment threads that wander off far from the original post, into tedious viciousness, purely narcissistic self-justifications, and other pointless enterprises.
Don’t these people know I have work to do? The delectable distractions continue to pile up:
1. After suffering blog burnout, writer David Dobbs has experienced a blog rebirth. Check out his revival, Neuron Culture, for observations on the twenty-first century mind.
2. John Whitfield, another writer worth reading, is blogging his reading of The Origin of Species over the next few days at Blogging the Origin.
This year Science magazine will be celebrating Darwin’s big year with, among other things, a monthly series of essays on major evolutionary questions. The editors asked me to kick things off with an essay on the Big Kick Off–the origin of life. They’ve just posted my piece. Here’s how it starts:
An Amazon of words flowed from Charles Darwin’s pen. His books covered the gamut from barnacles to orchids, from geology to domestication. At the same time, he filled notebooks with his ruminations and scribbled thousands of letters packed with observations and speculations on nature. Yet Darwin dedicated only a few words of his great verbal flood to one of the biggest questions in all of biology: how life began.
On January 26 and February 2, I’ll be teaching a workshop for science graduate students at Yale on writing about science for non-scientists. This is the third time for me, and I think I’ve got the hang of it. Of course, things have changed a lot since the last time around (see under Twitter), so I’m doing a little rethinking. That’s how you sprout new neurons, right?
Information about the workshop and registration can be found on the Yale Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology web site (flyer pdf).
Continue reading “Third Time’s A Charm: Science-Writing Workshop At Yale”