On Wednesday, EO Wilson and colleagues at Harvard came out swinging at a major concept in modern evolutionary biology, known as inclusive fitness. A generation of scientists has used it to explain how animals help each other–because they’re kin. In the new paper, Wilson and colleagues say it’s superfluous.

I’ve written a story about the paper–and the sparks flying from it in biology circles–for tomorrow’s issue of the New York Times. I very much liked the way Jim Hunt, an expert on wasps, described the debate to me:

“Things are just bouncing around right now like a box full of Ping-Pong balls.”

To see what he means, check out the story.

[Image from Alex Wild]

Originally published August 30, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

I’ve contributed my first article to Technology Review–a short profile of Tim Lu of MIT, one of TR’s 35 innovators under 35. Lu is engineering viruses to attack biofilms–not just the ones that make us sick, but the ones that gum up factories and HVAC systems. Elegant and practical at the same time. Congratulations to all the winners!

Originally published August 27, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.

If you’re looking for a gang of vicious killers, look no further than the Apicomplexans. These single-celled protozoans cause death and destruction across the animal kingdom. They infect everything from butterflies to people. Their diseases include Texas Cattle Fever, toxoplasmosis, and the scourge that makes Plasmodium the baddest Apicomplexan of them all, malaria. Continue reading “Malaria, Sea Grapes, and Kidney Stones: A Tale of Parasites Lost” →

I’ve got two podcasts at Meet the Scientist to tell you about.

The first is a conversation with Nancy Moran, a Yale biologist who studies microbes that become essential to the survival of their hosts. In some cases, these symbionts lose just about all their DNA except for the genes that they use to be useful to their host–leading to the smallest genomes in nature.

The second is a conversation with Susan Golden of UCSD on the subject of time. We humans have a body clock, of course, but so do some bacteria. Why does a microbe need to know the time of day, when its lifespan can be far shorter? That would be like our body clock running a cycle of 1,000 years. Listen to find out.

Originally published August 19, 2010. Copyright 2010 Carl Zimmer.