Greetings from Durham!

Durham isn’t quite the brutal oven that Austin was, but it’s pretty sultry. I’m here for the annual International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health meeting. I gave a plenary talk about reporting on evolutionary medicine. Some stories virtually write themselves, while others, on tricky concepts like imprinting, require a lot of wrestling. With my talk over, I get to enjoy a couple days of presentations about research about everything from sex chromosomes to mountain sickness. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, June 24, 2016” →

Greetings from Austin!

I’m broiling under the Texan sun on a visit to the Society for the Study of Evolution’s annual meeting. Last night I gave the Stephen Jay Gould Prize lecture, about our changing picture of human evolution. I talked about the articles I’ve written about in recent newsletters, on exciting new fossils and insights from DNA. In the 1970s, Gould pushed his readers to appreciate human evolution as a bush, rather than a simplistic march of progress. With lots of new fossils found since then, the human evolutionary trees is even more ramified. And all the interbreeding revealed in ancient DNA over the past 100,000 years between humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other mysterious hominins has complicated our family tree even more. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, June 17, 2016” →

Greetings–

It’s late spring here in New England, and that means one thing: an invasion of snapping turtles, in search of a place to lay their eggs. Here’s a story I told two years ago about learning to love my monstrous neighbors.
 

If you are in Austin, or if you’ll be there for the Society for the Study of Evolution meeting, please join me on June 17 for a public lecture, “The Surviving Branch: How Genomes Are Revealing The Twisted Course of Human Evolution.” Details here Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, June 3, 2016” →