Category: Articles

The Face of Nature Changes as Art and Science Evolve

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, November 23, 2004

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Artists and scientists, so the story goes, glare at each other across a cultural divide. The scientist coldly hacks nature into pieces. The artist is unwilling to do the hard work necessary to understand how the world works.

This story is mostly fiction, as the work of the printmaker Joseph Scheer makes abundantly clear.

For the past six years, Mr. Scheer has made pictures of moths. He does not use paint or silk screens to make them. Instead, he has devised a method for placing real moths on a high-resolution digital scanner without crushing them flat.

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Faster Than a Hyena? Running May Make Humans Special

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Science, November 19, 2004

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Depending on your point of view, last week’s New York City marathon was a demonstration of athletic excellence or of unparalleled masochism. But according to a report in this week’s issue of Nature, it was also a display of a key innovation in human evolution. University of Utah biomechanics expert Dennis Bramble and Harvard physical anthropologist Daniel Lieberman argue that the human body is exquisitely adapted for endurance running. They marshal evidence that the ability to run long distances emerged 2 million years ago, possibly enabling our ancestors to become better scavengers. If the researchers are right, running goes a long way toward explaining why our bodies are so different from those of other apes.

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Faith-Boosting Genes

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Scientific American, October 31, 2004

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By page 77 of The God Gene, Dean H. Hamer has already disowned the title of his own book. He recalls describing to a colleague his discovery of a link between spirituality and a specific gene he calls “the God gene.” His colleague raised her eyebrows. “Do you mean there’s just one?” she asked.

“I deserved her skepticism,” Hamer writes. “What I meant to say, of course, was ‘a’ God gene, not ‘the’ God gene.”

Of course. Why, the reader wonders, didn’t Hamer call his book A God Gene? That might not have been as catchy, but at least it wouldn’t have left him contradicting himself.

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Those Brilliant Fall Outfits May Be Saving Trees

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, October 19, 2004

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As trees across the northern United States turn gold and crimson, scientists are debating exactly what those colors are for.

The scientists do agree on one thing: the colors are for something. That represents a major shift in thinking. For decades, textbooks claimed that autumn colors were just a byproduct of dying leaves. “I had always assumed that autumn leaves were waste baskets,” said Dr. David Wilkinson, an evolutionary ecologist at Liverpool John Moores University in England. “That’s what I was told as a student.”

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‘The Ancestor’s Tale’: You Are Here

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, October 17, 2004

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I once attended a conference about systematics — the classification of species — and felt as if I were looking at Mount Rushmore with a magnifying glass. The names alone — Tetraconata, Amoebozoa, Ecdysozoa, Oomycota, Neomeniomorpha — were overwhelming. Speaker after speaker hypothesized about how various species were related — whether springtails or bristletails were the closest relatives of winged insects, whether sponges all descended from a common ancestor, whether slime molds are really molds. I stumbled out of the lecture hall desperate for the big picture. And suddenly I saw it, on a five-foot-square poster taped to a wall.

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