This week I took a trip to the University of Maryland to give a talk about parasites. I waxed poetic about how sophisticated parasites are in their manipulations of their hosts, and how we might do well to learn from their wisdom about how the brain works. At dinner, I sat next to David Inouye, the incoming president of the Ecological Society of America. The waiter set down plates in front of us, loaded with plants, animals and fungi–free-living organisms, in other words. As we looked at the plates, a question came up: is there a parasite you can eat? Continue reading “Parasite Cuisine: Eating the Eaters” →

In today’s New York Times, I’ve written a story about a simple but important question: where do new genes come from?

Some four billion years ago, when cellular life emerged, a typical primordial microbe likely had only a small set of genes. Today, however, genes abound. We, for example, have 20,000 genes that encode proteins. Dogs have their own set, and so do starfish and fireflies and willow trees and every other species on Earth. Continue reading “Where Genes Come From” →

I’ll be giving some talks in the next few months, and I wanted to let you know the when’s and where’s…

This Saturday at 1 pm, I’ll be at the USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington DC. I’ll be moderating a panel discussion on personalized medicine. The panelists will include Francis Collins, the director of the National Institutes of Health. Details here. Continue reading “Springtime Yammerings” →

In 1785, A French mathematician named Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat (known as Marquis de Condorcet) used statistics to champion democracy.

Democracies are based on the collective decisions of large groups of people. But citizens aren’t experts on every topic, and so they may be prone to errors in the choices they make. And yet, Condorcet argued, it’s possible for a group of error-prone decision-makers to be surprisingly good at picking the best choice. Continue reading “The Wisdom of (Little) Crowds” →