Do you live in Brooklyn? Or a subway ride from SUNY Downstate Medical Center? Are you free Tuesday May 20 at 4 pm? Then swing over for a lecture I’ll be giving on the evolution of mind. Here’s a copy of the poster (full size here). And while I’ll certainly be talking about human minds, you can expect other species to make cameos, from smart flies to clever hyenas to mindless E. coli. They all fit together into a big picture. See you there.

(PS: Just a reminder–I’ll also be at Harvard Book Store in Cambridge on Friday and the Field Museum in Chicago on Saturday to talk about Microcosm.)

Continue reading “Minds Evolving in Brooklyn” →

Renate writes, “As a geologist and in respect to my temperament, I though a volcano tattoo would be just adequate. I got it at a time when tattoos were not as fashionable as they are now. Someone said to me ‘Oh, with such a tattoo you will never get a permanent position.’ But I have a permanent position now, despite the tattoo (actually the second one).”

Click here to go to the full Science Tattoo Emporium. 

Originally published May 15, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.

The New York Sun has a positive review of Microcosm today, and part of me just wants to point you in its direction, let you read about the book’s “ecstatically reflective moments,” and leave it at that. But there’s one puzzling passage that makes me wonder if some printer bent on mischief swapped my page 31 for one that I didn’t write. The reviewer observes, correctly, that much of the book is dedicated to drawing parallels between E. coli and us–and all living things as well. While he thinks this works for the most part, he thinks sometimes the comparison is “perhaps too glib.”

Continue reading “Wha..? or, Making Sense of Inscrutable Reviews” →

Julia writes:

“I got this tattoo done on Saturday. It’s the same set of footprints I use in the avatar for my blog (The Ethical Palaeontologist), but in fact they’re the narrow-gauge sauropod dinosaur trackways from the Ardley quarry in Oxfordshire. There’s no deeper meaning other than the fact that I’ve spent most of my academic career working on sauropod dinosaurs. But there are plans for more, if I could just get hold of a decent black and white illustration of a sauropod dorsal vertebra in dorsal view…”

Continue reading “Dinosaur Footprints” →

Last fall the Loom was awash in tattoos from scientists. Since then, I’ve moved them over to my Science Tattoo Emporium. If you haven’t checked it out recently, let me invite you over. Incredibly, someone sends me a new science tattoo just about every day. I post them as fast as I can, but I’ve still got a backlog. And most of them are astonishingly cool–both beautiful and enlightening. I particularly like today’s post, today’s post, an homage to Darwin’s finches. Plenty more where that came from. 

Originally published May 13, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.