Category: Blog
The Koufax awards are among the biggest honors out here in the blogmos. It just came to my attention that the Loom has been nominated in the category of best writing. Of course, I’m packed in with lots of excellent blogs, so if you plan to vote, you’ve got lots of reading ahead of you. When voting does open up, prepare for a not-so-subtle reminder…
Best Writing Nominations | The Koufax Awards
Originally published February 23, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.
There was a time–in the 1960s and 1970s–when the phrase “Man the Hunter” enjoyed a lot of popularity. Some researchers claimed that the evolution of hunting played a key role in the origin of our lineage. That’s what we made tools for, and that’s how we got all the extra energy to fuel our big brains. Much of our anatomy, according to the Man-the-Hunter theory, was the result of adaptations for hunting. You have to stand tall above the savannah grass, for example, to spot your game. You need to make weapons. And a bloody-minded psychology helped too.
Behold conservapedia, which calls itself “an online resource and meeting place where we favor Christianity and America”–and where we don’t like Wikipedia at all. My fellow Sciencebloggers have been finding all sorts of factual troubles with the site over the past few days. I didn’t think I had all that much to add, until I started entering a few basic science terms in the search engine and detected a certain pattern…
Darwin gave a lot of thought to the strangest creatures on this planet, wondering how they had evolved from less strange ancestors. Whales today might be fish-like warm-blooded beasts with blowholes and flukes, but long ago, Darwin argued, their ancestors were ordinary mammals that walked on land with legs. His suggestion was greeted with shock and disbelief; nevertheless, scientists have found bones from ancient walking whales. Humans, Darwin argued, evolved from apes, most likely in Africa where chimpanzees and gorillas are found today. And today scientists have found about twenty different species of hominids, from chimp-like creatures that lived six million years ago to not-quite humans that lived alongside our own species.
The latest joy from the Discovery Institute: an attempt to make dodos look scary.
Originally published February 7, 2007. Copyright 2007 Carl Zimmer.