A couple readers have emailed me asking what I think of the recent Nature article on blogs by scientists. I agree with Revere that it’s great that Nature (and specifically, Nature reporter Declan Butler) is paying such close attention to blogs in science. The top 50 list they provide is a good launch pad for rocketing off into this realm of the blogosphere.

But I’ve always loathed the newsiness of lists. Put a number on a cover, and you sell copies. There must be some weird psychological weakness we have for lists. I noticed that the headline on the latest issue of Entertainment Weekly is “113 PEOPLE AND THINGS WE LOVE RIGHT NOW.” Poor 114. Not quite enough love to go around…

Continue reading “Yarn Versus Science: Who Wins?” →

I just want to make one thing clear. When Ann Coulter talks about her Giant Raccoon Flatulence Theory, she’s talking about me. Don’t let anyone else tell you that they are a giant flatulent raccoon. They’re all just a bunch of wannabes. For I am the One True Giant Flatulent Raccoon.

Allow me to explain…

Continue reading “Behold, For *I* am the Giant Flatulent Raccoon!” →

In today’s New York Times I have an article about the discovery of a vast graveyard of dodo fossils. The fossils date back an estimated 3,000 years. Dodo fossils are exquisitely rare, and so it’s quite something to find an entire assemblage of them. But as the leader of the expedition that found them told me, that discovery alone would have been scientifically unimportant. What matters is the entire package. The scientists found fossils of lots of other animals and plants. It wasn’t just the dodo that went extinct on the island of Mauritius. It was an entire ecosystem, and these fossils may help scientists understand how that ecosystem lived and breathed.

Continue reading “The Dodo Graveyard” →

Last night I took the ferry across Long Island Sound to spend the day in Stony Brook at Evolution 2006, the joint annual meeting of American Society of Naturalists, the Society for the Study of Evolution, and the Society of Systematic Biologists. About 1500 scientists were there, and there were enough talks going on–often simultaneously–to keep me in constant motion from eight in the morning till eleven at night.

Continue reading “A Letter from Stony Brook” →

It’s been twenty months now since scientists reported discovering fossils on the Indonesian island of Flores belonging to a three-foot-tall hominid with a brain the size of a chimp that lived recently as 12,000 years ago. Homo floresiensis, as this hominid was dubbed, has inspired two clashing interpretations. Its discoverers declared it a separate species descended from another branch of hominids. In others words, the most recent common ancestor we share with Homo floresiensis lived two or even three million years ago. Skeptics argued that the fossils belonged to human pygmies. The one fossil of a Homo floresiensis brain-case belonged to a female with a rare genetic defect. In brief: healthy hominid versus deformed human.

Continue reading “Hobbits: Happy, Healthy, Human?” →