Just a technical note: Corante has been upgrading to a new version of Movable Type, and they’re still working out a few glitches. Some readers have already reported trouble posting comments. You can vent any other sort of frustration in my direction, and I’ll let the powers that be know. I assume everything will be sorted out shortly.
Category: Blog
This Wednesday, I’ll be coming to Swarthmore Collegeto give a public lecture about human evolution. I had originally planned to focus on some of the cutting-edge discoveries I include in my upcoming book, from brain genes to enigmatic hobbits. But now that the big creationism trialis scheduled to get underway a couple hours away in Dover, Pa., on Monday, I’ll talk about that as well–in particular how scientists continue to find evidence of human evolution, despite what some op-ed writing politiciansmay claim.
The National Academy of Sciences just announced its 2005 Communications Awards. Gareth Cook, Pulitzer prizewinner from the Boston Globe, won the Newspaper/Magazine/Internet category for his must-read series of articleson stem cells. I was named one of two finalists, for a group of pieces about evolution that appeared during 2005 in Discover, The New York Times, and right here. I knew I might be taking a risk by including some posts from The Loom, but I was very proud of them. It’s nice to see that blogs are taking seriously by the likes of the National Academy of Sciences.
Continue reading “Blogs: Another Sign of Semi-Respectability”
My brother Ben is now a respectable consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary, but when he was a kid, he was a puzzle freak, pure and simple. In fourth grade he’d spend hours paging through a big unabridged Webster’s, looking for obscure words that he could use to create a fiendish rebus. Little did I know that one day one of his favorite puzzles–the doublet–would become useful to me in thinking about evolution.
Last year I was contacted by a team of scientists and museum exhibit designers to help put together a show about evolution. The result is Exploring Evolution, which is now opening at a string of state science museums in the midwest. (The list of participating museums is here.) The exhibit may not have a laser light show or a 100-foot long robotic dinosaur, but it does offer a look at seven examples of how scientists study evolution, from HIV to walking whales. Cornelia Dean includes the exhibit in an article in the New York Times on evolution-themed museum displays.