The folks behind the Macarthur genius grant chose wisely this week when they gave one to Loren Rieseberg, an evolutionary biologist at Indiana University. Rieseberg does fascinating work on the origin of new species (that little subject). Specifically, he’s shown how new plant species emerge from hybrids. When two species of plants form a hybrid, it doesn’t necessarily become a sterile dead end. In fact, hybridization is an important source of entirely new species. Rieseberg does his work mainly on sunflowers, and so whenever I walk past a charming row of them, I think of the weird inter-species mingling that may lurk in their past.
Category: Blog
Today Daniel Kevles, a Yale historian, has an interesting review in the New York Times of a new book about eugenics. The book in question is War against the Weak, by Edward Black. It’s a cinderblock of a book, and it’s got a lot of chilling material to offer on how popular eugenics was in the United States in the earlier part of the century. A lot of people sincerely believed that criminals, blind people, sick babies, social misfits, and non-Nordic immigrants had to be stopped from poisoning the American gene pool. We’re not talking about a few racists here and there–we’re talking about leading biologists, doctors, philanthropists, Congressmen, and Supreme Court justices.
As someone who writes a lot about evolutionary biology, I’ve often had people say to me, “I just can’t believe that evolved.” Originally, that referred to the lovely side of nature–the beauty of flowers, for example, or the grace of birds in flight. The implication was that these things were so beautiful and intricate that they had to be created for a purpose–a beautiful purpose, obviously.
Over the past couple weeks an unplanned experiment has taken place that shows what sort of science makes it into the popular consciousness and what doesn’t. In the past couple weeks we’ve had three pieces of research on the same evolutionary puzzle in the same high-profile journal (Nature). One was all over the place–I’ll just link the USA Today article as one example. The other two vanished with barely a peep.
I wrote an article for this Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about the grey zone between coma and consciousness. Stories like this one are always hard, because there are so many crucial dimensions to the subject and so little room to do justice to them all. For example, I couldn’t even begin to explain how the research I describe in the article–using PET and MRI scans to measure the brain activity in people with traumatic brain injuries–is a beautiful reverse twist on some of the most famous research ever done on the brain: the nineteenth century doctor Pierre Paul Broca’s discovery of a region of the brain dedicated to speech.