On March 28, 1838, Charles Darwin paid a visit to the London Zoo. At age 29, he was far from the scientific celebrity he would eventually become. It had only been two years since his return from his round-the-world voyage on the Beagle, and he was still methodically working his way through the heap of fossils and living specimens he had accumulated along the way. It would take more than two decades before he would present the world with his theory of evolution. In 1838, the theory was still in a primordial form in his mind. Darwin was struggling to find an explanation for how living things–humans included–got to be the way they are. And so, on that chilly spring day, Darwin went to the zoo and stepped into a cage with an orangutan.
The New York Times, April 16, 2015
In 1998, Dr. Philip A. Starr started putting electrodes in people’s brains.
A neurosurgeon at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Starr was treating people with Parkinson’s disease, which slowly destroys essential bits of brain tissue, robbing people of control of their bodies. At first, drugs had given his patients some relief, but now they needed more help.
After the surgery, Dr. Starr closed up his patients’ skulls and switched on the electrodes, releasing a steady buzz of electric pulses in their brains. For many patients, the effect was immediate.
Continue reading “Clues to How an Electric Treatment for Parkinson’s Works”
The New York Times, April 9, 2015
Gert Stulp stands 6 feet, 7 inches tall. His height makes him especially self-conscious at scientific conferences when he rises to describe his research as a demographer at the London School of Tropical Medicine. “It’s always quite embarrassing,” he said.
Dr. Stulp, who is Dutch, studies why his fellow citizens are so tall.
Today, the Dutch are on average the tallest people on the planet. Just 150 years ago, they were relatively short. In 1860, the average Dutch soldier in the Netherlands was just 5 feet 5 inches. American men were 2.7 inches taller.
Continue reading “Natural Selection May Help Account for Dutch Height Advantage”
The more you think about sickness and health, the trickier it gets to draw a clean line between them. We tend to think of ourselves as being prepared by nature for a good life. If we can just keep bacteria and viruses from killing us, and avoid walking into open elevator shafts, we’ll live a long, healthy life.
But we are actually the products of evolution, and evolution can’t give us perfect health. It has endowed us with powerful immune systems, thank you very much. And it has endowed us with quick reflexes that can, in some cases, keep us out of open elevator shafts. But evolution doesn’t automatically march to perfection. It stops short, leaving us with grave imperfections.
Mosaic, April 6, 2015
For me, it was hornets.
One summer afternoon when I was 12, I ran into an overgrown field near a friend’s house and kicked a hornet nest the size of a football. An angry squadron of insects clamped onto my leg; their stings felt like scorching needles. I swatted the hornets away and ran for help, but within minutes I realised something else was happening. A constellation of pink stars had appeared around the stings. The hives swelled, and new ones began appearing farther up my legs. I was having an allergic reaction.