Before 1947, a few clippings of Franciscan manzanita had ended up in nurseries. Today you can buy the plant online. But the nursery form is the result of hybridization and extreme breeding; it’s now about as much like wild Franciscan manzanita as a German shepherd is like a wolf. It’s unlikely it could survive in the wild anymore. For thousands of years, wild Franciscan manzanita had grown luxuriantly in the prairies that carpeted much of the California coast. Now the wild plants were all gone–or almost, it turned out.

Before Gluesenkamp’s discovery, the U.S. government officially listed Franciscan manzanita as extinct in the wild. But then three organizations–the Wild Equity Institute, Center for Biological Diversity, and California Native Plant Society–petitioned the U.S. government to change its status. In 2012, the Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to the request and reclassified Franciscan manzanita from extinct to  endangered. Its known wild population was precisely one. Continue reading “Does a Woolly Mammoth Need a Lawyer?” →

Insects and tropical plants are locked in an endless battle, featuring daggers, ant mercenaries, and chemical weapons. But as ugly as the fight can become, there may be a lovely consequence. Some researchers argue that the pests in the tropics play a major role in fostering the overwhelming diversity of the rain forest. For more details, check out my “Matter” column this week in the New York Times.check out my “Matter” column this week in the New York Times.check out my “Matter” column this week in the New York Times.

(Thanks to Elizabeth Kolbert for the headline!) Continue reading “What Doesn’t Kill You Makes You Speciate: My First New York Times Column of 2014” →

A couple weeks ago, All Things Considered asked me to talk about the deaths in 2013 of three Nobel-prize winning scientists: Francois Jacob, Frederick Sanger, and David Hubel. I had blogged about Jacob’s death in April, and reflecting on his career in conjunction with those of Sanger and Hubel was a thought-provoking experience. In some ways, these three scientists seemed worlds apart–Jacob poring over bacteria feeding on sugar, Sanger tearing apart insulin molecules, and Hubel using electrodes to eavesdrop on neurons in the brains of cats.

But what unites them all, I think, was their ability to use the very simple scientific tools available to scientists in the 1950s to open up vast realms of biological complexity–from the orchestral activity of the genome to the reality-building network of cells in our brains.

Continue reading “The Scientists We Lost in 2013” →

For my new  “Matter” column for the New York Times, I take a look at a new idea to explain that mystery between our ears. Our brains are enormous for our body size, and our minds are capable of extraordinary feats of cognition. Two neuroscientists have offered up a hypothesis that links these two facts, suggesting how an increase in brain size could have led to a change in how the brain is networked. Check it out.

You may also want to check out P.Z. Myers’s critique of the “tether hypothesis” on his blog Pharyngula. He raises some important questions about the idea, based on his own experiences as a neuroscientist. I’m puzzled, though, why he decided to kick it off with this swipe at me:

Continue reading “Untethering the Brain” →