Science is not a string of successes. It has its share of errors and misconduct, and acknowledging them does no disservice to the value of scientific research that stands the test of time. So it was a pleasure to review a new book, Brilliant Blunders, by Marco Livio, for the New York Times Book Review. No one is perfect, Livio shows us, even some of the greatest scientists of the modern age. Check it out.
Originally published June 8, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.
The New York Times, June 7, 2013
In a letter to a fellow physicist in 1915, Albert Einstein described how a scientist gets things wrong:
“1. The devil leads him by the nose with a false hypothesis. (For this he deserves our pity.)
“2. His arguments are erroneous and sloppy. (For this he deserves a beating.)”
According to his own rules, Einstein should have been pitied and beaten alike. “Einstein himself certainly committed errors of both types,” the astrophysicist Mario Livio writes in his enlightening new book, “Brilliant Blunders.”
The New York Times, June 6, 2013
For a strange sexual history, it’s hard to beat birds. In some lineages, bird penises have evolved to spectacular lengths. Ducks, for example, have corkscrew-shaped penises that can grow as long as their entire body. They use their baroque genitalia to deliver sperm to female reproductive tracts that are also corkscrew-shaped — but twisted in the opposite direction.
In other lineages of birds, however, the penis simply vanished. Of the 10,000 species of birds on Earth, 97 percent reproduce without using the organ. “That’s shocking, when you think about it,” says Martin Cohn, a biologist at the University of Florida.
Continue reading “The Sex Life of Birds, and Why It’s Important”
(And for you anatomy junkies, Ed Yong has more!)
Originally published June 6, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.
James Snyder noticed one day that a frog had climbed onto a tree in his backyard in southern Florida and swallowed one of his Christmas lights. He snapped this eerie photo in which the light glows through the frog’s stomach, like a herpetological holiday ornament.
This frog’s behavior seems weirdly stupid. But there’s actually a wisdom of sorts in swallowing a Christmas light–if you’re a Cuban tree frog, that is. For thousands of years, the only glows your ancestors ever saw on a tree came from luminescent insects. If they responded to a little glow by attacking, they got a meal. They were more likely to survive and have baby frogs. The frogs that didn’t respond? Some of them may have done just fine. But others may have gone hungry. The males might have struggled to attract a mate; the females might have laid small eggs that failed to develop.
Continue reading “Freeing Animals From Our Evolutionary Traps”