While I was blogging over the past few weeks about fact-checking George Will’s dismissal of global warming (collected here), I got comments. A lot of them. A fair number of commenters claimed George Will was right, and presented evidence that they claimed supported him. Some tried to back their claims with news that came out after Will’s column was published. For example, a few days after his column came out, there were reports that the a satellite that measure ice cover had some trouble and was fixed. But George Will could not jump forward in time, check out the satellites, and then leap back to write his column. There’s no way that it could have any bearing on fact-checking his piece. What’s more, even if Will did know about them, he’d still be wrong, as I explained here.

Continue reading “Checking George Will: The Perils of Time Travel” →

If you live in or around Santa Barbara, California, I’d like to invite you to a talk I’ll be giving at the Sage Center for the Study of Mind. It’s called, “Soul Made Flesh: Neuroscience in 1659 and 2009.” I’ll be talking about how the whole science of the brain was launched by alchemists, mystics, and other rogue natural philosophers during the English Civil War, and draw a few lessons for understanding the brain and mind in an age of fMRI scans, brain-machine interfaces, and other remarkable developments. I’ll be drawing on my book, Soul Made Flesh, as well as on my recent columns, articles, and blog posts on the brain. The talk (which is free) will be on Thursday, March 12, from 4 to 6 pm at Mosher Alumni House Alumni Hall, (2nd floor) on the campus of the University of California at Santa Barbara. Here’s the Sage lecture page.

Originally published March 4, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.

Several commenters checked out the 3-D video of the world’s oldest fossil brain I posted yesterday and were struck by just how tiny the 300-million-year-old fish’s brain was in comparison to its braincase. Their verdict: shrinkage. In the paleontological sense of the word, not the Seinfeldian one. After death, brains that do not simply disappear sometimes get smaller. In this particular fish, Sibyrhynchus denisoni the brain must have gotten a lot smaller. Check out this image, in which the braincase is in red, and the brain is in yellow. (The scale bar is 5 millimeters.)

Continue reading “Like a Frightened Turtle?” →

Paleontologists don’t go looking for brains, and I’m not surprised. I once got to hold a fresh brain in my hands (it was at a medical school–nothing fishy, I promise), and I can vouch that they are marvelously delicate: a custard for thinking. When any vertebrate with a brain dies, be it human, turtle, or guppy, that fragile greasy clump of neurons is one of the first organs to vanish. Scientists must infer what ancient brains were like very often by examining the case that held it–that is, if they can find a relatively intact braincase.

Continue reading “The 300-Million-Year-Old Brain: Now In 3-D” →