Okay, you’re approaching Darwin saturation, I know. But how about Darwin’s impact on the English language? The Oxford English Dictionary credits him with the first use of 144 words. Did you know Darwin was the first person to use the word alfalfa in English? Or rodeo? Check out this post from my brother Ben for more. And be sure to read to the end to catch the most surprising neologism of all.
Originally published February 12, 2009. Copyright 2009 Carl Zimmer.
I am hanging out at the airport, having just missed my flight to Raleigh, but free wireless makes it just an extra office. I’ve just read a few complaints on my post about visualizing the tree of life. Some commenters are not pleased that the tree I illustrated the post with does a grave disservice to the overwhelming diversity of the bacterial world. It is certainly true that bacteria (and archaea) are staggeringly diverse. In a spoonful of soil there may be 10,000 species of microbes. By comparison, there are only about 5,000 mammal species. A lot of the diversity in microbes is ancient, since they’ve been around a lot longer than mammals, or even animals.
This week of all things Darwin seemed like a good time to share some news about a project I’ve been working on for the past few months. It’s a book called The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution.
The inspiration for the book came from a conversation I had last year with the folks at Roberts & Company, a publishing company. They had noticed a growing number of classes about evolution for non-biology-majors, and asked if I’d be interested in writing a textbook for them. I was excited by the prospect of being able to bring together the things I’ve learned and written about over the past few years, as evolutionary biologists have made a string of surprising new advances in understanding the history of life (many of which I’ve written about here at the Loom).
The New York Times, February 9, 2009
Michael Sanderson is worried. Dr. Sanderson, a biologist at the University of Arizona, is part of an effort to figure out how all the estimated 500,000 species of plants are related to one another. For years now the researchers have sequenced DNA from thousands of species from jungles, tundras and museum drawers. They have used supercomputers to crunch the genetic data and have gleaned clues to how today’s diversity of baobabs, dandelions, mosses and other plants evolved over the past 450 million years. The pace of their progress gives Dr. Sanderson hope that they will draw the entire evolutionary tree of plants within the next few years. “It’s within striking distance,” Dr. Sanderson said.
There are perhaps ten million species on Earth, joined together by common ancestry. But even 3000 species are practically impossible to represent on a single evolutionary tree. So how shall we ever see the tree of life (especially if it’s also a web in parts)? That’s the subject of my latest article in tomorrow’s New York Times, “Crunching Data for the Tree of Life.” It’s one of a set of stories the Times is publishing in observation of Darwin’s birthday. Check them all out.