In Games, an Insight Into the Rules of Evolution

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The New York Times, July 31, 2007

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When Martin Nowak was in high school, his parents thought he would be a nice boy and become a doctor. But when he left for the University of Vienna, he abandoned medicine for something called biochemistry. As far as his parents could tell, it had something to do with yeast and fermenting. They became a little worried. When their son entered graduate school, they became even more worried. He announced that he was now studying games.

In the end, Dr. Nowak turned out all right. He is now the director of the Program for Evolutionary Dynamics at Harvard. The games were actually versatile mathematical models that Dr. Nowak could use to make important discoveries in fields as varied as economics and cancer biology.

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Picking Up the Dog

Posted on by Lori Jia

Last update of the day: Tomorrow’s New York Times has a profile I wrote about Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist at Harvard. Nowak uses games to understand how cooperation evolved–whether that cooperation is between people or between cells or between genes. I’ve written about Nowak in passing before–his work on language evolution turns up in my book Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, and there’s a bit on his research on cancer evolution in an article I wrote last year for in Scientific American. But I was very curious to talk to Nowak and figure out how all these topics fit inside the head of one scientist.

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So You Want to Visit Mars

Posted on by Lori Jia

Today is a day for short updates, rather than deep essays. Update number 1: if you’re interested in going to Mars, check out this podcast from Popular Mechanics in which I discuss the challenges astronauts would face living and working on Mars. The magazine will be running a series of articles on the future space travel, including one by me on the Red Planet. (NB: contrary to how PM introduces me, I am not officially “New York Times astrobiology reporter.” The Times just lets me write about life elsewhere when a cool story arises.)

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Old Fourlegs Revisited

Posted on by Lori Jia

Last week the world press took note of a fish hauled up off the coast of Zanzibar. (AP, Reuters). Why did they care? Because the animal was one of the most celebrated fish of the sea: it was a coelacanth.

The coelacanth is an ugly, bucket-mouthed creature. At first scientists only knew it from its fossils, the youngest of which was 70 million years old. In 1938, however, a flesh-and-blood coelacanth was dredged up near East London, South Africa. The five-foot long beast had many of the hallmarks of fossil coelacanths, such as hollow spines in their vertebrae, peculiar lobe-shaped fins, and a joint dividing its eye and “nose” from its brain and ears. The coelacanth became a celebrity in the, hailed as a “living fossil.”

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