Last month I blogged about my Scientific American reviewof Dean Hamer’s new book, The God Gene. I was not impressed. It’s not that I was dismissing the possibility that there might be genetic influences on religious behavior. I just think that the time for writing pop-sci books about the discovery of a “God gene” is after scientists publish their results in a peer-reviewed journal, after the results are independently replicated, and after any hypotheses about the adaptive value of the gene (or genes) have been tested.
The New York Times, October 19, 2004
As trees across the northern United States turn gold and crimson, scientists are debating exactly what those colors are for.
The scientists do agree on one thing: the colors are for something. That represents a major shift in thinking. For decades, textbooks claimed that autumn colors were just a byproduct of dying leaves. “I had always assumed that autumn leaves were waste baskets,” said Dr. David Wilkinson, an evolutionary ecologist at Liverpool John Moores University in England. “That’s what I was told as a student.”
Continue reading “Those Brilliant Fall Outfits May Be Saving Trees”
I have an article in tomorrow’s New York Times about the mystery of autumn leaves. Insect warning? Sunscreen? The debate rages. The one thing I was sad to see get cut for space was the statement by one of the scientists that the answer might be “all of the above.” This sort of multitasking is the cool–and sometimes maddening–thing about living things. Very important, and very hard to sort out.
Last week I blogged about the strange story of our past encoded in the DNA of lice. We carry two lineages of lice, one of which our Homo sapiensancestors may have picked up in Asia from another hominid, Homo erectus. I always get a kick imagining human beings, having migrated out of Africa around 50,000 years ago, coming face to face with other species of upright, tool-making, big-brained apes. It’s pretty clear that it happened in Europe, which was occupied by both humans and Neanderthals for several thousand years. But encountering Homo erectus would be even weirder. Studies on DNA suggest humans and Neanderthals share an ancestor dating back half a million years or so. But Homo erectus moved into Asia 1.8 million years ago. These were long-lost cousins, to put it mildly. What’s more, they almost certainly had nothing along the lines of human language. Their brains were very different too; they kept making the same stone tools they had been making since they had left Africa. I can’t help imagining it would have been an awkward encounter, or even a bloody one. Yet it was close enough for us to pick up their lice.
The New York Times, October 17, 2004
I once attended a conference about systematics — the classification of species — and felt as if I were looking at Mount Rushmore with a magnifying glass. The names alone — Tetraconata, Amoebozoa, Ecdysozoa, Oomycota, Neomeniomorpha — were overwhelming. Speaker after speaker hypothesized about how various species were related — whether springtails or bristletails were the closest relatives of winged insects, whether sponges all descended from a common ancestor, whether slime molds are really molds. I stumbled out of the lecture hall desperate for the big picture. And suddenly I saw it, on a five-foot-square poster taped to a wall.