My hotel here in Wisconsin has a great high-speed connection and I have some downtime, and so I’ll post on a really interesting paper that just came out that may tell us a lot about how we got so complex.
I’ll be off blogging duty for a couple days while I head out to Wisconsin to give a couple talks at UW. I’ll be talking about what chimp DNA can tell us about ourselves. I wrote about the topic last year for Natural History, but I’ll be focusing on some newer work that has come out since then. I hope any Wisconsinites (sp?) reading this can come.
Last week a region of the brain called the insula was in the news. As I described in my post, scientists found that physical pain and social rejection both activate the insula in much the same way. The insula returns now for a disgusting encore that gives a glimpse at how we get inside other people’s heads.
Books have been bubbling up from the comments cauldron. Jim Harrison has asked what I think of Simon Conway Morris’s Life’s Solution. Web Webstersays Cosmos was his first favorite science book and asks for suggestions. Humboldt and Feyerband make an appearance too. It’s ironic that two forms of reading that are competing furiously these days for my free time–books and blogs–meet at this crossroads.
Evolution is nature’s great R&D division. Through mutation, natural selection, and other processes, life can find new solutions for the challenge of staying alive. It’s possible to see a simplified version of this problem solving at work in the lab. The genetic molecule RNA, for example, can evolve into shapes that allow it to do things no one ever expected RNA to do, like join together amino acids. Over millions of years, evolution can solve far bigger problems. How can a mammal became an efficient swimmer? How can a bug fly?