Greetings–
An exciting week!
Stephen Jay Gould, the late Harvard paleontologist, was a master of bringing evolution to a wide audience in books like Wonderful Life and The Panda’s Thumb. The Society for the Study of Evolution now honors his legacy with the Stephen Jay Gould Prize. I’m delighted to be this year’s winner. I’ll be giving a public lecture in conjunction with the award ceremony. If you’re in Austin on June 17, please come by. Details here.
How did we evolve our big-brained anatomy from ape-like ancestors? A shift in our diet gave us the extra energy we needed. A new study suggests that we didn’t have to wait till the invention of fire for a better cuisine. Slicing and pounding our food might have given us a good start on the path to humanity. I write about the study in my column this week in the New York Times.
The journal Cell invited me to write an essay about how scientists can better communicate with the public. You can read it on the journal’s web site. (I’ve also uploaded a pdf here.)
I was a recent guest on Podcast Science to talk about A Planet of Viruses. It’s a French show, but my hosts thankfully let me talk in English. Otherwise we would have been limited to questions about what to order for lunch. You can listen to it here.
March 15: Cooper Union, New York.A conversation with biologist Sean Carroll
March 24: Strand Bookstore, New York: Should We Re-engineer Humanity? With Daniel Kevles. Details here.
New–>June 17: Austin, Texas. Public Lecture for the Stephen Jay Gould Award. Details here
June 23-25: Durham North Carolina: International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, Plenary Lecture. Here’s the meeting site.
New–>June 29: Boston: Festival of Genomics, Plenary Lecture, “Tales from the genome beat: how journalists explore (& sometimes get lost in) our DNA.” Details here.
July 31: Keynote lecture at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America in Savannah
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there’s always carlzimmer.com.
Best wishes, Carl
Originally published March 11, 2016. Copyright 2016 Carl Zimmer.