In the Darwin bicentennial, new insights into fossils, genes, birdsong, and cancer.
The latest issue of Nature to land in my mailbox-the May 28th one-was not a tribute to Darwin in honor of his 200th birthday and the 150th of The Origin of Species; Nature has been there, done that. But it might as well have been another celebration for him, Read more
It’s always wrong to panic, but it’s never wrong to be prepared.
But the writer in me prefers another metaphor, used by the virologist Richard Krause as the title of a book: The Restless Tide. As the subtitle explains, Read more
Last week the Kepler Mission blasted off into space—or as NASA nicely put it, “vaulted into the heavens on a column of thunder”—and within a few days passed the orbit of the moon. On March 12 its photometer was powered on, and as soon as it can be calibrated it will begin fulfilling the mission’s purpose: the search for other worlds. Read more
Can we say anything about human beings to come? In a word, yes.
Recently after lecturing about human evolution, I had a student come up to me and ask—she apologized first, as some do, despite my mantra that there are no bad questions—if I had any thoughts about future evolution. I did, although I hesitated to offer them; the political correctness monitors are everywhere in universities today. But, casting caution to the winds,
Read more