For the holiday season, we here at LWON discussed a series of Secret Santa posts: we would assign one another posts about our own areas of specialization so, say, archeology might be assigned to an eco-writer. Fear erupted. What if I get biology? What if I get physics? Count me out! Then we realized: we could confront […]
Evolution
It’s amazing what scientists can do nowadays. They can get right down into the center of an atom. They can tell us in detail about rocks on other planets. So it’s no wonder when they report there are a certain number of very large animals in an area – and they only have to count […]
First, a disclaimer. This is the kind of discussion that happens when friends talk evolutionary biology over a bottle of wine. (Specifically, me, my husband Dave–whose knowledge of evolution comes from reading New Scientist magazine — and our friend Kevin.) Christie: Penises make no sense. They’re floppy, vulnerable appendages and males spend an inordinate amount […]
Scientists aren’t very good at telling stories. That’s a generalization, but true. I’m constantly cajoling scientists to tell me the story — hell, any story, any anecdote, any remotely narrative nugget — of their work. More scientists than you’d expect are good at simplifying a complicated technology or theory into layman’s terms. And many are […]
Quite by accident last week, I came across something, an ethnographic detail really, that captured my imagination, and that has clearly delighted and puzzled anthropologists and even contributed to a new theory of human evolution. The detail concerned the Hadza, 1000 or so modern hunter-gatherers who speak an ancient click language and who live in […]
Two weeks ago, I wrote about scientists who intentionally killed 80,000 feral goats on one of the islands in the Galápagos archipelago. The effort was in the name of biodiversity and conservation, sure, but was it right? The post spurred some fascinating questions and comments, particularly from Jason G. Goldman, who writes The Thoughtful Animal […]
This is the last installment of my six-week series about the Galápagos Islands. To recap the first five posts: The Galápagos is an archipelago of 14 volcanic islands that scientists since Darwin have gone well out of their way to study. The islands are extremely inhospitable to life, and yet, over long periods of time, life has […]
This story, I promise, will end with giant deep-sea tubeworms like the beauties above. Please bear with me while I get there via the Colorado River. I’m one of the nearly 40 million people who depend on the Colorado for water, and for most of my adult life I’ve heard about (and reported on) the bureaucratic […]
