Darwin
Time Travel in a Test Tube
In books and movies, time travel is typically fraught with negative consequences. Any attempt to change the past — say, stopping the JFK assassination, or taking your mom to the Enchantment Under the Sea dance — is bound to produce ripples of change that alter the future. But what if you could safely contain a […]
Linkage 3/25: Giant Bunnies, Religious Obesity, and Kin Selection Kerfuffle
Just in time for Easter, a team of scientists digging on a Spanish island have discovered the fossils of a prehistoric rabbit of unusual size: 26 pounds, more than six times the size of today’s bunnies. Called Nuralagus rex – the “king of the hares” – the big guy definitely did not hop when it […]
The Tools We Share With Sharks
Billions of years of evolution has produced an incredible diversity of life – “endless forms most beautiful and wonderful,” as Darwin famously put it. But a fascinating thing about evolution is it has produced such a wide variety of species with a relatively small amount of tools. Many of the roughly 23,000 human genes can […]
Linkage 10/29: Coffee Grounds & The New Beagle
I’ve always been fascinated with the rock solid bags of coffee bought at the store, which have all the density of a brick until opened, when they crumble into scoopable grounds. Turns out that’s a physical concept at work, known as “jamming transition,” when separate, particulate materials are pushed so close together they act like […]
The Snowball of Speciation
Among evolution’s best tricks is the act of turning one species into two. Speciation, the foundation of a new species from an accumulation of small changes in an old one, has given birth to the incredible diversity of life on our planet. But in order for a new species to be founded, a sort of […]
Life Lessons from Life’s Randomness
It’s traditional at the University of Chicago to invite a faculty member to deliver the convocation speech, rather than invite an outside speaker as many schools do. This year’s chosen faculty for Spring Convocation (the first campus-wide ceremony since 1929) was a well-known name from the rolls of the Biological Sciences Division: Paul Sereno, our […]
Relive Darwin/Chicago in Video Form
Six months ago, some of the world’s brightest evolutionary biologists and scholars gathered on the University of Chicago campus for a three-day birthday party celebrating Charlie Darwin’s 200th. At the time, the blog featured live-ish coverage of the event wherein I tried my best to capture the fascinating lectures and discussion on display at Rockefeller […]
Linkage 5/7: Climate Change McCarthyism & Neanderthal Sex
Climate Scientists to Politicians: Enough Already A pretty remarkable letter was published in the journal Science this week, signed by 250 members (including4 University of Chicago scientists) of the National Academy of Sciences and calling for “an end to McCarthy-like threats” surrounding climate change. The letter makes a stand for reason on both climate change […]
Setting the Fossil Record Straight
It was the fossil infamously hyped as the scientific discovery “THAT WILL CHANGE EVERYTHING.” But one year after its controversial press conference debut, Darwinius masillae has come under increased scrutiny from a scientific community already skeptical about the 55-million-year-old primate fossil’s Hollywood roll-out. When scientists from Norway, Germany and Michigan published the original Darwinius paper […]
