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Must Do’s: What we like this week

Sat, 30 Mar 2013 14:00:00 +0000

BOOKS

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For anyone interested in epic adventure tales, Laura Miller recommends “Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure That Took the Victorian World by Storm,” a study of Paul du Chaillu, an explorer whose remarkable journey is part Charles Darwin, part Indiana Jones:

"This elusive, gallant and endearing man was born on a date and in a place unknown, to a mother who has never been identified. His story, as told by Reel, is both a tale of plucky self-invention and an ironic reflection on the sometimes ugly inner workings of the scientific world."

“Between Man and Beast”: A great explorer with a secret

Sun, 24 Mar 2013 22:00:00 +0000

A renowned Victorian explorer stands before his colleagues, accused of fabricating accounts of the strange beasts he encountered in a remote jungle. The explorer responds by challenging the most energetic of these detractors to join him in an expedition back to the site of his celebrated discoveries. That's the opener of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Lost World," a ripping adventure yarn published in the early 20th century, with a main character, Professor Challenger, thought by many to be based on the real-life physiologist William Rutherford.

But as Monte Reel persuasively argues in his equally ripping (and far more intellectually satisfying) "Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer, the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventure That Took the Victorian World by Storm," another likely model for Challenger is Paul Du Chaillu, the first modern naturalist to observe gorillas in their native habitat. This elusive, gallant and endearing man was born on a date and in a place unknown, to a mother who has never been identified. His story, as told by Reel, is both a tale of plucky self-invention and an ironic reflection on the sometimes ugly inner workings of the scientific world.

Happy birthday, Charles Darwin

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 18:56:00 +0000

Did you know that today is Charles Darwin Day? In honor of the evolutionary biologist's birthday, people around the world hold lectures, share research and generally make merry about one of history's greatest thinkers.

But not everyone feels like celebrating on Feb. 12. Who? Glad you asked!

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Darwin outperforms on ballot

Thu, 08 Nov 2012 21:24:00 +0000

Rep. Paul C. Broun, R-Ga., will keep his House seat for another term, but thousands in his district registered their dissent at the polls. The five-term incumbent, who holds an M.D. degree but has called evolution and the Big Bang Theory "lies straight from the pit of hell," ran unopposed.

In protest, 4,000 voters in Athens-Clarke County wrote in the name of English naturalist Charles Darwin, making the pro-science opposition account for nearly one-fifth of all ballots registered in the county. Broun, who also believes that the earth is 9,000 years old, currently serves on the House Science Committee (alongside Rep. Todd Akin).

With mounting opposition brewing in his district, many anticipate someone will step up to challenge Broun in 2014. But -- as witty as the Darwin protest vote was -- perhaps they can choose someone living next time?

“Darwin’s Devices”: Here come the robot fish

Mon, 09 Apr 2012 00:00:00 +0000

Fish, without a doubt, gotta swim, but how do they do it? And how, over millenniums of evolution, did they get to be so good at it? These two questions have driven the career of John Long, a professor of biology and cognitive science at Vassar College. Long is so into fish that his primal scene of intellectual seduction involved a Ph.D. trying to get him to join her team by taking him out for coffee and asking, "Have you seen the vertebral column of a marlin?" Thus was Long launched into a course of study that would ultimately lead him to the improbable task of making robot fish.

As geeky as this may sound, it turns out that the problems inherent in making robot fish yield some of humanity's deepest questions: How did we get here? What (and where) is thought? How much can we trust the symbols (words, images, digital signals) that dominate our lives? Long's new book, "Darwin's Devices: What Evolving Robots Can Teach Us About the History of Life and the Future of Technology," is part Descartes, part MacGyver and part Douglas Adams, turning from rumination on the possibility of intelligence residing in a brainless body to tips on making artificial fish vertebrae out of coffee stirrers to the dopey yet endearing jokes that seem to flourish in laboratories all over the world.

Huffington Post publishes anti-Darwin smears from creationist think tank

Wed, 07 Jul 2010 15:44:00 +0000

At the Huffington Post, popular liberal news aggregator, nipple slideshow source, and intern slave market, you can get away with writing pretty much any old nonsense you like. Especially if you're famous, or a friend of Arianna Huffington. One thing you apparently can't do, though, is criticize the Huffington Post itself for publishing nonsense.

I've long been a critic of HuffPo's "Living" section, where fake doctors peddle snake oil cures and vaccine conspiracy theorists spread their poisonous misinformation. Those who read the Huffington Post solely for its (usually good) political content often don't even realize that a couple verticals away is a den of quackery and pseudoscience.

The HuffPo has, they claim, a specific editorial policy against promoting "conspiracy theories." It is selectively enforced.

But publishing the new agey holistic naturopath crystal-healing Beverly Hills quack-to-the-stars bullshit of Arianna's good friend's nutritionist is one (stupid, potentially dangerous) thing. Giving a platform to the anti-science creationist dingbats at The Discovery Institute is a step in a darker direction.

Creationism vs. atheism: It’s on!

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 01:24:00 +0000

America's universities are supposed to be marketplaces of ideas, but last week they looked more like theaters of the absurd, as representatives of an evangelical group descended on an undetermined number of campuses to hand out free copies of Charles Darwin's "The Origin of Species." The catch: They used an edition of Darwin's seminal 1859 text that included an introduction by Ray Comfort, a minister who has made a specialty of arguing for creationism.

Was this stunt shrewd or moronic? From the first it's been hard to tell. The plan, innocuously named "Origin Into Schools," was announced this September in a video featuring Kirk Cameron, a former television child star who co-founded a ministry called Living Waters with Comfort. There's something almost pitiable about the way Cameron crows over the scheme; he truly seems to find it ingenious. He points out that the University of California at Berkeley cannot prevent the action because "their own Web site" dictates that "anyone is free to distribute noncommercial materials in any outdoor area of the campus." "Besides," he gleefully adds, "what are they really going to do? Ban 'The Origin of Species'? That would be big news! Especially when their own bookstore sells it for $29.99!"

Inside the Creation Museum

Thu, 31 May 2007 11:41:00 +0000

The Creation Museum swung open its stegosaurus-guarded gates to the public Monday, and I have to say it's out of this world. For those of us raised in natural history Meccas like the American Museum in New York, the Smithsonian in Washington, or the Field in Chicago, the beautifully designed museum induces an eerie vertigo. All the familiar characters are here: T. rex, giant skeletons of triceratops and apatosaurus, a pterosaur spreading its wings above the crowd, live exhibits of birds, amphibians and reptiles, and the dripping, hooting and chirping soundtrack of the primeval forest. There are also a couple of unfamiliar faces, for a natural history museum, in the tan and finely muscled bodies of Adam and Eve.

At the ribbon cutting, Ken Ham, the rugged-faced CEO and president of Answers in Genesis, the nonprofit ministry that built the museum, tells an enthusiastic crowd that the Creation Museum will undo the damage done 82 years ago when Clarence Darrow put William Jennings Bryan on the stand in the famous Scopes trial in Dayton, Tenn. "It was the first time the Bible was ridiculed by the media in America, and that was a downward turning point for Christendom," Ham says. "We are going to undo all of that here at the Creation Museum. We are going to answer the questions Bryan wasn't prepared to, and show that belief in every word of the Bible can be defended by modern science."

Fear factors

Mon, 12 Feb 2007 12:10:00 +0000

Allen Shawn never drives down unfamiliar roads. If he did, he'd likely have to turn back and return home, for the talismans he carries with him on trips -- Xanax, ginger ale, a cellphone and a paper bag -- are no match for his many phobias. Shawn is scared of bridges, subways, elevators, crowds, planes and large museums. He can't even walk across an open parking lot without becoming distressed. His new book, "Wish I Could Be There: Notes From a Phobic Life," elegantly combines memoir and research to try to understand the reasons for the fears that have ruled his life since he was a young man.

Shawn is a composer of classical music, but may be better known as the son of famous New Yorker editor William Shawn and the younger brother of actor and playwright Wallace Shawn (of "My Dinner With Andre" and "The Princess Bride," among many other projects). The matter of his family name is not merely one of pedigree. His upbringing, as "Wish I Could Be There" shows, encouraged whatever genetic predisposition to anxiety he had. His was a childhood marked by an excess of the usual secrets and lies. There was the matter of the Shawns' "ambivalence" toward their Jewishness -- his mother preferred to identify with her Swedish side rather than her Russian side, and William and one of his brothers changed their name from "Chon" to the decidedly more Anglo "Shawn." There was his mentally ill twin sister, Mary, who, at the age of 8, was sent to a home and seen only once a year.

Who are you?

Mon, 26 Jun 2006 13:01:00 +0000

Every family has its genealogical myths, legends and secrets. There's the Native American ancestor some clans like to talk about and the Jewish or black (or in the case of African-American families, white) great-great-grandparent that no one mentions or even knows for sure existed. Whole nations tell themselves similar stories about the past. Icelanders believe their country was settled by Norsemen and the British or Irish women they brought (often unwillingly) with them. British schoolchildren are taught that when the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain in the fifth century, they pushed Britain's Celtic inhabitants out to the hinterlands of Scotland and Wales and made England an essentially Anglo-Saxon country.

Until recently, it's been impossible to prove or disprove any of these stories. DNA analysis has changed all that, and as New York Times science reporter Nicholas Wade explains in his new book, "Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors," in the process it has toppled more than one cherished belief. It turns out, for example, that most Icelanders are probably descended from Norsewomen and that a large proportion of the male population of Britain carries the Y chromosome of the Celtic speakers who were supposedly chased off the land by the Anglo-Saxons. Similar research has established that an astonishing 8 percent of the men living in the vast territory formerly controlled by the Mongol Empire are most likely direct descendants of Genghis Khan.

Going beyond God

Tue, 30 May 2006 12:00:00 +0000

Karen Armstrong is a one-woman publishing industry, the author of nearly 20 books on religion. When her breakthrough book "A History of God" appeared in 1993, this British writer quickly became known as one of the world's leading historians of spiritual matters. Her work displays a wide-ranging knowledge of religious traditions -- from the monotheistic religions to Buddhism. What's most remarkable is how she carved out this career for herself after rejecting a life in the church.

At 17, Armstrong became a Catholic nun. She left the convent after seven years of torment. "I had failed to make a gift of myself to God," she wrote in her recent memoir, "The Spiral Staircase." While she despaired over never managing to feel the presence of God, Armstrong also bristled at the restrictive life imposed by the convent, which she described in her first book, "Through the Narrow Gate." When she left in 1969, she had never heard of the Beatles or the Vietnam War, and she'd lost her faith in God.

Hope for the homely

Mon, 08 May 2006 18:45:00 +0000

In some respects, nice guys really do finish first, according to Sharon Begley's story in Friday's Wall Street Journal. Or at least nice birds do.

The findings, based on research with male flycatchers, essentially blow Charles Darwin's theory of sexual selection out of the water. The so-called sexy-son hypothesis holds that a female who mates with an attractive male will have cute offspring. They, of course, will be just as charming, able to get the girl and give their mother a gaggle of gorgeous grandkids. As time went on, the most desirable genes would survive since females would covet them.

In the case of the flycatcher, however, the hot male birds were so busy getting their groove on, they ignored their little ones. The busted birds, on the other hand, were better fathers, creating sons who later had no problem getting the ladies to lay a few eggs.

The idea that females choose mates by getting an eyeful of how they look in their genes is being increasingly challenged. "Instead of choosing mates who will increase the genetic quality of their offspring, females make choices that will increase their number of offspring," Stanford biologist Joan Roughgarden told Begley.

Priests in lab coats

Sat, 06 Aug 2005 19:02:00 +0000

Philosopher Michael Ruse is pretty famous, for someone in his esoteric academic discipline. Ruse is a congenial, blustery, bearded fellow, with more than a hint about him of the English schoolboy he was half a century ago. He seems like he'd be great company over a couple of game hens and a decent bottle of claret, and it's not surprising to learn that he befriends people with opposing views and is widely loved in his field. But just Google him -- or better yet, run an Amazon search -- and you'll quickly learn that the admiration is not universal. (Amazon, in fact, is one place where the dispute between creationists and supporters of evolution reaches both its loftiest intellectual plateau and the depths of puerile name-calling.)

You see, Ruse is a philosopher of science and, to use his phrase, an "ardent evolutionist." He stops a crucial degree or two short of declaring himself an atheist, but he firmly believes in Darwin's theory that evolution (now established as fact) by natural selection (still under discussion, although widely accepted) is the driving force behind the diversity of life on this planet. He thinks that creationists, both of the old-fashioned "young earth" variety and the newfangled intelligent-design model -- which President Bush said earlier this week should be taught in schools -- are spewing dangerous claptrap and are in league, consciously or not, with a sinister right-wing political agenda.

The new Monkey Trial

Tue, 11 Jan 2005 00:26:00 +0000

It was an ordinary springtime school board meeting in the bedroom community of Dover, Pa. The high school needed new biology textbooks, and the science department had recommended Kenneth Miller and Joseph Levine's "Biology." "It was a fantastic text," said Carol "Casey" Brown, 57, a self-described Goldwater Republican and the board's senior member. "It just followed our curriculum so beautifully."

But Bill Buckingham, a new board member who'd recently become chair of the curriculum committee, had an objection. "Biology," he said, was "laced with Darwinism." He wanted a book that balanced theories of evolution with Christian creationism, and he was willing to turn his town into a cultural battlefield to get it.

"This country wasn't founded on Muslim beliefs or evolution," Buckingham, a stocky, gray-haired man who wears a red, white and blue crucifix pin on his lapel, said at the meeting. "This country was founded on Christianity, and our students should be taught as such."

Casey Brown and her husband, fellow board member Jeff Brown, were stunned. "I was picturing the headlines," Jeff said months later.

"And we got them," Casey added.

Invasion of the high-tech body snatchers

Tue, 30 Sep 2003 19:30:00 +0000

Right here, right now, it is virtually impossible to find a human being in the developed world who is not technologically enhanced or modified. Ever been vaccinated? Have a tooth crowned? Wear contact lenses? One does not need a pacemaker to qualify as a bioengineered Homo sapiens.

These examples have profound implications. There is no theoretical difference between a dental implant and a mental implant except that we know how a tooth works and can manufacture a functional replacement. Currently, the same cannot be said for the neural network of the brain. But from a bioengineering standpoint, that is only a matter of time.

Once the structure and function of an organ are elucidated, bioengineers can develop replacement parts. Artificial heart-valve implantation is practically routine. Next-generation pacemakers will come with built-in diagnostics and telemetry to provide your hospital's computer with a constant stream of data on the condition of both your heart and the pacemaker itself. Some designs even include global positioning systems for emergencies. Several tissue-engineering companies produce commercial synthetic-skin products for grafting onto burns. Some use a mixture of biological and synthetic polymers, while others offer the genuine article, natural tissue grown from cells. As these technologies emerge, humans will metamorphose: The first stage of our metamorphosis will, in fact, be the physical fusion of human beings with both the biological and nonbiological systems we are engineering.

A textbook case of bad science

Wed, 20 Aug 2003 19:30:00 +0000

Charles Darwin, Satan, Joseph Stalin, aliens, Raelians and fire-breathing dragons hibernating at the bottom of the sea all put in cameos last month at a Texas board of education public hearing on textbooks.

One member of the board invoked Darwin's name with reverence, even as she defended the principle of giving more attention to alleged weaknesses in the theory of evolution in biology textbooks.

"Darwin himself would not have supported censorship of scientific weaknesses," said Republican board member Terri Leo.

But a former United Methodist minister chided members of the board that such "ignorance and misinformation are the works of Satan." In other words, in this minister's view, God is firmly on the side of teaching scientific fact to students.

The president of Texas Citizens for Science appealed to no less an authority than the eyes of Texas as he cautioned the board: "If you plan to modify biology textbooks by requiring the authors and publishers to remove or change scientifically accurate material about evolution, please remember that the eyes of Texas are upon you, and you cannot get away with it."

The dancing plant

Tue, 11 Mar 2003 20:30:00 +0000

Dr. Pradit Kampermpool marches through his plant nursery, past row upon row of exotic orchids, before stopping, his chest proudly puffed out, in front of an unremarkable, weedy-looking plant. This plant, he says gravely, cost him a fortune. He developed complicated breeding programs and followed them religiously for almost 10 years to produce it, he says. This plant, he says, is a dancing plant.

"It's a dancing plant!"

He pauses for effect. Meanwhile, the sun comes up over the green fields. The pointed little leaves of Kampermpool's dancing plant nod and bounce in the breeze. Somewhere, a bird warbles. Kampermpool is still waiting.

"This plant," he says again slowly for emphasis, "is a dancing plant."

Kampermpool stands maybe 5 and a half feet tall. He strides through the nursery, disappearing occasionally behind a screen of orchid stems to reappear seconds later on the other side, his green-and-white polka-dot shirt flashing between gaps in the swaying thicket.

Evolution, Enron-style

Wed, 13 Feb 2002 20:30:00 +0000

There is a '90s way of doing business that new economy companies "get," and old economy companies create committees to study. It has much to do with flat hierarchies, innovation, casual clothes and foosball tables. It's the theme that ran through every issue of the Industry Standard, every Silicon Valley mission statement and every recent book by "pop" strategy gurus like metaphor-spinner Geoffrey A. Moore or Wired editor Kevin Kelly. And it is exactly this cluster of ideas that is at the heart of "Survival Is Not Enough: Zooming, Evolution, and the Future of Your Company," a new book by Seth Godin, Fast Company editor and self-proclaimed "agent of change."

The twist of Godin's approach is his choice of master narrative: an evolutionary approach to business. On one level, this is just another vapid gimmick connecting a sexy metaphor to the same old recycled management fads: Unleash your company's "mDNA" to make it "zoom"! A clearance-counter library of variations exists on this theme, from "business judo" to "chessmaster strategy." But on another level, Godin's topic gestures at a genuinely interesting idea.

Survival of the losers

Wed, 06 Jun 2001 19:09:00 +0000

The revolution is over. Or so it might appear to anyone reviewing the wreckage wreaked in the past month in the digital music industry. As chronicled in Salon, the purchases of MP3.com by Vivendi Universal and Myplay.com by Bertelsmann were only the latest in a series of sad stories about Scour, Launch Media, Liquid Audio, Emusic, CDnow, Listen.com, Aimster, Gnutella and even Napster. The revolution has choked on litigation, drifted toward bankruptcy and sold out to the establishment at rock-bottom prices.

It wasn't so long ago that things looked very different. Stewart Alsop, general partner at venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates and Silicon Valley pundit, went so far as to say, "The music business as we know it is hosed." Fortune and BusinessWeek put Napster's teenage founder on their covers. The record industry was accused, again and again, of failing to "get it." Of the new technology's impact, said Hal Varian, professor at Berkeley's Haas School of Business, "the business model for music distribution is unlikely to survive."

“The Man Who Found the Missing Link” by Pat Shipman

Thu, 18 Jan 2001 20:00:00 +0000

Java man. The missing link. Peking man. Homo erectus. If these names from the history of humanity are familiar to readers today, it is partly due to the superhuman persistence of a 19th century Dutch physician named Eugene Dubois. He single-handedly tied human beings with evolution and abstract theories with fossil-hard facts. He turned chance fossil finding into a systematic science and helped bring the science of paleontology to public attention. That his own name is now unknown is both ironic and unfortunate. Pat Shipman's dynamic new biography should help restore Dubois' name to a body of work that a century of time has erased.

Dubois was born in 1858, in between the discovery of the first Neanderthal skeleton and the publication of Charles Darwin's"The Origin of Species." Many of Europe's leading scientists were eager to connect the Neanderthal skeleton with Darwin's theories in order to say that mankind had evolved from lower, primate-like forms. Evolution is revolution, writes Shipman, and the idea that earlier models of human beings once roamed the Earth was radical stuff -- scientifically, politically and socially.