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They Froze for Science — But Got the Eggs
Below find #8 in my Best of Neuron Culture Moving Party — a run of 10 of my favorite posts from the blog’s stay at WIRED, posted on the eve of the blog’s move to this site. (Details on my move are at...
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How Eugenics Gets Legit
In the wake of the flap over Geoffrey Miller’s fat-shaming, a friend pointed me to a remarkable collection at the Cold Spring Harbor website, the Eugenics Archive. In one section on how eugenics ideas...
View ArticleRosie’s Revenge: Rosalind Franklin Outraps Watson & Crick
“Well I”m back from the dead And I read what you said And I’m here to set the record straight.” I love this. Big hat-tip to @nncomfort
View ArticleMy TL,DR version of “Die, Selfish Gene, Die”
Many have liked “Die, Selfish Gene, Die,” my Aeon piece challenging Richard Dawkins “Selfish Gene” meme. Quite a few readers have objected to and disagreed with the story, sometimes sharply. Some...
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Love Poems About Elephant Skin, Rhino Skin, Hippo Skin, and Snake Skin – For...
I’ve been reading some of Harry Harlow’s papers, and am in wonder at his seminal “The Nature of Love,” his 1958 Presidential Lecture to the American Psychological Association, to what had to be a...
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Leonardo da Vinci and the Power of Ignorance
In his fine short Leonardo da Vinci: A Life, for Penguin’s Penguin Lives series, Sherwin Nuland wonders if there are times when good scientists or entire disciplines, psychology among them, sound...
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How the Tobacco Industry Shaped the Science of Stress
The modern idea of stress began on a rooftop in Canada, with a handful of rats freezing in the winter wind. This was 1936 and by that point the owner of the rats, an endocrinologist named Hans Selye,...
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Two Sharp Takes on Mukherjee’s The Gene
Nathaniel Comfort, “Genes Are Overrated”: Mukherjee gives us a Whig history of the gene, told with verve and color, if not scrupulous accuracy. The gene, he tells us, was first described by the...
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Andre Fenton, comeback memory player of the year
06/13/2016 WOODS HOLE, MA Dr. Andre Fenton (cq) poses for a photo at the Marine Biological Laboratories in Woods Hole. (Aram Boghosian for The Boston Globe) Carl Zimmer on memory researcher Andre...
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Should fitness share the stage with beauty? My review of Prum’s “Evolution of...
Charles Darwin, 1883, by John Collier. National Portrait Gallery, London. The Times Sunday Book Review, six days ahead of the Sunday paper, published today my review of Richard Prum’s “The Evolution of...
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