The Irish love their turf — poet Seamus Heaney’s “kind, black butter.” Sliced and dried, it makes a lovely, aromatic fuel. The turf bogs are also wonderful repositories of Irish history.
Evolution
The skeleton of a Megaloceros giganteus • Photo by Momotarou2012 (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Photo by AMIT RANJAN on Unsplash
Did language drive society or vice versa?
“A challenge for evolutionary biology, therefore, is to provide a detailed mathematical account of how natural selection can enable the emergence of human language from animal communication.”
More closely related to a chimpanzee than a shark • Photo by Jen Milius on Unsplash
Trip to the genome zoo
Come with me to a zoo. Not your usual zoo of animals in cages and corrals. This zoo is displayed on a fold-out chart in the 1999 annual genome issue of the journal Science.
Portrait of Charles Darwin by John Collier (1883)
Darwin’s dangerous de-evolution
“Our school systems teach the children that they are nothing but glorified apes who have evolutionized out of some primordial soup of mud,” said House Republican Majority Whip Tom DeLay, by way of explaining the school massacre in Columbine, Colorado.
Photo by Shardar Tarikul Islam on Unsplash
Prying open Darwin’s ‘Black Box’
Some weeks ago I described certain South America ants that tend fungal gardens in underground chambers. They leave the nest to cut bits of leaves from nearby vegetation.
Leafcutter ants • Photo by Pjt56 (CC BY-SA 4.0)
No cartoon world for leafcutter ants
roots. Matchboxes for beds. Bottlecaps for tables. Thimbles for bath tubs. Postage stamps for carpets.
Photo by Magda Ehlers from Pexels
The moment when life ceased to be microscopic
Early in Jules Vernes’ “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” Captain Nemo welcomes Pierre Aronnax, professor of natural history at the Paris Museum, aboard his submarine.
Photo by Ekaterina Shakharova on Unsplash
Whatever are grandmothers for?
Let me ‘fess up: I’m happily married to a grandmother.
A well-preserved fossil Scipionyx discovered in southern Italy • © Giovanni Dall'Orto
Out of the darkness
“You darkness, that I come from, I love you more than all the fires that fence in the world,” wrote the poet Ranier Maria Rilke.
“But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?” • Image by New York Zoological Society (Public Domain)
The hand on the controls is survival
OK, OK already. A thousand monkeys banging on a thousand typewriters for a thousand years could not produce the works of Shakespeare.