Greetings from Austin!
I'm broiling under the Texan sun on a visit to the Society for the Study of Evolution's annual meeting. Last night I gave the Stephen Jay Gould Prize lecture, about our changing picture of human evolution. I talked about the articles I've written about in recent newsletters, on exciting new fossils and insights from DNA. In the 1970s, Gould pushed his readers to appreciate human evolution as a bush, rather than a simplistic march of progress. With lots of new fossils found since then, the human evolutionary trees is even more ramified. And all the interbreeding revealed in ancient DNA over the past 100,000 years between humans, Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other mysterious hominins has complicated our family tree even more.
It was a little spooky to talk with people after the lecture and realize that a lot of them may have been teenagers or even younger when Gould died in 2002. So if there are any whippersnappers among my Friday's Elk readers who don't really know who this Gould guy was, please go read his stuff. I'd suggest starting with a book of essays like Ever Since Darwin.
The lecture was recorded and will go on YouTube before too long. I'll link to it when it's up.
This week I wrote about dirt. Scientists and gardeners have long known that some kinds of soil can protect plants from diseases. Its defensive powers come from the microbes that live within it. In my latest column for the New York Times, I write about scientists who are beginning to understand how the soil acts like an immune system, and their attempts to harness this power to protect crops. (Photo: National Conservation Service)
June 23-25: Durham, North Carolina: International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, Plenary Lecture. Here's the meeting site.
June 29: Boston: Festival of Genomics, Plenary Lecture, "Tales from the genome beat: how journalists explore (& sometimes get lost in) our DNA." Details here.
July 31: Plenary lecture at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America in Savannah. The talk is entitled, "Plants Are Weird: Epigenetics, Journalism, and the Alien Beauty of Botany"
September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details to come
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.
Best wishes, Carl
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