Let's think of places on Earth where scientists have done great big natural "experiments" on evolution.Looking east from near the top of Mount Lemmon, January 2021 Here are some that ought to come to mind (in no particular order other than the first): 1. The Galapagos Islands, with their famous finches and their less-famous tomatoes and all their otherworldly animals, probably belong at the top of the list.

What is a library? If you ask a biologist (especially a molecular biologist) this question, they are likely to ask for clarification. In their work, they are likely to make regular use of two very different kinds of libraries. The first is the kind that we've had for millenia: a collection of books, journals, and media that is ordered and curated by people. These are the OG libraries, with 'book' at the very root of the word.

One of the most effective metaphors for evolutionary change is the image of an exploration of a space, perhaps a map that shows "fitness peaks" or, better, a library of possibilities. The philosopher Daniel Dennett, writing in Darwin's Dangerous Idea , suggested The Library of Mendel as a way of thinking about the total set of possible gene sequences.

March of 2020 seems a very long time ago. The coronavirus pandemic was roaring to life in the US, and it had arrived in Cambridge, Massachusetts where I lived and worked. I was leading an international team of editors, half of whom worked in the Cell Press office in Cambridge near the MIT campus. That month, the goal was to flatten the curve, so that our great hospitals and their heroic staffs would not be overwhelmed by COVID patients.

I do apologize for this dull cliche, but I know I'm right about this: change is hard. I don't mean that it's hard to adapt after someone or something forces a change on you. That's true too, but it's not my topic here. I'm talking about this: you want to change, or you need to change, or both. You know what the change has to be. Maybe you know what the first step has to be. It's change, and it's hard.

The messy smelly death of social media is causing a few meaningful losses — most notably damage to or destruction of some online communities that really were valuable. There are some things to lament. Black Twitter, for example, was and is a vibrant and important community.

One motivation for relaunching Quintessence of Dust was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is this month's entry in my new series, What I'm reading , posted at the start of every month.

One motivation for relaunching Quintessence of Dust was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is this month's entry in my new series, What I'm reading , posted at the start of every month. Fiction Hester by Laurie Lico Albanese Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman Non-fiction Complicit by Max BazermanContinue reading...

I've been writing and thinking about design in biology since I started Quintessence of Dust . I want to write and think about it a lot more, so in my last post I introduced my view of the concept and pointed ahead to this post, which consists of edited excerpts from some conversations at a discussion forum at the Peaceful Science site. You will find links to those conversations in the previous post.

One of the most interesting books I've read in the last few years was The Gene's-Eye View of Evolution by J. Arvid Ågren. The author explains the gene's-eye view both scientifically and historically, and I hope to write about the book sometime soon. But for now there's one point he makes that I found fascinating.