TGIPF: What the Baculum Said

This is the third installment of the occasional series Thank God It’s Penis Friday. The first was on banana slug sex; the second on Iceland’s Phallological Museum. Today we are going to talk about penis bones. The penis bone, or baculum, is the supportive bone in the penises of most mammals. Relax, you didn’t miss anything: humans […]

The mundaneness of science

When I was a biology researcher, the strangers I met at parties and on airplanes were always impressed when I told them how I made my living. Evidently, they envisioned my work as something out of Jurassic Park—a thrilling journey packed with breakthroughs and adventures. Few suspected the truth: doing science is mostly about performing […]

Galápagos Monday: World Within Itself

This is the third installment of a six-week series about my recent trip to the Galápagos. You can read the first post, about tortoises and donkeys, here, and the second, about eerie mounds of black coral, here. If you go to the Galápagos, and even if you go, as I did, in a herd of clumsy American tourists, […]

Galápagos Monday: Southern Inhospitality

This is the second installment of a six-week series about my recent trip to the Galápagos. You can read my first post, about tortoises and donkeys, here. At dawn on June 6, more than 30 years after Lynn was chasing tortoises at the top of Alcedo, our boat anchored near the volcano’s base in Urbina Bay. By […]

Galápagos Monday: Lynn’s Tortoises

Every Monday for the next six weeks I’ll be posting about my recent trip to the Galápagos. After a week on a big boat, hopping from one imposing volcanic island to the next, I saw most of the odd creatures that Charles Darwin famously wrote about: century-old tortoises, finches with beaks of all sizes, swimming […]

Evolve or Die

Several years ago, on a soggy but majestic mountain afternoon, I hiked into the Yosemite backcountry to meet UC-Berkeley mammalogist Jim Patton. Patton and his colleagues at the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology were retracing the steps of renowned naturalist Joseph Grinnell, who surveyed California’s wildlife early in the last century — and obsessively documented his work in […]

Horgan, Hayden, and the Last Word on Warfare

In 2008, I published a book about the evolutionary origins and cultural development of warfare throughout human history. John Horgan, about as distinguished a science writer as one is likely to find, graciously invited me to share my thoughts on war’s deep past and possible futures on a web video show he hosted. It was […]

The Seven Deadly Sins: Envy

You know the feeling: somebody has something and you want it for yourself. That thing may be talent, or success, or good looks, or something simple . . . like a bag of chips. For me, the emotion is all too familiar. See that cute girl on the subway? The one with curly blonde hair, […]