I did not realize ‘mendacity’ was a 50-cent word. That’s what academic life has done to me.

A new film about evolution looks like fun, if the NYT report is anything to go by. Randy Olson -- that’s him quoted above -- is a biologist turned film maker, whose Flock of Dodos lets scientists ta...

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A very interesting paper in PLOS Biology makes a convincing case that a mutation in a gene called APOC3 is linked to long life in people. Nir Barzilai, of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, and his team looked for this particular genetic needle in a haystack of 214 centenarians. This was sma...

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I’d like to recommend Prof. Rodney Stark's latest podcast. Alas, I cannot.

Not because of the ideas. The lecture continues his series on religion (blogged earlier) by looking at the rise of different religious groups in Rome, effectively making the case that the dead hand of state-subsidized re...

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In the TLS, a review of a new translation of Linneaus' Philosophica Botanica, another book that I am sure to know more about through reviews than reading. No matter, the point is that this review, by Jim Endersby, a Cambridge historian of science, is as good an introduction to the delights and...

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Tangled Bank 50 turned up some nice reads, not least the self-selected “carnival of the vanities” post by James Hrynyshyn, this edition’s editor.

In Getting our act together ... not he wittily conjoins two separate ideas.

Exhibit A is the never-ending argument among scientists over the rol...

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