July-August 2008

The Go-To Guy for Hurricanes

August 29, 2008

My family has had a defenseless beach shack on a barrier island—Fort Myers Beach, Florida—for 53 years. Built up on pilings to allow passage to storm surge, it survived a direct hit from Donna in 1960 and took glancing slaps on both cheeks from Charley in 2004 and Wilma in 2005. So we anxiously watch every hurricane that heads into the Gulf of Mexico.  more

Science Ink

August 26, 2008

Conservatives and intelligent-design advocates are forever accusing science of being a religion. It has its dogmas, they say, that must not be questioned: the theory of evolution and the nondualistic materialism that does away with the need for a Creator (because matter is self-organizing by its own intrinsic laws, life and intelligence could have just happened). It has its prophets (Darwin) and its popes (Dennett and Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens—what’s with all the Ds and Hs? Huxley, too! DUH). And it has its heretics, whom it excommunicates with the ruthless efficiency of a mini-Inquisition; see the movie Expelled. (Or don’t.)  more

Best Friends

Dog Days, II

August 18, 2008

Both came down from the trees in times of drying climate and the spread of open grasslands, though tens of millions of years apart. Both became long-legged, running, social hunters of large ungulates. Both proved versatile and hardy enough to survive another drastic climatic shift—from grass to ice. And at some point, they looked each other in the eye with recognition and respect—and chose to team up. It was a fateful moment (or millennium) for both Homo and Canis, that changed the course and sealed the dominance of both.  more

No Dog is an Island

Short Dogs Dog Shorts

July 27, 2008

Here’s a story about the difficulty of teasing apart the structural legacy of ancestry from that of adaptation, and about a fossil canid that evolved back from a “wolf” to a “fox ecomorph,” both in size and in anatomy, once it became isolated on an island (Sardinia) where only small prey was abundantly available.   more

The Truth about Cats and Dogs

Dog Days I

July 21, 2008

As a certified cat person, I just had to sneak the felines in there, even though it is the dog lineage that is celebrated in this month's cover and featured story, How Dogs Came to Run the World by Xiaoming Wang and Richard H. Tedford. Even someone who loves both dogs and cats, as I do, will readily admit how profoundly different they are. It turns out that this difference is correctly observed and objectively profound. To be as precise as we can, it goes back more than forty million years.   more

You Can Take It With You.

July 12, 2008

Our summer issue, that is. Toss it in your carry-on or beach bag if you share my take on summer vacation: no time to stop thinking (what fun would that be?), but a time for thinking about different things. Perennial favorite things. Comfortingly timeless things—baseball, beaches, bandanna-wearing Frisbee-catching dogs—that nonetheless reveal new vistas when viewed from new perspectives. Working on this issue made me see those chestnuts of summer as if for the first time.  more

A Note to the Reader: “Heavy Links”

It’s occurred to me that it’s unfair not to forewarn you when a link leads to a long, scholarly source, packed with substantive revelations, that may seem to demand too much time and attention for a quick blog read.

So I’m trying an experiment: beginning with the upcoming post, I’m going to bold those links. Think of them as “heavy links,” the ones that are "more than you ever wanted to know about" the subject at hand—or as much as you wanted to know, if you had all the time in the world. In many cases, I haven’t had the time (or the technical prowess) to read these sources all the way through myself. But I have profited greatly by skimming or rummaging around in them—which is how a fact checker has to do it, but I heartily commend it for a blog reader as well. I like knowing where these troves of info are, like a squirrel’s buried nuts, in case someday I do have time to go back and learn more.

If you can’t tell the heavy links from the regular ones, or you think this is a dumb idea, let me know.

(Annie Gottlieb)