Wandering Wim's Blog

Around 1620 the Flemish chemist Jan Baptist van Helmont, often considered the father of pneumatic chemistry (the chemistry of gases), wrote the following:

“If you press a piece of underwear soiled with sweat together with some wheat in an open mouth jar, after about 21 days the odor changes and the ferment coming out of the underwear and penetrating through the husks of the wheat, changes the wheat into mice.”

This reflected the commonly held belief at that time, even among many scientists, of spontaneous generation. Life was assumed to arise spontaneously and continuously: mice from wheat, maggots from meat, frogs from mud, and so on.

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Earlier this year, the inaugural workshop of the EES Project was held at the Konrad Lorenz Institute (KLI) in Austria. The KLI is a private and independent research institute with a focus on the development and evolution of biological and cultural complexity. Housed in a beautiful baroque building in the medieval town of Klosterneuburg, it offers a place to think outside the box, escape the usual academic constraints, and work on unconventional ideas.

Read the full story on the EES blog…

Our ability to learn, use, and process language is something that sets us apart from other animals. Language is used for effective communication, but also allows us to express our creativity through literature, poetry, and song. However, our use of language follows strict mathematical principles as well. One of the best known of these is Zipf’s law.

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“Most scientific explanations are causal. This is also the case in evolutionary biology, where the primary goals are to explain the diversity of life and the adaptive fit between organisms and their surroundings. Yet, the nature of causation in evolutionary biology is contentious.” So starts the description of a workshop on Cause and Process in Evolution, organized by Kevin Laland and Tobias Uller. It brought together an eclectic mix of evolutionary biologists, developmental biologists, and philosophers of biology, with the aim of addressing this contention. I sat in on this workshop, like a fly on the wall, in the hope of learning a bit about the latest research and debates in evolutionary biology.

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In this day and age of the internet, where anyone can post anything, it is often difficult to know what is true and what is not. One person claims one thing, while another states the exact opposite. Who to believe among all this (sometimes deliberate) confusion? The upside, also thanks to the internet, is that you don’t need to be a professional scientist to find out at least some of the truth for yourself. With the increasing availability of public online databases and easy-to-use software, “citizen science” can go a long way at countering unsubstantiated claims.

Read the full story on Plus magazine…