An Sesquicentennial Thought
On this day in 1859, or thereabouts (matinee on Wednesdays, concessions for senior citizens and guide dogs), Chaim Dershowitz, a man born into grinding poverty (indicentally, why is poverty always ‘grinding’, in the same way that indictments are always ‘damning’?) as fifteenth child in a family of eleven, son of a poor carpenter, in a manger in a stable on the outskirts of Chelm, because there was no room at the Linnean Society inn, published (under a pseudonym) his epic memoir

Why Futures in Nature will never be Differently Abled
Over on the Fight the Future forum, which discusses stories in the weekly Futures SF column in Nature, we’ve been discussing the latest entry – a somewhat tongue-in-cheek tale by Martin Hayes warning all school leavers against joining the Space Corps. As the Editor of the column, I enjoyed the references to Alien but what resonated most with me were echoes of older SF tales such as Harry Harrison’s Bill The Galactic Hero and Hoe Haldeman’s The Forever War. The piece is writt

Your Mind Tricks Won't Work On Me, Jedi
The recent monomania of my nemesis adversary friend RPG brings to mind the close association between science and science fiction. Let’s face it, we’re all space cadets at heart. But what, precisely, is the relationship between science and SF? How well does SF interpret science? Can it predict the future? Does science draw from SF? Such are the themes to be discussed in a panel discussion on SF film to be held in a couple of weeks, in which I am i

Science as a Religion that Worships Doubt as its God
I’ve just come across David Sloan Wilson’s inaugural blog on SciBlogs which is entitled, in part, Science as a Religion that Worships Truth as its God I don’t think I’ve read or heard anything more misleading all day, and in this post I hope to explain why I am so concerned.

The Names Of Art, The Art Of Names
Many years ago when the world was young, I was putting together an anthology of Nature papers on Chinese paleontology, for the University of Chicago Press. The idea was to mark the explosion in our knowledge of the history of life, directly precipitated by spectacular fossil material from China from the late ’90s onward. I was aided and advised my my colleague and friend Dr Zhe-Xi Luo of the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. “What’s the title going to be?” asked Luo, during one of our many, long transatlantic conversations. “I don’t know yet”, I replied. "I do have a working title, though: