Darwin's Devices

What a great present on Darwin’s Birthday, 12 February 2013: the National Science Foundation featured an interview about Darwin’s Devices on their Radio360 web site.  Update: if you click on the image below, you’ll be sent directly to Big Picture Science, where you’ll see the interview archived (it disappeared from Radio360′s site the day after Darwin’s birthday).

Jack Graceffa takes a peek at what was inside his Christmas stocking.  Coal or candy?  Neither:  Darwin’s Devices!  I don’t know if that means he was naughty or nice.  You decide.

The Department of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School!  A great band of creative and enthusiastic scientists welcomed Darwin’s Devices to campus on Friday, 15 December 2012.  My job: interactively interpret the book using only a white board during their “Theory Lunch.”  Many thanks to professor Jeremy Gunawardena for the invitation and the hosting. 

Maker Faire New York 2012.  I’m still trying to wrap my head around this event.  Grass-roots tinkerers, inventors, and hackers.  A whole tent of home-made 3D prototypers.  A day of talks about Arduinos.  A steam punk village.  The best I can do is offer this amalgam:  science fair, county fair, and craft fair.  Brilliant.  Nerd-fest.  Family fair.  Created by the do-it-yourself mavens at Make Magazine, this event occurs annually in San Francisco, Detroit, and New York.  They were kind enough to invite me to speak about Darwin’s Devices.  Even better, they videotaped the talk, along with all of the others given over the weekend, and made it available on YouTube.

Ready for a teaser?  Check out this excerpt of Darwin’s Devices at The Vassar Quarterly.

A review in Science!  A big deal?  You bet.  Science and Nature are the two journals that have the largest readership among professional scientists and laypeople.  So to have Darwin’s Devices reviewed now in both places is fantastic news.  Thanks to Mike White, a biologist at Washington University at St. Louis, for the review in Science, which appeared yesterday, in the July 20th issue.  If you follow the link for the review, and can work via a library that has a subscription, you’ll see that Mike takes a humorous approach and, at the same time, digs down into what he thinks are the important bits for biologists. 

Check out this image: Darwin’s Devices is listed under “Hot Books,” on Barnes & Noble’s home page!

Okay, honesty check.  It’s not listed any more.  I took this screen shot on May 25th.  Poof.  Then Darwin’s Devices was gone.  A brief flare goes up, and then burns out.  “Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more.”  And, yes, I’m aware that MacBeth’s next line is about a tale told by an idiot.  I’ll own that.  (Note:  publishers talk about the “life” of a book…)

The magazine, New Scientist, selected Darwin’s Devices as one of its top five books for the Spring.  Thank you, NS!  And you can get all five books for free if you subscribe to New Scientist now…  (back-stratching alert!).

By laws of physics that I still seek to comprehend, Darwin’s Devices has transmogrified itself from paper to electrons.  If you wish to experience this process for yourself, I strongly encourage you to whip out your Kindle and make the magic happen!

It’s on the shelves!  Our embedded field reporter, Dr. Marianne Porter, took this exclusive image of Darwin’s Devices, four copies, lurking on the shelves of the Barnes & Noble in Boca Raton, Florida.  Authorities refused to comment about the placement of the book near volumes attending to clones and zombies.  One by-stander, who asked to kept anonymous, pondered the possible secret connection between Napolean’s buttons, the God particle, and Darwin’s Devices:  might they all refer to the same thing?