For years now the topic of gender has been all the rage – and I do mean rage. Whether you’re from the “fluid” side or the “Adam and Eve” side, the amount of heat generated by “discussions” (quotations marks intentionally added as these events are usually far from discoursive) of it has been far more than the amount of light shone. Consequently, I’ve vigorously avoided the entire matter at every possible opportunity.
As most naturalists do, I like to stop for at least a few moments on anniversaries of particular scientific significance in order to acknowledge and contemplate what or who that anniversary commemorates and where we would be had that thing not happened or that person not been born. Such a day is 12 February, the date on which Charles Robert Darwin, FRS FRGS FLS FZS was born.
On the day this article is published, it will be exactly one month until the day of the 2017 North American Solar Eclipse; an event that is expected to cause tens of millions of people to stop what they are doing and turn their eyes (properly protected, it is hoped) skyward to witness one of […]
Ever since I read her brilliant book “Stiff; the Curious Lives of Human Cadavers” (on a trans-U.S. airplane flight, no less – talk about making one’s fellow seat mates uncomfortable!) I have delighted in her ability to take a range of topics that most people would think to be somewhere between uncomfortable (“Gulp”) and unmentionable (“Bonk”), and turn them into lively, eye-opening books.