At his event with Zocalo, Robert Kurzban offered up an explanation of hypocritical behavior by politicians:

For more on how our brains modularity contributes to contradictions, read Rob’s book Why Everyone (Else) Is a Hypocrite.

Rule #1: Cardio

And Columbus is quite right in his rules for zombie survival in the new classic zombie comedy Zombieland. But how do you negotiate with mindless brainsuckers? Look no further than our very own zombie affairs expert Daniel Drezner. Popular blogger for ForeignPolicy.com, Tufts University professor, and member of the Zombie Research Society, Drezner in his new book THEORIES OF INTERNATIONAL POLITICS AND ZOMBIES takes a deadpan look at an actual zombie invasion and what different theories of international relations work best against a zombie plague.

And, in what may be a first for the Princeton University Press, the classic horror magazine Fangoria had a positive review of the book in a recent issue.

The book has risen from its previous life as a manuscript in search of luscious craniums of readers worldwide. It is spreading like a virus so Double Tap (Rule #2, by the way) your mouse and pick up a copy today!

Two bird bloggers have posted some early thoughts on The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds.

Steve Blain, admitted admirer of bird porn writes on his blog that The Crossley ID Guide is “an impressive piece of work and one I fell in love with after a few minutes. It has set the standard for modern photographic bird guides.” He also includes marching orders to “Buy it.”

Rob Fergus writes a note on his blog The Birdchaser to warn everyone that the Birdman Cometh (I particularly like how the photograph of Richard looks as if he literally coming to get us with his Nikon optics in hand). He also has this to say about The Crossley ID Guide: “There’s a lot of field guides out there. I don’t always say this, but this is one you aren’t going to want to miss.”

So, it seems like a good time to extend this invitation again. Please join us for a webinar with acclaimed photographer and birder Richard Crossley where he will share a sneak preview of The Crossley ID Guide: Eastern Birds.

Experience it for yourself.

DATE: February 22, 2011

DETAILS: Be among the first to experience Richard’s 21st-century birding vision. Richard will share a stunning visual smorgasbord of life-like, in-focus scenes showing birds in their habitats, from near and far, and in all plumages and behaviors. There will also be a 15 minute Q&A session.

REGISTER NOW:
February 22, 2011, 12 PM-1 PM EST https://princeton.ilinc.com/register/vfjksbb
February 22, 2011, 2 PM – 3 PM EST https://princeton.ilinc.com/register/tzrvpmh

Sample plates, Q&A, videos, and additional information available at http://press.princeton.edu/titles/9384.html and http://crossleybirds.com/

Our final Darwin Day Q&A is with John Kricher, author of Galapagos: A Natural History. This book is a must-read for anyone curious about the flora and fauna Darwin might have encountered in his expedition to the Galapagos. Here, John discusses his favorite Galapagos species and the ecological changes the islands have undergone since Darwin’s visit. Oh, and did I mention the photographs? John has kindly provided photographs of two native species including perhaps the most famous of all — the giant tortoise.

Princeton Global Science: Your book Galapagos: A Natural History describes many of the flora and fauna of the Islands. What are some of your favorite species? Do you have any photographs or illustrations you could share?

John Kricher: As an ornithologist I obviously like birds and the Darwin’s finches and various seabirds of the Galapagos are real favorites. I very much enjoy visiting the waved albatross colony, for example. Plus the fact that where else is it possible to observe penguins and flamingos in close proximity to one another? Answer, no where else. And, of course, I very much like the reptiles of the Galapagos, the giant tortoises and the marine and land iguanas.

More after the jump.

To celebrate Darwin Day, we are interviewing our Darwinian authors. Earlier I posted a Q&A with David Reznick focused more on Darwin as author. Here we speak with Thalia Grant and Greg Estes, authors of Darwin in Galápagos: Footsteps to a New World about Darwin as an explorer. Thalia and Greg are in the unique position of having retraced, step-by-step, Darwin’s expedition to the Galapagos. Here they speak about the challenges they faced in following in Darwin’s footsteps and also the insights they gained from the experience. Hover over the images to read descriptive captions. You might also enjoy reading this excerpt from their book.

Thalia Grant & Greg Estes: Greg and I came up with the idea to retrace Darwin’s footsteps through Galápagos after discovering that although it was known which 4 islands Darwin visited in Galápagos; it was not clear where on these islands he explored. In order to determine Darwin’s movements through the archipelago, we needed to examine his written works.

We traveled to England to immerse ourselves in archival research; to examine Darwin’s writings, and most importantly his original notes and manuscripts. Today all of Darwin’s works can be found on Darwin Online, but at that time his notes and manuscripts were buried deep within the Darwin archive of Cambridge University Library. There we unearthed, among other gems, a full volume of untranscribed geological notes that contained important clues to where Darwin had explored in Galápagos. At other repositories in England we found the log of HMS Beagle, and Captain FitzRoy’s charts of the archipelago, which showed the Beagle’s routes and bearings.

We then returned to Galápagos with all we had learned and embarked on our expedition. Some of the places Darwin explored were easy to pinpoint, others challenging. Some were found by trial and error, by going to places that sounded right in terms of the ship’s general anchorage, and when not finding the formations Darwin described, having to re-examine the clues and the coast line repeatedly until we got it right. It helped that both of us knew the Galápagos intimately from having spent years conducting ecological research on various islands and, in Greg’s case, leading natural history tours through the archipelago.

Continues after the jump.

George Levine is the author of Darwin Loves You: Natural Selection and the Re-enchantment of the World and editor of the forthcoming volume The Joy of Secularism: 11 Essays for How We Live Now. His point of view is unique among our authors because his background is not in the biological sciences or evolutionary studies. He is an English professor. In fact, he was one of my English professors at Rutgers University. In this brief article, Dr. Levine questions whether Darwin would have ever (as has been reported) repented his beliefs. He also addresses the question of “how does one live now with [Darwin's] well-tested theory?”

I was once challenged by a very kind and gentle woman. “You know,” she said, “that Darwin repented on his deathbed.” No, of course I didn’t know that, but I did shortly after learn that the idea is part of a whole series of total misconceptions about Darwin that are designed to demonstrate that Darwin had been wrong about evolution, and thus that it hadn’t happened and wasn’t happening. The wrongness of all of these ideas is so absolute that they are beyond contradiction, which is part of the problem. Evidence will do nothing to change that gentle woman’s view. Nevertheless, there is a wonderful little book by James Moore that investigates the myth of Darwin’s repentance in all seriousness, and totally confutes it. Although Darwin is now probably the most thoroughly documented historical figure in the history of the English speaking world, there isn’t a whimper of evidence that he “repented.”

What is striking about the current continuation of mid nineteenth-century attacks on Darwin’s ideas (nobody dared attack him as a man, he was so meticulously respectable, and likeable, and buried in Westminster Abbey) is that anyone thinks that one can continue to fight about evolution as one fights about strategies to overcome our current economic problems. Do you “believe” in evolution? It is like asking, “Do you believe in gravity?” There are of course many disagreements and uncertainties among scientists about precisely how evolution works, but the problem is not whether it works. That is a given of all modern biology, as the great biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky argued half a century ago. Modern biology has taken Darwin and run with his ideas so that even his secret deathbed repentance would not affect in the slightest the developments in evolutionary biology since his time.

For lay people, the real question is, how does one live now with his well-tested theory? The fact that its most important founding father was such a nice guy and that so many of its early proponents were so eminently respectable (T. H. Huxley, for example), and even religious (Charles Kingsley and Asa Gray, for example) probably shouldn’t be taken as quite sufficient evidence that there’s no necessary connection between belief in evolution and wickedness. Nor even Stephen Jay Gould’s elaborate theorizing that science and religion are not conflicting ways of seeing and feeling, but belong to “non overlapping magisteria.”

But reading Darwin should do it. While some of his work might, for the lay reader, be a little dry, with lots of “dry facts,” as he put it, On the Origin of Species is a book full of wonder, and, as Adam Gopnik wrote recently, makes the whole world “vibrate.” Darwin had nothing to repent for, except, as he gently and sadly complained in his Autobiography, he hadn’t done enough good things in the course of his amazingly productive life. There is no reason that Darwin’s vision of the world should threaten anyone’s idea that life is meaningful. He described the world as it is, full of the bad things we see around us every day, and miraculously beautiful and diverse, and endlessly worth preserving; it is a world that has produced people capable of real generosity – “altruism” – which, as Frans de Waal, among others has been showing us, is built into our worldly human bones. Darwin’s determination to face the world as he found it has helped us grow up, and to seek meaning right here in the extraordinary world he described with such fidelity. He told us the truth as he knew it, and he had nothing for which to repent.

To celebrate Darwin Day, we are interviewing our Darwinian authors. First up is David Reznick who is the author of The Origin Then and Now: An Interpretive Guide to the Origin of Species. Of the book, SEED Magazine wrote, “Reznick . . . succeeds where others have failed–instead of annotating the dense, Victorian prose of the Origin or recasting it as a popular narrative, he paraphrases each chapter of the book, adding fascinating elaborations on why Darwin chose a certain phrase, where he turned out to be wrong, and how the intervening 150 years have changed our theories. His account is a welcome tool for those who’d like to hear evolution from Darwin himself but find the master impenetrable.” In this brief interview, Reznick talks about the initial response to On the Origin of the Species and why it continues to be such an important book. He also has a few suggestions for how to celebrate Darwin Day this year. If you are in Calgary, David will present the 26th Annual Darwin Lecture tonight.

Princeton Global Science: You make the point that in spite of being one of the most important books ever written and being cited thousands of times, The Origin of the Species is a rather difficult book to read, right?

David Reznick: Yes. Also, it is cited far more often than it is read, I think. The difficulty lies in part in its being rooted in the science of 1859, so some of the ways he presents things are foreign. A second reason is that he had a much broader command of science than most people do today, so he skips lightly from geology to paleontology to comparative embryology to anatomy, etc.

More available after the jump.

From the book, Beyond UFOs: In 1543, Nicholas Copernicus published De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium (“Concerning the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres”), a book in which he made the radical suggestion that Earth was not in fact the center of the universe, but instead was one of the planets going around the Sun. It was not an entirely new idea; some 1,800 years earlier, a Greek philosopher named Aristarchus (c. 310–230 b.c.) had proposed the same thing, and Copernicus was aware of Aristarchus’s work when he wrote his book. However, while Aristarchus had little success in convincing any of his contemporaries of the idea’s validity, Copernicus started a revolution. It took a few decades and the help of people like Tycho Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo, but by the mid-1600s the idea of an Earth-centered universe was essentially dead.

Beyond UFOs:
The Search for Extraterrestrial Life and Its Astonishing Implications for Our Future
By Jeffrey Bennett

The quest for extraterrestrial life doesn’t happen only in science fiction. This book describes the startling discoveries being made in the very real science of astrobiology, an intriguing new field that blends astronomy, biology, and geology to explore the possibility of life on other planets. Jeffrey Bennett takes readers beyond UFOs to discuss some of the tantalizing questions astrobiologists grapple with every day: What is life and how does it begin? What makes a planet or moon habitable? Is there life on Mars or elsewhere in the solar system? How can life be recognized on distant worlds? Is it likely to be microbial, more biologically complex–or even intelligent? What would such a discovery mean for life here on Earth?

Beyond UFOs shows why the very quest to find alien life can help us to grow up as a species and chart a course for the stars.

We invite you to read chapter one online:
http://press.princeton.edu/chapters/s8594.html

Darwin Day is tomorrow, so it’s time to start planning for the festivities Here’s a suggestion — check out the PUP blog for Q&As and articles from our authors and exclusive excerpts from some of our Darwin books.

In the meantime, head over to the official Darwin Day site to check out their events calendar, videos of people explaining why they celebrate Darwin Day and a bunch more information.

Speaking of events, if you are in Calgary, plan to hear Dr. David Reznick give the 26th Annual Darwin Lecture tonight at the University of Calgary. Details are here.

The image above can be found at the Darwin Day web site.

Want to learn more about The Crossley ID Guide? Sign up for our webinar on February 22nd at noon or 2 PM. Click here for details.

Earlier Crossley Unplugged videos:

• Where to go birding?
• In the garden: bird baths and plantings
• In the garden: bird feeders
• Becoming a Better Birder
• ID Tips: Size

Is anyone else getting seriously excited about Mark Witton’s forthcoming book on pterosaurs? We previously featured a sneak peek from the book and I just ran across this post at Tetrapod Zoology which features even more of Witton’s artwork.

So what’s the occasion for this article? It turns out Junchang Lü, David Unwin and colleagues have discovered

An adult pterosaur skeleton, poised as if ‘caught in the act’ of laying an egg [the specimen is shown below: image courtesy of Junchang Lü, Institute of Geology, Beijing, used with permission]. As usual with fossil mothers preserved in the act of parturition, it seems likely that the egg was pushed out of the body during decomposition: the mother wasn’t really laying an egg when she died (though this does, admittedly, remain a possibility).

Click over to read a fascinating account of this discovery and to admire two lovely illustrations from Witton whose book with Princeton University Press is due to publish in the summer of 2012.