It’s today!  It’s real!  It’s here!  My new book, I mean. If that sounds like I’m a bit excited, it’s because I am.  I’ve been working on Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider for about four years, and finally I can share it with all of you.  It’s a book about the names of […]

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My metaphorical squirrels, that is. It’s a strange time in the world, and the particular ways in which it’s strange are changing moment to moment.  In only about four days, my university has gone from business-as-usual to all-courses-online to essential-services-only.  Just like everyone else around the world, we’re all scrambling to adjust, and we’ll continue […]

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A colleague recently mentioned being astonished to receive eight different peer reviews, on a single manuscript in a single round of reviews at a single journal.*  Wasn’t this too many, he asked?  And how could it happen? Well, I’m here to serve.  Yes, eight is too many.  As for “how could it happen”: that’s a […]

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This is a guest post from Carly Ziter – liberally red-penned by Steve, who couldn’t agree more!  As a PhD student, I’d often arrive at my office (characteristically, late in the morning) to find a marked up manuscript waiting on my desk chair. My advisor preferred to comment in hard copy, you see. The comments […]

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No, not that one.  This one. More specifically: the Nautilus (the on-line science magazine, not the submarine) has an excerpt from my almost-but-not-quite-yet-available book, Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider.  It’s on their blog, and you can find it here. The Nautilus’s editors had their pick of anything from the book, and they chose […]

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Warning: etymological nerdery.  The origin and fate of the phrase, I mean, not the actual species. In evolutionary biology, a pair of “sister species” (or “sister taxa”, or “sister clades”) are each other’s closest living relatives. I was at lunch last week with an interesting assortment of biologists when the topic of gendered language in […]

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The last two months have seen a couple of scandals fairly close to my own field.  Over the same span, I’ve been asked five or six times what I think of the behaviour of Person X, who has apparently Done Something Bad, or who has apparently Failed to Do Something Good.  There’s nothing unusual about […]

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This year, I promised to log, and share with anyone who’s interested, the non-academic books I read. Wondering why I’d do such a thing?  Click here for an explanation. I’ve been tweeting these books as I finish them using the hashtag #AYearOfBooks, but tweets are constrained to be very short and are inconveniently impermanent.  So, […]

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Some folks sit; some folks sprint. I was once a determined sprinter.  Before a conference, I’d study the programme carefully, highlighting and circling and starring talks that looked promising.  Then I’d assemble my schedule: a talk in this session, a talk in that one, a couple of talks in a third, all before the morning […]

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I love writing Scientist Sees Squirrel, and I love that you’re reading it.  I also love that you don’t have to pay for it (well, except for being forced to endure whatever creepy semi-targeted ad WordPress drops onto the page). But every now and again, someone asks me if I have a Patreon, or a […]

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