This is the inaugural post in a series we’re calling The Tangled Bank, in which we highlight weblogs and articles on the broadly defined topics of biology, medicine, and natural history. We invite anyone to participate; we plan to post one of these summaries every two weeks, and if you have written something relevant in some way to our mission, send e-mail to and we’ll try to include a link to your work next time.

First up is Syaffolee, a graduate student in microbiology at Dartmouth. Her site is a good one for odd and interesting links (the one where the squid swallowed whole by a bird eats its way out—very cool, in a grim way!), for the grad student perspective (also sometimes grim), and for microbiology...for instance, this article on “Too much hygiene." You may have heard of the “hygiene hypothesis”, that one reason we may be seeing a rise in chronic and autoimmune diseases is that we’ve been keeping our homes too clean, and people are growing up with immune systems that haven’t been adequately challenged. Syaffolee describes a paper by King et al. that tests this model in a mouse system.

Mike of the 10,000 Birds Blog is a birder. The name comes from the fact that there are about 10,000 species of birds on this planet, and Mike and his fellow contributors plan to see every single one of them (they’re going to need a team of people to accomplish that, and they know it; they’re doing some long range planning and spawning another generation of birders. Say hello to Mason over there.) Mike is being thorough, and doesn’t just look for the glitzy, flashy, exotic species—he’s also willing to treat the “American Trash Bird" with respect.

Rhosgobel: Radagast’s home is the weblog of a mysterious, anonymous community college instructor in biology who writes about biology and academic issues. He also has some infatuation with Tolkien, as might be guessed from the name, lives in California, and has a fondness for taunting snowbound Minnesotans with photos of blooming flowers. I just finished lecturing my class on reproductive physiology, so his article on “Human follicular development" was particularly relevant to me. He describes recent work by Baerwald et al. that shows that the maturation of follicles in the ovary is more complicated than we thought, and proceeds by waves of development.

Jason Rosenhouse is a fellow conspirator at The Panda’s Thumb, and he also maintains his own Evolution Blog. Jason is an assistant professor of mathematics at James Madison University with a strong interest in evolution and the evolution/creation wars, and tells us now how “The Conservative Assault on Science Continues". He dissects the recent ghastly nonsense by Kelly Hollowell, published at WorldNetDaily, which is representative of conservative antipathy towards science.

Speaking of mathematics, one common canard directed at evolutionary biologists is that they are ‘soft’ scientists, little more than stamp collectors. While Jason Rosenhouse is demonstrating that a mathematician can be knowledgeable about biology, Reed Cartwright, a graduate student in evolutionary biology at the University of Georgia and also a contributor on The Panda’s Thumb, is exemplifying the complement, that biologists can also demonstrate mathematical rigor. On his weblog, De Rerum Natura, he has begun a series on evolutionary mathematics with “EvoMath 1: Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium". Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium is one of the most fundamental rules in population genetics; every biology major gets exposed to it in introductory biology.

Mrs Tilton of The Sixth International continues our run of intellectual polymaths; she’s a contributor to the group blog, Fistful of Euros, and writes about European politics and arachnids (I don’t know if there is any link between those two...). She’s done a number of Friday photo essays on spiders, including this one, “Friday arachnid blogging, and what’s in a name". In addition to the lovely picture of Philodromus rufus, Mrs Tilton gives us a wonderfully concise, jargon-free outline of cladistics.

Respectful of Otters is a psychologist working in HIV research and treatment who writes about politics, feminism, and baseball in addition to health care and psychology. She’s also possesses a scientifically skeptical mind, and addresses the question of “The Short Attention Span Generation?" with a literature search. In addition to finding a dearth of reasonable evidence for any historical trends in children’s attention span, she strongly criticizes a widely cited article in Pediatrics that blames the problem on TV.

Last up this time around is Jennifer Forman Orth’s Invasive Species Weblog. Jennifer has a remarkably focused weblog that covers everything there is to know about invasive species, and has been in operation for two years, so there is an impressive collection of information there. She’s brought up “Mass Invaders!", a new website that discusses invasive species in New England, illustrated with a poster. She mentions that the poster has “information about 12 species that many of you are likely to recognize, even if you’re not from New England,” and yes, it’s true...even a botanically-challenged Minnesotan like myself spotted a few familiar nuisances. Test yourself!

Jennifer Forman Orth will also be hosting the next edition of The Tangled Bank at the Invasive Species Weblog, scheduled for 5 May 2004. If you’d like a link, send a URL and preferably, a brief synopsis to her by way of e-mail to before that date.