About GregLaden

Greg Laden is an academic who spends his time advising students and others, doing research and writing, teaching, and occasionally going into the field. Is he a tenured professor? No! He's a blogger! Greg has several advanced degrees in anthropology from prestigious institutions, and more fieldwork experience than most, including several years in the Northeastern United States and several years in Africa. He writes and teaches about anthropology, race and racism, the biology of gender, evolution, human evolution, nature, birds, and open source operating systems. He is an active member of the skeptics community and an unabashed progressive liberal. His main blog home is scienceblogs.com, he maintains a presence at gregladen.com, and writes a piece every four weeks for 10,000 Birds.

Darwin’s Finches

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A quick break from sexual selection (we’ll get back to it) to read Darwin’s words about the famous finches and other birds of the Galapagos. Of land-birds I obtained twenty-six […]

Darwin’s Sexy Sons

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Darwin saw the same thing others had seen … an enigma of nature … and took equal note of it. But others explained this enigma in a way that made […]

Birds, Darwin, Sex: Foreplay

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Birds played an important role in Darwin’s thinking about evolution, both from his observations of bird variation and biogeography and his observation of breeding birds in England. But they also […]

The Cowbird and the cuckoo

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For this week’s installment of Darwin’s Other Birds I give you pure Darwin, from the Voyage monograph on birds, concerning the cowbid and the cuckoo. MOLOTHRUS NIGER This species is […]

Darwinian Thinking From The Birds

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In Darwin’s time explorers had converted the European view of the world by their observations, much like travelers of today convert their own view of the world, from a simple […]

Birds Feared Darwin

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If Darwin was alive today he would be a bird watcher. But he would do his bird watching differently, using a nice set of binoculars rather than a shotgun. In […]

The mocking bird mocks ironically

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Most people think of Darwin and Birds in relation to Darwin’s Finches. Unless, of course, you’ve heard a bit more about Darwin than the first-order mythology we tend to attach […]

Darwin on the Andean Condor

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Darwin demonstrates his approach to doing science in his description of the Andean Condor, which was used in the monograph on birds that came out of the famous voyage of the Beagle.

Darwin’s Other Birds: Introduction

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Despite rumors to the contrary, Charles Darwin knew his birds. In fact, some of the most interesting writing on birds is to be found in his work. And, for the next several weeks, that’s where we’ll be looking for knowledge and inspiration of an avian kind.