Picking Up the Dog

Last update of the day: Tomorrow's New York Times has a profile I wrote about Martin Nowak, a mathematical biologist at Harvard. Nowak uses games to understand how cooperation evolved--whether that cooperation is between people or between cells or between genes. I've written about Nowak in passing before--his work on language evolution turns up in my book Evolution: The Triumph of an Idea, and there's a bit on his research on cancer evolution in an article I wrote last year for in Scientific American. But I was very curious to talk to Nowak and figure out how all these topics fit inside the head of one scientist. If you want to read more about Nowak, he's got pdf's galore at his web site. Be prepared for a lot of math, though. All the equations may leave you wondering what the ethereal realm of math has to do with the blood-and-guts ...