Return of the Howlers

Apologies for the long radio silence. Travelling and the obligatory pre-travelling frenzy shut down the blogging assembly line for a couple weeks. Having wrapped up my west-coast jaunt (thanks to the great crowd that came out for the CSPAN taping at Stanford), I can write a bit about some of the new science that has caught my eye. Crouching on top on the pile are howler monkeys. Howlers have become frequentvisitors to the Loom, much to my surprise. For some reason they've recently started to have a lot to say about evolution--particularly, as odd as it may seem, about the evolution of our own species. As I wrote in an earlier post, we humans have good eyesight compared to many other primates. We have three genes that make receptors for light in our eyes, each sensitive to its own band of the spectrum--red, green and blue. The combined sensitivity of ...