Fredric Heeren has a reputation for writing about the everyday work of leading scientists so that readers wish they too could be out there making these discoveries.
John Mather (senior scientist for JWST, the Hubble Space Telescope’s replacement) says that Heeren “brings the latest space results down to Earth”; his account of modern cosmology is “a story well told.”
George Smoot (co-winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Physics) describes Heeren’s writing as “ground-breaking,” “engaging,” “cutting-edge.”
Heeren’s recent investigations have taken him to fossil sites that tell the story of life’s evolution — from early Cambrian and Precambrian sites across southern China, to the hominin findings at Koobi Fora, Kenya, to the Romanian Carpathians where he joined cave-divers excavating the earliest modern human remains in Europe. He has covered science news for over a dozen newspapers, magazines, and science journals.
“Finding Fossils Faster”
Good-bye, field seasons? A push to year-round collecting
- May 2008; Pages 28-30.
Good-bye, field seasons? A push to year-round collecting
- May 2008; Pages 28-30.
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East Turkana, Kenya — What unnerves Louise Leakey is not so much the banditry on the only supply road or the gun battles between herders who sometimes mistake researchers for their enemies — it’s the goats. When a fossil in the Lake Turkana region in northern Kenya makes its way back to the eroding surface after several million years, it’s just a matter of time before, as Leakey puts it, “a herd of 200 to 600 goats with those little hooves, four apiece, goes straight over it.” To lose this race against time is to lose specimens forever — including remains of our ancestors.
“Making the Sale”
Give ‘em the easy choice
- November 9, 2006
Give ‘em the easy choice
- November 9, 2006
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In this modern parable for Nature’s “Futures” page, Heeren tells the story of a future when everyone owns a PAD, a Personal Advice Device. This smart, well-proven program provides the best options, displayed on our retinas, as we navigate through life’s decisions. But a problem develops for creationists when their young people start using it to evaluate claims from their preachers, such as “There is no evidence that primitive hominids ever existed.” Young people equipped with PADs find themselves looking at a sequence of hominid skulls with increasing cranial capacities over time. Those denominations whose leaders most insistently dismiss evolution have the most ‘splaining to do — until someone comes up with a PAD that thinks like we do: it rationalizes away anything its owner dislikes.
“Cave Diving for Europe's Past”
Interview with Romanian explorer Stefan Milota
- June 3, 2006
Interview with Romanian explorer Stefan Milota
- June 3, 2006
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Four years ago, Romanian explorer Stefan Milota made an amazing discovery in previously unknown caves deep within his country's Carpathian mountains: a jawbone that turned out to be the oldest modern human fossil found in Europe. More surprisingly, this mandible showed features that suggested early modern humans might have interbred with Neanderthals. With his climbing buddies at the explorers' club Pro Acva Grup, Milota helped scientists make the subterranean trek to Pestera cu Oase (Cave with Bones) for three seasons of dark, 10-hour days, much of them spent climbing, swimming or diving through tight passages. Fredric Heeren followed the cave divers through the underwater passages on one such trip to ask Milota how he found the 35,000-year-old human remains — an hour’s journey deep within a Carpathian mountain.
“Caveful of Clues About Early
Humans”
Interbreeding With Neanderthals Among Theories Being Explored
- September 20, 2004; Page A06
Interbreeding With Neanderthals Among Theories Being Explored
- September 20, 2004; Page A06
summary
An expedition to the
world’s most inaccessible human fossil site has
wrapped up in the foothills of Romania’s Carpathian
Mountains. From data gained, scientists hope to wrap up their
case for answers to some of the most hotly debated questions
about early humans: Did early modern humans make love or
war with Neanderthals? Were Neanderthals intellectually
inferior to us? A seven-member team hazards daily treks
through underwater caves to conclude: Yes, early modern humans
interbred with Neandertals 35,000 years ago. And no,
Neandertals were not inferior. Other anthropologists
examine the fossils and heartily disagree with both
conclusions.
“Challenging Fossil of a Little
Fish”
- May 30, 2000
summary
The Boston Globe follows Chinese paleontologist Jun-Yuan Chen and his
colleagues as they discover and describe fossils of the
earliest chordate, the phylum named for the
“notochord” that would eventually form the
vertebrate backbone. Globe correspondent Fred Heeren reports on
their announcement of the 530-million-year-old proto-fish,
dubbed Haikouella, at an international science symposium in Chengjiang,
China. For Western paleontologists, Haikouella looks like
a breakthrough for understanding the origin of the human
lineage. “It proves that the direct ancestor of
mankind already existed in the time of the Cambrian
explosion,” says German paleontologist Michael Steiner.
Scripps biologist Nicholas Holland reports:
“It’s the earliest known chordate ancestor. This is
going to be page one, two, three and four of vertebrate
texts.”
“Nothing to fear from NASA”
- June 28, 2001
summary
Fred Heeren reports on NASA’s launch
of a small spacecraft called the Microwave Anisotropy Probe.
MAP will be on a two-year mission orbiting the Sun beyond
the Earth’s orbit to measure tiny ripples, called
anisotropy, in cosmic radiation left over from the Big Bang.
Cosmologists hope to distinguish between competing theories to
help them learn what caused the universe to start to expand.
The 1990 Cosmic Background Explorer (COBE) mission showed what
the universe looked like when it was 300,000 years old. MAP
should be able to detect gravitational waves, and these could
take us back to the tiniest fraction of a second after time
began. MIT’s Alan Guth, the father of inflation theory,
tells Heeren: “Inflation itself takes a very small
universe and produces from it a very big universe. But
inflation by itself does not explain where that very small
universe came from.”
“Paleontologic Agitprop?”
- July 24, 2000
summary
Fred Heeren reports on a gathering in
China of sixty scientists from around the world; they delivered
papers dealing with the theme of the week-long conference:
“The Origins of Animal Body Plans and the Fossil
Record.” Central questions revolved around why so many
new phyla evolved in the early Cambrian period, 543 to 535
million years ago. Biologists and paleontologists staked out
positions repudiating or supporting Stephen Jay Gould and Niles
Eldredge’s theory of punctuated equilibrium, in which
life evolves in creative bursts followed by long periods of
stasis, rather than according to Darwin’s (and
neo-Darwinism’s) gradualism. Disagreements erupted over
fundamentally different approaches by Chinese and Western
scientists on these issues. But China’s Chengjiang
locale is where Westerners must now go to learn about the
Cambrian period’s clearest and earliest remains.
Evolution and Cognition is an international, peer reviewed science journal,
printed by the University of Vienna, the journal of the Konrad
Lorenz Institute for Evolution and Cognition.
“Was the first craniate on the road
to cognition?”
Evolution and Cognition 2003; 9(2): 142-156.
Evolution and Cognition 2003; 9(2): 142-156.
summary
Chinese fossil discoveries of the earliest
known craniates (from the early Cambrian period) have led
scientists to question whether the evolution of human-level
cognition is a rare occurrence in the universe. The earliest
chordate is now best represented by a well-documented metazoan
called Haikouella lanceolata. Possessing a relatively large brain, this
animal appears to demonstrate that the brain and endoskeleton
did not evolve together, as had been assumed, but rather that
the brain appeared long before full endoskeletization. The
paleontologist who describes the animal further notes a
“top-down” pattern in the appearances of new forms
in the fossil record. Researchers find such observations
relevant to the question: Was the evolution of human-level
cognition in some sense inevitable, or was it an accident
dependent upon historical contingencies? The new evidence for
early craniates lends support to the view that human-level
cognition may be part of a developmental package, but
historical contingencies pose serious problems for a strictly
law-like explanation.
“Home Alone in the Universe?”
- March 2002
- March 2002
summarY
Pleading ignorance but desiring knowledge, all of us can remain open to the possibility of aloneness as well as alien company. Either way, the truth must surely be a wondrous thing. With options fully open, then—in the true scientific spirit of letting the evidence lead us rather than our presuppositions—we may choose to fully support SETI’s quest.
But given what we can know for now, we have little reason to hope for answers from E.T. in our lifetime. We’ll have to solve our own problems with war, crime and poverty, make up our own minds about the purpose of life, and seek another “conduit to the ultimate.”
