A new story by Carl Zimmer on the evolution of complexity has followed a complex path into print.
Well, OK, maybe not so complex, but an interesting path, and one that many of us might be following soon.
The story, as Zimmer lays it out, begins on his blog The Loom at National Geographic's Phenomena. There Zimmer explained that he had been thinking for some time about a story on how complexity evolves, but had trouble sorting out the arguments and finding an outlet where he could tell the story at the length he thought it required. At one point, he got an magazine assignment, but as he reported the story, he came to feel that it would not be right for that magazine, so he withdrew it.
He then found a partner in Thomas Lin, managing editor at the Simons Foundation, which had launched a considerable initiative to support science journalism. Zimmer got to work, and so did Lin, who transformed Simons Science News into a new online magazine called Quanta. The magazine publishes stories on its own site and has established syndication partnerships with Scientific American and Wired, which will run some of the stories in their pages. This is a model pioneered by ProPublica, another foundation-supported site that partners with other publications to broaden the reach of its stories.
Zimmer's story on complexity is the first to appear in Quanta, and it also appears in the August issue of Scientific American.
So much for the complex journey that began with Zimmer's musings about complexity.
And lest we forget–the story! Zimmer's piece is an entertaining look at a new idea in evolutionary biology–what seems to be a built-in-tendency of life to become more complex over time. Zimmer's skill has been to make this complexity easy to understand.
Follow Zimmer's trail, and you'll learn something about the evolution of life and the evolution of publishing. Both are worth your time this weekend.
-Paul Raeburn
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