Why You Can’t Fake A Good Horn

Next month, my first co-authored book is coming out. Evolution: Making Sense of Life is a textbook for biology majors, and my co-author is Doug Emlen, a professor at the University of Montana. I’ve heard many tales of disastrous collaborations between scientists and science writers, and so I don’t enter into them lightly. But working with Emlen has been a delight. No matter how many times we’ve had to rewrite a chapter, he threw himself into the work as if he was cannonballing into a swimming pool. And yet somehow Emlen was advancing his own research in evolutionary biology at the same time, quietly chugging away on some remarkable experiments. And today–just a week after we shipped our book off to the printers–Emlen’s latest, most intriguing paper has just come out in the journal Science.

If he wasn’t my co-author, I’d probably be writing about the new paper in the New York Times (or perhaps get into a bare-knuckle fight with the other reporters there for the right to do so). But given our connection, I’m going to use my blog to describe it.

When you’re a young evolutionary biologist, ...