Wouldn't it be great to know if your three-year-old has the potential to be a soccer star or a top marathon runner? One genetic testing company is offering to tell you just that, so that all of you obsessive, controlling parents can get your toddlers in the proper training program right from the start.

I'm sure most of you are probably cringing at the thought of using genetics to decide what sort of future you're going to push your kid into before she can even brush her own teeth. But even if you are a parent who sees nothing wrong using a little prior information to get a head start on your kid's bright athletic career, DON'T DO IT! Leaving ethical arguments aside, there are good reasons to stay away from these tests: they are not good predictors of athletic performance.

Yesterday our department hosted Peter and Rosemary Grant, who spoke about their 30+ years studying natural selection and finches in the Galapagos. (If you're interested in the book version of their work, check out Jonathan Weiner's Pulitzer Prize-winning The Beak of the Finch.)

While the Grants give a great presentation, full of pictures the Galapagos finches in action, my first impression was that none of this was really groundbreaking. As the Grants mentioned multiple times in the talk, Darwin anticipated so much of what they observe in the Galapagos. In an age of molecular genetics, a long-term, non-molecular field study is bound to seem a little old fashioned, although the Grants have recently been taking DNA samples and incorporating the tools of molecular genetics into their work.

In the end, I came away from the talk satisfied. This work may not be conceptually groundbreaking, but I find it important for at least one reason: this is evolution in detail, in the wild.

Oppenheimer: The Tragic Intellect

Charles Thorpe, University of Chicago 2006

For decades, there was a dearth of comprehensive Oppenheimer biographies. As Thomas Powers noted in the New York Review of Books, biographies of other major Manhattan Project figures came out long before adequate Oppenheimer biographies: "Oppenheimer, the truly central figure, seemed to resist the attempt to write his life on the grand scale." That is no longer the case, and a shelf of very good biographies makes it difficult to know where to start reading.