- Author, editor, scientist, critic
- Developmental cell biologist, neuroscientist
- Evolutionist
- Humanist
- NCSE Steve
- Baseball fan
- Bardolator
- Bicyclist
- Beer lover
Quintessence of Dust emerged from hiatus in January 2023, because it's time to write. The blog explores science, society, and human nature, focusing on genetics, development, evolution, neuroscience, systems biology, and topics related to scientific literacy. I occasionally discuss intelligent design, misinformation, science denial, and other political/social influences on scientific literacy. Additional topics: scientific writing, scientific culture, baseball, philosophy, books I'm reading, and Shakespeare. One main theme is scientific explanation.
At times, I discuss a recent article in the scientific literature. I will bias my selections toward open-access papers so that readers can read the articles themselves regardless of academic affiliation.
For basics on my perspectives, see my 2007 post on common descent and explanation. My very first post has a little more detail about the blog, and my second one explains the name. The original About page description from 2007 is here.
The header image highlights my favorite things: Shakespeare, neuroscience (that's my brain), genetics, Scotland and all things British (the Celtic cross), developmental biology (that's a human embryo, image from Wellcome Images, as of 2007), and evolution. The Celtic cross (the famous St. Martin's cross in Iona) also formerly represented Christianity on my blog. I'm no longer a Christian, but I'm happy to acknowledge Christian cultural contributions. However, all of my writing before 2014 (the year of my deconversion, or I would say emancipation) was influenced by my Christian beliefs, which I described in detail when I started the blog.
More about Stephen
- Current Scientific Editor at Life Science Editors, providing high-level writing and editing of scientific papers with consulting on publication strategy and training in all aspects of scientific writing and publishing.
- Co-founder, co-organizer and instructor, Scientific Writing Retreat at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. Since 2015.
- Previous roles:
- Associate Editorial Director at PLOS.
- Editor-in-Chief at Cell Reports and editor and contributor at CrossTalk, the Cell Press blog.
- Research publications (at PubMed or download PDFs at my personal site)
- My Google Scholar profile
- My ORCID record
- Science writing (at my personal site)
- Presentations and appearances
- Vita (at my personal site)
- Contact page at my personal site. Contact page here on the blog.
- Linktree for social media links and more.
- Best of Quintessence of Dust (science writing)
- All writing on Quintessence of Dust expresses my personal views, and none expresses or implies the views or policies of my employer.
- My previous work as an editorial director places some constraints on what I write. Specifically, I will never comment on editorial policies at Cell Reports or at PLOS journals. See CrossTalk for past writing on scientific publishing and editorial work.
