Best Of

brilliant scientist/artist, excellent essay/biography/explanation of genetics:

The clock in our genes
The biologist Victoria Foe discovered a timing device in ‘junk’ DNA that could unlock the evolution of complex life

When not tending her garden, Foe’s priority will be getting the word out about genetic fragility and her hypothesis about the solution millions of years of evolution have wrought to protect the complexity of life. This project’s current form, an extended exposition in the journal Integrative Organismal Biology, is up against the reduced attention spans of modern readers. Foe’s prose resembles that of historical synthetic monographs such as Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) or D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form (1917), which bore down on details over hundreds more pages. But in our fast-paced digital age, few scientists want to attend to long explanations any more, even when the intricacy of the things being described demand them. Foe is trying to break up this transformative story into digestible bites, but I can sense that it pains her to do so. Her other challenge is that the independent path she chose means a younger generation of biologists is largely unaware of her. Her focus has been on the work itself, cultivating life in and outside the lab, and not the scientific seminar or conference circuits.

https://aeon.co/essays/far-from-junk-the-clock-in-our-dna-and-its-discoverer?

We began in a world with twice as much literacy as we have now. We’ve lost 50% of literacy in the last fifteen years. So, that epiphenomenon of writers like me being attacked and abandoned by our friends running scared of social media was part of the progression towards illiteracy and the fundamental inability to morally deliberate, which now characterises our society and which will propel us into authoritarianism, like America. That’s what the book’s about.

Someone who can’t read a book cannot deliberate, cannot think and cannot conceptualise, and therefore is a threat – particularly humans who, instead of conceptualising in isolation and being able to think inside their own heads, only think through their engagement with others. That’s where fascism gets going, or social movements that depend on a kind of hysterical level of identification. What books and the ability to read books do is present a barrier that prevents you from being able to avoid moral deliberation at some point.

https://thelondonmagazine.org/interview-will-self-on-the-end-of-satire-the-rise-of-fascism-and-writing-his-own-death/