Coleman McCormick

Archive of posts with tag 'Science'

May 2, 2024 • #

The Two Enlightenments →

Differentiating two different variants of The Enlightenment:

April 18, 2024 • #

Kármán vortex streets in nature.

April 7, 2024 • #

Map of humanmetabolic pathways.

(via @burny_tech)

February 22, 2024 • #

Illustrations by naturalistErnst Haeckel.

From his collection Kunstformen der Natur.

The Two Enlightenments

February 20, 2024 • #

We learn about “The Enlightenment” as a singular entity, a historical age associated with rationality, scientific inquiry, humanism, and liberty. The Enlightenment and scientific revolution were defining moments that spawned an unprecedented period of progress and human flourishing. But in his book The Beginning of Infinity, David Deutsch adds useful texture for better understanding the motivations of the Enlightenment’s contributors.

He divides the movement into two broad forms: the “British” and the “Continental”.

Both branches agree on the core principles of rationality, progress, and freedom. Where they disagree is on how to achieve these goals. They pursue the same ends, but disagree on the means. The British model builds on the concept of fallibilism: progress happens through conjecture, empirical evidence, and falsification. The Continental relies on pure reason, and our theoretical ability to find final, objective truth. Thinkers like Kant, Rousseau, and Voltaire best fit in the Continental camp. The likes of John Locke, Edmund Burke, Karl Popper, and Adam Smith in the British.

Here’s a summary of qualities that differentiate these two approaches to pursuing human progress:

Continental Enlightenment British Enlightenment
Utopianism Fallibilism
Society can be perfected Society can only be indefinitely improved
Problems are soluble, NOT inevitable Problems are soluble, AND inevitable
Perfect the state through design Improve the state through gradual evolution
Top-down Bottom-up
Comprehensive reform of institutions Messy, improvement of imperfect forms

Deutsch himself favors the British form. As with issues of contemporary politics and philosophy, it’s important to understand not only the goals a particular philosophy seeks, but how it proposes we go about doing so.

Interview with Richard Rhodes, on the Making of the Atomic Bomb

May 23, 2023 • #

This is a phenomenal interview with Richard Rhodes, author of the legendary The Making of the Atomic Bomb, an expansive history of the Manhattan Project and the development of nuclear weapons technology.

Dwarkesh Shah’s show The Lunar Society is generally excellent and highly recommended. Just listen to how long he lets Rhodes answer and expound on questions without interruption. These are my favorite types of long-form interviews.

Portals Into Earth

September 21, 2022 • #

From John McPhee’s Annals of the Former World:

Geologists on the whole are inconsistent drivers. When a roadcut presents itself, they tend to lurch and weave. To them, the roadcut is a portal, a fragment of a regional story, a proscenium arch that leads their imaginations into the earth and through the surrounding terrane.

This is a book I’d love to revisit. So many great bits of history.

Weekend Reading: Liberal Science, Roam42, and JTBD Examples

February 6, 2021 • #

🧠 In Defense of Being Offensive

Jonathan Rauch on pluralism and the necessity of disagreement in the search for truth.

His book Kindly Inquisitors was first published in 1993, but is as relevant today as ever. The book is a defense of what he calls “liberal science”, our decentralized process for knowledge discovery that relies on relentless-but-gradual error correction:

Liberal science, by its very nature, has little tolerance for fundamentalism; conversely fundamentalism is a threat to liberal science. Fundamentalism, defined by Rauch as the “search for certainty rather than for errors,” is the antithesis of scientific inquiry. Fundamentalism seeks a monopoly on knowledge from which it can deny the beliefs put forth by all others. Rauch even notes that there are fundamentalist free-marketeers—those who refuse to accept the possibility that cherished economic axioms may be flawed, or at least in need of revision—and he challenges them to enhance their intellectual rigor. If classical liberals are willing to accept the self-correcting actions of the marketplace to properly allocate valued resources, they should also allow the self-correcting mechanisms of liberal science to separate knowledge from supposition.

Due to its nature as a decentralized system, liberal science frees knowledge from authoritarian control by self-appointed commissars of truth. “In an imperfect world, the best insurance we have against truth’s being politicized is to put no one in particular in charge of it,” notes Rauch. Liberal science achieves this end. It avoids despotism in the intellectual realm as it does in those of politics and economics.

⌨️ Become a Keyboard Pro with Roam42

A great guide here from Ramses at RoamStack

I set up RoamHacker’s Roam42 suite for SmartBlocks a few weeks back, and it’s game-changing. I’m still a novice with it and have only used a few of its tools, but this sort of extensibility and programmability is what’s making Roam the most interesting text platform.

👨‍💻 How to Write Jobs to Be Done Example Statements

This is a solid, brief guide on how to frame Jobs to Be Done statements.

“Help me brush my teeth in the morning” is not a great example of a Job to Be Done statement.

“Help me brush my teeth in the morning” is joined at the hip to an existing solution (a toothbrush) and there’s only so far you’ll be able to expand your thinking within that bubble.

A way to describe the Job to Be Done when a person is brushing their teeth that could lead to more innovative product design is:

“Keep my teeth healthy.”

Progress is Not Automatic

September 23, 2020 • #

One of the key insights coming out of the progress studies movement seems like a simple idea on the surface, but it’s an important core thesis: that progress is not an inevitability. We don’t see new inventions, innovations, and improvements to quality of life by accident. It’s the result of deliberate effort by people in searching for new life improvements. Using names like “Moore’s Law” perhaps makes it sound like computer chip improvements “just happen,” but researchers at Intel or TSMC would beg to differ on how automatic those developments were.

Innovation is deliberate

For at least the last 150 years, steady, expansive progress has been the default. Since the Industrial Revolution, scientific discovery has marched forward, and since the days of the Enlightenment, science and progress have been generally accepted as net benefits to humanity1.

I think what we see today isn’t so much a reversal on this position, but perhaps a sense of passivity and taking progress for granted. That scientific advancement just happens to us without deliberate effort.

Jason Crawford had some interesting thoughts on this subject on Roots of Progress, first posing a question on where progress comes from:

Most of the arguments in response supporting the second case fell into two categories:

  • Failure of imagination — ”I can’t imagine any big breakthroughs, so they must be flukes or strokes of luck” or
  • Materialism — ”Progress happens through exploitation of resources, so will peter out as we run out of physical materiel”

Exploring innovation’s inner workings is helpful in understanding the issues with these two arguments.

In his phenomenal book How Innovation Works, Matt Ridley describes innovation as a gradual, bottom-up, evolutionary process of thousands of small steps forward. We tend to look back on the history of progress and point to pillar breakthroughs like Orville and Wilbur at Kitty Hawk, Edison’s lightbulb, Marconi’s radio, or Pasteur’s vaccines, treating each as a Big Bang moment of inspiration that happened in one fell swoop. Ridley tells us this is a flaw in human reasoning; we love narratives and stories, so we spice up the reality of how these inventions came to be. The truth on the ground was much more gradual and dispersed in each of these cases. Hundreds of precursor steps had to happen, proffered by hundreds of different individuals dispersed around the globe. The Big Bang invention story takes as given the source branches lower on the tree that sprouted these successor innovations.

It’s not as if innovators aren’t actively pursuing discovery, that solutions just fell in their lap while sitting in their living rooms. The Wright Brothers knew that they were trying to get a flying machine off the ground. What they didn’t predict, though, was the impact that flight would have on global economics, war, trade, recreation, and every other dimension of modern life. The same is typically true of other instances of progress. From our position in the 21st century, it seems obvious that flight would have massive ramifications for the global order. But this is easy too see in hindsight. As Ridley puts it:

Technology is absurdly predictable in retrospect, wholly unpredictable in prospect.

I think Jason raises a good point on why we have trouble imagining where the next breakthrough will come from:

The historical reason is that the big breakthroughs of the past were not easy to imagine or predict before they happened. In a different context, Eliezer Yudkowsky points out that even the creators of inventions such as the airplane or the nuclear reactor felt that their breakthroughs were fifty years out, or even impossible, shortly before they happened. Now is no different.

One of the biggest factors to this trick of hindsight is that innovation in situ is a gradual phenomenon. Only in hindsight do we look back on it as a “eureka” process of going from 0 to 1 in a flash of inspiration. I think if you reframe your understanding of progress and innovation around a steady, gradual march of deliberate advances, you begin to see why waiting around for it to happen in big bursts is an incorrect model.

Another insight from Ridley is that innovation is rooted in trial and error. In a world where we’ve become hyper-concerned with risk and protecting against downsides (just look at our expanding regulatory complex — only growing, never shrinking), we slow ourselves down from making the errors necessary for progress. Edison, a man that turned innovation into a product in itself, had this to say on his process, acknowledging error as a baked-in prerequisite for discovery:

I’ve not failed, I’ve just found 10,000 ways it won’t work.

Regarding the point on material constraints, it’s worth reading into the concept of dematerialization. The best work on the topic I know of is Andrew McAfee’s More From Less, which dives deep on this topic of how much modern progress is able to not only continue but in most cases accelerate, all while using fewer resources than once required. Take the simple aluminum can: the first ones weighed 85 grams. Modern refinement and manufacturing processes have reduced that to 11. The book is filled with cases like this of dematerialization outpacing our increase in consumption. It’s not a universal law of innovation, but rather a pattern that we see with continued progress2.

Getting back to Jason’s original question — I believe that progress does have substantive causes. But between innovation’s gradual nature and the sea of trial and error, it’s hard to notice it while it’s happening. While you’re sitting in the present without the clarity of hindsight, it can feel like progress comes from flukes and strokes of luck3. But the deliberate effort and small victories add up (and compound) over time to enormous progress.

One of the goals of the progress studies movement is to expose what the sources of innovation are, to teach people how innovations came to be. And it’s important to recognize that innovation is intentional. It happens because we choose to work on making our lives better.

A final quote from the beginning of How Innovation Works (emphasis mine):

Innovation, like evolution, is a process of constantly discovering ways of rearranging the world into forms that are unlikely to arise by chance – and that happen to be useful.

  1. For most of human history, the unknown was treated as mystical and divine, rather than something that could be analyzed, understood, and deliberately improved. 

  2. Also check out McAfee’s interview about the book on EconTalk. 

  3. To be clear, serendipity does play a role. Teflon, famously, was accidentally discovered by Roy Plunkett in his time at DuPont. He was attempting to create a new refrigerant, and ended up coating the inside of a pressurized bottle with the slick material. But he was putting in work and seeking a discovery, he just ended up with a different one. As one of my favorite quotes from explorer Roald Amunsen goes: “Victory awaits him who has everything in order — luck, people call it.” 

Weekend Reading: Invading Markets, Sleep Deprivation, and the Observer Effect

June 13, 2020 • #

🎖️ Commandos, Infantry, and Police

Jeff Atwood on Robert X. Cringely’s descriptions of three groups of people you need to “attack a market”:

Whether invading countries or markets, the first wave of troops to see battle are the commandos. Woz and Jobs were the commandos of the Apple II. Don Estridge and his twelve disciples were the commandos of the IBM PC. Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston were the commandos of VisiCalc.

Grouping offshore as the commandos do their work is the second wave of soldiers, the infantry. These are the people who hit the beach en masse and slog out the early victory, building on the start given them by the commandos. The second-wave troops take the prototype, test it, refine it, make it manufacturable, write the manuals, market it, and ideally produce a profit.

What happens then is that the commandos and the infantry head off in the direction of Berlin or Baghdad, advancing into new territories, performing their same jobs again and again, though each time in a slightly different way. But there is still a need for a military presence in the territory they leave behind, which they have liberated. These third-wave troops hate change. They aren’t troops at all but police.

😴 Why Sleep Deprivation Kills

Behind all this is the astonishing, baffling breadth of what sleep does for the body. The fact that learning, metabolism, memory, and myriad other functions and systems are affected makes an alteration as basic as the presence of ROS quite interesting. But even if ROS is behind the lethality of sleep loss, there is no evidence yet that sleep’s cognitive effects, for instance, come from the same source. And even if antioxidants prevent premature death in flies, they may not affect sleep’s other functions, or if they do, it may be for different reasons.

📥 The Observer Effect: Marc Andreessen

A new interview series from Sriram Krishnan:

The Observer Effect studies interesting people and institutions and tries to understand how they work.

He kicks it off big with an interview with Marc Andreessen.

Weekend Reading: Dracones, Calendars, and Science 2.0

June 6, 2020 • #

🐉 Hic Sunt Dracones

Adam Elkus with a great essay on the current moment:

“Is this as bad as 1968?” is an utterly meaningless question precisely for this underlying reason. People do not invoke 1968 because of the objective similarities between 2020 and 1968. They do so because we have crossed a threshold at which basic foundations of social organization we take for granted now seem up for grabs. This is an inherently subjective determination, based on the circumstances of our present much as people in 1968 similarly judged the state of their worlds to be in flux. 1968 is an arbitrary signpost on an unfamiliar road we are driving down at breakneck speeds. You can blast “Gimme Shelter” on the car stereo for the aesthetic, but it’s not worth much more than that.

📆 Contemplating Calendars

Devon Zuegel with ideas on how to better utilize your calendar for things beyond appointments and meetings. A few ideas I’d like to commit to doing, especially with using the calendar as a recall tool for memory.

🔬 Science 2.0

Robin Hanson on experts, prestige, skepticism:

Just as our distant ancestors were too gullible (factually, if not strategically) about their sources of knowledge on the physical world around them, we today are too gullible on how much we can trust the many experts on which we rely. Oh we are quite capable of skepticism about our rivals, such as rival governments and their laws and officials. Or rival professions and their experts. Or rival suppliers within our profession. But without such rivalry, we revert to gullibility, at least regarding “our” prestigious experts who follow proper procedures.

Wernher von Braun and the Moon Landing

January 13, 2020 • #

This is a neat clip from Walt Disney’s Disneyland TV series. Wernher von Braun explains the future technology that’ll take us to the Moon, in 1955, several years before the Mercury program even began.

Microgravity Will Change How We Make Everything

December 4, 2019 • #

Bloomberg has been publishing this video series on future technologies called “Giant Leap.” It’s well-done and a nice use of YouTube as a medium.

This one explores a number of new companies doing R&D in microgravity manufacturing — from biological organ “printing” to creation of high-quality fiber optic materials. There are still some challenges ahead to unlock growth of space as a manufacturing environment, but it feels like we’re on the cusp of a new platform for industrial growth in the near future.

Weekend Reading: Figma Multiplayer, Rice vs. Wheat, and Tuft Cells

November 23, 2019 • #

🕹 How Figma’s Multiplayer Technology Works

An interesting technical breakdown on how Figma built their multiplayer tech (the collaboration capability where you can see other users’ mouse cursors and highlights in the same document, in real time).

🌾 Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice Versus Wheat Agriculture

A fascinating paper. This research suggests the possibility that group-conforming versus individualistic cultures may have roots in diet and agricultural practices. From the abstract:

Cross-cultural psychologists have mostly contrasted East Asia with the West. However, this study shows that there are major psychological differences within China. We propose that a history of farming rice makes cultures more interdependent, whereas farming wheat makes cultures more independent, and these agricultural legacies continue to affect people in the modern world. We tested 1162 Han Chinese participants in six sites and found that rice-growing southern China is more interdependent and holistic-thinking than the wheat-growing north. To control for confounds like climate, we tested people from neighboring counties along the rice-wheat border and found differences that were just as large. We also find that modernization and pathogen prevalence theories do not fit the data.

An interesting thread to follow, but worthy of skepticism given the challenge of aggregating enough concrete data to prove anything definitively. There’s some intuitively sensible argument here as to the fundamental differences with subsistence practices in wheat versus rice farming techniques:

The two biggest differences between farming rice and wheat are irrigation and labor. Because rice paddies need standing water, people in rice regions build elaborate irrigation systems that require farmers to cooperate. In irrigation networks, one family’s water use can affect their neighbors, so rice farmers have to coordinate their water use. Irrigation networks also require many hours each year to build, dredge, and drain—a burden that often falls on villages, not isolated individuals.

🦠 Cells That ‘Taste’ Danger Set Off Immune Responses

I’ve talked before about my astonishment with the immune system’s complexity and power. This piece talks about tuft cells and how they use their chemosensory powers to identify parasites and alert the immune system to respond:

Howitt’s findings were significant because they pointed to a possible role for tuft cells in the body’s defenses — one that would fill a conspicuous hole in immunologists’ understanding. Scientists understood quite a bit about how the immune system detects bacteria and viruses in tissues. But they knew far less about how the body recognizes invasive worms, parasitic protozoa and allergens, all of which trigger so-called type 2 immune responses. Howitt and Garett’s work suggested that tuft cells might act as sentinels, using their abundant chemosensory receptors to sniff out the presence of these intruders. If something seems wrong, the tuft cells could send signals to the immune system and other tissues to help coordinate a response.

Given the massive depth of knowledge about biological processes, anatomy, and medical research, it’s incredible how much we still don’t know about how organisms work. Evolution, selection, and time can create some truly complex systems.

A Network of Science

November 22, 2019 • #

A beautiful visualization project from Nature converts 150 years of scientific papers into a 3-dimensional network diagram, making concrete the network of citations and references linking together the history of discoveries.

Weekend Reading: Blot, Hand-Drawn Visualizations, and Megafire Detection

November 9, 2019 • #

📝 Blot.im

Blot is a super-minimal open source blogging system based on plain text files in a folder. It supports markdown, Word docs, images, and HTML — just drag the files into the folder and it generates web pages. I love simple tools like this.

🖋 Handcrafted Visualization: Precision

An interesting post from Robert Simmon from Planet. These examples of visualizations and graphics of physical phenomena (maps, cloud diagrams, drawings of insects, planetary motion charts) were all hand-drawn, in an era where specialized photography and sensing weren’t always options.

A common thread between each of these visualizations is the sheer amount of work that went into each of them. The painstaking effort of transforming a dataset into a graphic by hand grants a perspective on the data that may be hindered by a computer intermediary. It’s not a guarantee of accurate interpretation (see Chapplesmith’s flawed conclusions), but it forces an intimate examination of the evidence. Something that’s worth remembering in this age of machine learning and button-press visualization.

I especially love that Apollo mission “lunar trajectory” map.

🔥 The Satellites Hunting for Megafires

Descartes Labs built a wildfire detection algorithm and tool that leans on NASA’s GOES weather satellite thermal spectrum data, in order to detect wildfires by temperature:

While the pair of GOES satellites provides us with a dependable source of imagery, we still needed to figure out how to identify and detect fires within the images themselves. We started simple: wildfires are hot. They are also hotter than anything around them, and hotter than at any point in the recent past. Crucially, we also know that wildfires start small and are pretty rare for a given location, so our strategy is to model what the earth looks like in the absence of a wildfire, and compare it to the situation that the pair GOES satellites presents to us. Put another way our wildfire detector is essentially looking for thermal anomalies.

The Bacteria Light of the Future

July 25, 2019 • #

A French startup company called Glowee is working on being able to produce light using bioluminescence:

Glowee reinvents light production with technology nature has already created to make lighting more sustainable and healthier for both humans and the environment. Having identified the genetic coding that creates bioluminescence, Glowee inserts this code into common, non-toxic, and non-pathogenic bacteria to produce clean, safe, synthetic bioluminescence. Once engineered and grown, the bacteria are encapsulated into a transparent shell, alongside a medium composed of the nutrients they need to live and make light. This lighting solution can indefinitely and exponentially grow with little infrastructure needed and does not require any extraction of natural resources.

Because of the relatively low output of these biological sources of light, they want to focus first on nighttime lighting for things like street furniture and nighttime street lighting. But it’s a clever idea to how we could engineer energy sources with alternative fueling methods than electricity.

Imagine having to “feed” the lights in your house instead of simply paying a generation facility for watts delivered through wires.

Watch Karl Friston Explain Free Energy

June 28, 2019 • #

Neuroscientist Karl Friston is the world’s leading authority on brain imaging science and on the forefront of our understanding of how brains actually work. He’s the creator of the free energy principle, an idea that attempts to unify an organizing framework for what drives all life: minimizing free energy.

See also this excellent profile of Friston in Wired from late last year.

Process Not Products

April 14, 2019 • #

In his new book Loonshots, author Safi Bahcall uses the concept of phase transitions to analyze how companies work. When a substance changes phase, like water going from solid to liquid, the same exact substance is forced to take on a new structural form when the surrounding environment changes.

As Bahcall points out in the book, companies exhibit a similar behavior in their inventions and strategy. He contrasts two different types of innovations that companies tend to be built to produce: “P” type innovations, where a company is great at producing new products, and “S” type innovations, where they can stay ahead of the pack by developing new business strategies for the same products. There are many examples presented in the book of both types of innovation done right — Juan Trippe and Pan Am, Steve Jobs, Edwin Land and Polaroid, Bob Crandall and American Airlines — each of them was (or has been) a pillar innovator with a specialty in P or S types.

Process

Being great at a single type works great for a time, until the environment changes too much around you.

In the history of business, there are few examples of organizations able to straddle both phases simultaneously. Early on in the book there’s the example of Vannevar Bush, the engineer that led the historic Office of Scientific Research and Development during World War II. The OSRD was legendary for the systems and inventions developed during the war, many of which helped to tip the war in favor of the Allies. From the OSRD wiki page:

The research was widely varied, and included projects devoted to new and more accurate bombs, reliable detonators, work on the proximity fuze, guided missiles, radar and early-warning systems, lighter and more accurate hand weapons, more effective medical treatments, more versatile vehicles, and, most secret of all, the S-1 Section, which later became the Manhattan Project and developed the first atomic weapons.

What makes companies so focused on short term innovation, either in product or strategy? Humans (and organizations) are certainly known to be bad at having a long view of planning and decision making.

It’s a fascinating idea — that a successful, hard-to-kill organization becomes one by having a particular structure, one that can be water and ice at the same time. What Bush figured out 70 years ago was that the organization is what’s important. He focused on making organizations that could make great things, a focus on the process rather than its products:

This bit from a 1990 piece after his death sums it up:

He was an academic entrepreneur who co-founded Raytheon and was a vice president at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who consolidated the school’s reputation as having the nation’s finest engineering program. It’s not just that Bush was a brilliant engineer; it’s that Bush knew how to map, build and manage the relationships and organizations necessary to get things done. He knew how to craft the human networks that could build the technological networks.

Weekend Reading: T Cells, Creating Proteins, and SNI Awards

April 6, 2019 • #

🦠 T is for T Cell

After reading The Breakthrough, I’ve been doing more reading on immunotherapy, how it works, and what the latest science looks like. Another book in my to-read list is An Elegant Defense, a deeper study of how the immune system works. The human defensive system of white blood cells is a truly incredible evolutionary machine — a beautiful and phenomenally complex version of antifragility.

🧬 Engineering Proteins in the Cloud with Python

This stuff is crazy. Using modern compute, data science, and gene sequencing, you can now design proteins from your laptop:

Amazingly, we’re pretty close to being able to create any protein we want from the comfort of our jupyter notebooks, thanks to developments in genomics, synthetic biology, and most recently, cloud labs. In this article I’ll develop Python code that will take me from an idea for a protein all the way to expression of the protein in a bacterial cell, all without touching a pipette or talking to a human. The total cost will only be a few hundred dollars! Using Vijay Pande from A16Z’s terminology, this is Bio 2.0.

👩🏽‍💻 Spatial Networks Named a “Top Place to Work in Tampa Bay”

This is a fun one. I’ve been at Spatial Networks almost 10 years now. When I joined we were maybe 10 or 12 people, now we’re about 60 and still going up. It’s exciting to see the hard work paying off and validated — but like I say to our team all the time: it feels like we’re just getting started.

The Origin and Transmutation of Species

February 10, 2019 • #

Since The Origin of Species, Darwin’s theory of natural selection has been the foundation of our thinking about the evolution of life. Along the way there have been challengers to the broadness of that theory, and David Quammen’s The Tangled Tree brings together three core “modern” concepts that are beginning to take hold, providing a deeper understanding how lifeforms evolve.

The book mostly follows the research of the late Carl Woese, a microbiologist who spent his career studying microorganisms, looking for connections between creatures in the micro and macro. Beginning with Darwin’s tree of life, he sought to follow our individual branches back to the roots, looking for the cause of early splits and fractures in the genetic timeline that led us to where we are now.

Tree branches

The Tangled Tree traces the path of three separate yet interrelated discoveries over the past several decades:

  • The discovery of the Archaea — through the work of Woese and his associates, we now know that what was formerly a two-kingdom world of “prokaryotes” and “eukaryotes” was more complex than that. Hidden within the prokaryote kingdom was actually a genetically distinct kingdom dubbed “archaea.” These are fascinating creatures more like alien life than visually-similar bacteria, often found at the most extreme habitats like volcanic vents and permafrost layers fathoms deep.
  • Symbiogenesis — It was once thought that the organelles within cells developed on their own through natural selection and genetic mutation. This theory posits that certain components within cells were once their own independent (yet symbiotic) organisms, eventually subsumed by the host to become a single genetic lineage.
  • Horizontal gene transfer — This process is the most radical of all, and is the most germane to modern science, particularly when it comes to combating bacteria that can mutate and become invulnerable to current antibiotics. The process involves genes moving between branches of the tree, versus in the strictly linear ancestor → descendant fashion we’re all familiar with from biology class. Humans likely have had material inserted into our genomes in the relatively recent past from life far different from ourselves.

Quammen weaves together all of these ideas through the stories of their discoverers. There are probably a hundred different scientists mentioned in the book, many of whom collaborated along the way, sharing research findings and data to build a case that evolution doesn’t work exactly how we thought it did.

The diversity of life is difficult to comprehend, and the book brought out many statistics and factoids that stayed with me long after reading. How do 4 acids configured into various protein structures manifest as “life”? The sheer quantity of life growing and evolving beyond our level of perception is mind-boggling. The total mass of bacteria on earth exceeds that of all plants and animals combined. Within a typical human body, bacterial cells outnumber all other “human” cells by a 3-to-1 ratio. A bacteria known as prochlorococcus marinus is the most abundant lifeform, with 3 octillion individuals presumed to exist.

I’ve never been deeply interested in biology compared to other sciences, but The Tangled Tree was a thought-provoking, fascinating look at how much there is yet to be understood right at our fingertips. While we’re trying to understand the origins of the universe and what star systems look like millions of light years away, there’s also a mysterious, terrifyingly complex world within our own bodies.

Language and Progress

December 11, 2018 • #

A wide-ranging conversation on linguistics, human scientific advancement, and enlightenment thinking with Steven Pinker and John McWhorter.

Linguistics is endlessly fascinating.

I might be an outlier, but I absolutely love YouTube as a medium for this kind of content. This sort of long form video is an example of a fantastic new thing that couldn’t exist or thrive prior to YouTube.

Bits & Genes

March 14, 2017 • #

As I started The Gene, I was assuming it’d be framed as a history of genetics. There’s a significant amount of history on the discoveries made the last few centuries as scientists gained an understanding of how hereditary traits are encoded and transmitted. But my favorite parts of the narrative are when Mukherjee seeks to look at the gene as the fundamental building block, making comparisons to bits and atoms.

It reminded me of another book I’d like to revisit: James Gleick’s The Information. That book is to bits what The Gene was to genetics. Claude Shannon’s information theory shares so many parallels with genetics: both required technology to see nanoscopic things, rested on huge amounts of prior knowledge in physics, chemistry, and mathematics, and involved breaking down building blocks into ever more tiny requisite parts. Nearly all of our understanding of each of these sciences was gained since about 1950. We’re only just figuring out the fundamentals of both, and the potential for engineering them to our whims — through advancements in computing and AI on one end and gene splicing and gene therapy on the other. Genes are biological information. So I wonder what the next few decades will look like as the two disciplines start to converge.

Underwater Flight

August 12, 2012 • #

Graham Hawkes has a fascinating approach to undersea research and exploration. Rather than focusing on deep ocean submersibles (which he’s built plenty of), his company is currently building underwater airplanes, craft that fly through the water with hydrodynamic wings and thrusters, capable of flying alongside dolphins and manta rays. Hawkes is obsessed with the ocean, and is fond of saying to space explorers that their “rockets are pointing in the wrong direction”. It’s amazing how little is known about the ocean floor, and how relatively little funding we roll into hydro-exploration.

Deep Flight Challenger

The R&D work Hawkes is doing is amazing, focusing more effort on underwater flight than deep ocean dives. While they have built craft for the purpose of superdeep dives, that doesn’t seem to be Hawkes’ passion. They’ve designed and built several craft to study hydrodynamics, provide research platforms for scientists, and modes of transportation for recreation or studying the seafloor. The Merlin and the Challenger are two vessels funded by Richard Branson, under the moniker Virgin Oceanic.

I found myself obsessed with Hawkes and his work, and spent Sunday morning trolling the internet reading interviews and backstories, and watching videos of his projects. The notion of underwater flight is fascinating to me, and makes me wonder why the technology hasn’t caught on and become a popular attraction for divers in the tropics, to allow divers to fly through reefs and wrecks. I imagine flying over the Great Barrier reef for hundreds of miles sightseeing, stopping along the way for closer looks. Or diving to depth between the Cayman Islands, soaring over the bottom with sea turtles and schools of fish.

His company is running a Kickstarter campaign to fund a field test expedition to Lake Tahoe with his two-seater, Super Falcon, to perform “hydrobatic” maneuvers in the deep parts of the lake. If you’re as interested as I am in this stuff, here are some other links to check out:

(In my browsing yesterday, I also read about the Aquarius Reef Base, an undersea research station operated by NOAA since the 1980s. It sits on the bed of Conch Reef off the coast of Key Largo. The project is in danger of being shuttered soon, so they’ve launched a funding campaign to try and save the project.)