Genotype

The Fact of Totality

2012-01-24T10:50:00.013Z

In the play I'm going to write, which is going to be called "The Fly Room", the characters are the inhabitants of a total library. Like in the legendary Library of Alexandria (of which this is a 19th Century German engraving of an imagining thereof), all the wisdom of the ages, including all the genetic information, is stored in one place, curated and researched by a genetically dedicated team, whose universe this library is.

Years ago, something happened. A power outrage...a war...they don't know. What they do know is that they have had no contact with the outside world for hundreds of years, and that, in the disruption, the total information the library held was scrambled...not destroyed, but differentially encoded. Now, at last, they've found the code...and are beginning to re-assemble and reinterpret the material of their world. The ideational underpinning of this sci fi scenario comes from my own experience of texts...and libraries. I was writer in residence at the National Library of Scotland before coming here...

As to texts, if 1859's Origin of Species was the Ur-text of evolutionary thought, then Erwin Schrodinger's "What is Life?" from 1944 was the founding text of what one might call the genomic view of life. The great quantum physicist applied what he had come to understand about matter to the special form of matter that "lives"...and his text was a direct inspiration to the generation of physicists turned biologists...Crick, Gamow, Szilard, Urey etc etc etc...who took his intuitions about the mechanism of inheritance and turned it to evidence and then an industry in the seventies and eighties...an industry that pulled clumsily, expensively and not always happily together to accomplish biology's equivalent to the Apollo missions to the Moon : the sequencing of the total human genome.

That text...the genome...is now itself a foundation and a map for a dizzying array of ideas and explorations, and, most crucially, mechanisms...life has in FACT as well as idea, become a machine. But the logic of all this still comes down the question Schrodinger asked in his introduction :

How can events in space and time which take place within a living organism be accounted for?

Accounted for, that is, within the materialist viewpoint of physics and chemistry, rather than a teleology - divine or otherwise. From the point of view of the physicist, what is strange about "life" is how orderly it is. Life is an island of anti-entropy. James Lovelock noticed the same thing...it's the basis of his Gaia hypothesis, where all life on earth needs must be considered as a single self regulating entity...jut like the individual organisms that make it up.

Now, I'm agnostic on Gaia. This is partly because I'm instinctively attracted to arguments that start by treating the familiar as anomalous. Hence I'm loath to dismiss it as easily as most right thinking materialists have.

(My theatrical master, Bertolt Brecht, said that the playwright must always treat what his or her society sees as self-evident as surprising!)

It's also because I have yet to come across the argument that would convince me that it is any more weird to regard life-in-total as "impelled by the survival imperative" than it is to regard individual cows, fruitflys or mushrooms as "impelled" to live and survive and reproduce...and self regulate. Genomics has demonstrated self-regulation, switching...choices being made by molecules in four dimensions at every level of natural selection from genes to populations...and at every stage in embryonic development into adulthood and beyond. So why is that impossible for "life" in the world? All of it? Real question.

Anyway, my librarians exist to be tortured by the certainty that they have access to all the information any conceivable civilisation could ever need...but that none of it is reliable. They only have their own inherited flaws and capabilities to go on and to judge with. What they are hoping to discover first is who has put them here and why. For they know that a library cannot, surely, have arisen by chance...I mean...if you found a watch lying by the roadside, could you not deduce a watchmaker?

Oh...there is a fab cartoon set about Schrodinger's famous dead-and-alive cat at: http://abstrusegoose.com/secret-archives/in-a-parallel-world

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

purposeful dreaming

2012-01-18T12:03:00.005Z

To continue the thought from the last post a little, it may be that what was hyped as the revolution was actually a sideshow. Just as it was the technologies arising from the EFFORT of the Apollo moon shots rather than the moon shots themselves that ended up changing the world (principally through developments in computing, semi conductors etc etc) it may be that it is the ethos and methods that went into the effort to sequence the human genome rather than the headline sequencing itself that is the real change.

Thomas Kuhn's definition of "paradigm shift" is centred on changes to the daily practice of science, rather than its ideology or "meaning".

Horizon, the BBC's flagship science show had a huge impact on me in the 70s, partly because I'm the right age for the properly childish excitement of the moonshots and Viking and Voyager and all that...to have hit me between the eyes growing up.

Take a look at this recent episode, if you missed it the other night. The excitement has become complicated by unease.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/b01b45zh/

In the show, the rendering of genetic material and the proteins to which genes code...that is, the making of machines out of living material...is surveyed by Adam Rutherford, who, like me, is a bit staggered and disoriented...by putting silk-making genes from spiders into goats in Utah...and then getting silk from the milk...(seriously!)...by feeding sugar to yeast and getting diesel...(no, really) in California. And in a community centre based bio-tech lab with open source access for all...and six year olds transferring luminous genes from jellyfish into E Coli...all at the touch of a mouse...(oh, and the mouse with its brain wired to a light source so that it gets dopamine hits by pushing a button...I couldn't watch that at all)

The shift is in what people DO...every day...what we think about what they do comes after, and not nearly fast enough to keep up.

The hardest shift in my work is to go from research (which feels like work) to purposeful day-dreaming...which is how you actually get to create things, but makes you feel guilty. (or me, anyway)...and maybe a bit of my, and Adam Rutherford's discomfort at what is happening in synthetic biology all the way from the mega-corporations buying up rainforest so they can feed sugar cane to microbes and get a substitute for petrol to the folks in their garages building lego monsters out of biobricks is that it feels like all this has passed me by...and I was looking out for it...

Out of control? World gone wrong? I'm too old? There are times I wake up a Tory.

Brother, Can You Paradigm?

2012-01-12T13:35:00.007Z

I asked very early in the residency about whether or not this thing called "genomics" represented what’s called a paradigm shift. This is the confirmation of a scientific idea or principle that fundamentally alters both the general frame of ideas and the daily practices of science and was coined by Thomas Kuhn in his "Structure of Scientific Revolutions" in 1962.

I still don’t know the answer, but maybe it wasn’t quite the right question. There’s lots of work going on using the genomic understanding of evolution, and of development in utero, of personalised genetic diagnosis, of the making of nanomachines for targeted drug delivery, for the synthesising of micro and macro organisms for the purposes of research. Despite out straitened times, there’s still a lot of money around. There’s a lot of thinking about the economic potential of all this, and the potential impact on our ideas about identity, humanity…life itself.

Does this constitute a paradigm shift? Are we really asking different questions or arriving at different answers? Or are ideas lagging behind the day to day lab practice which certainly has shifted...is there anything, ideationally speaking, new?

(If the Higgs Boson turns not to be anywhere at any voltage, THAT's a shift...that's a rending of garments and a gnashing of textbooks)

As I head away from researching primary sources and towards scripting the first performed sharing of some ideas specific to the play that I’ve started to write, it is general ideas, worlds, that I am starting to imagine. A play is, in one way of thinking, a place. The theatre space in the imagined here and now is an arena, a world where personality and principle can fight it out. It is a place with rules…and it is those rules that I’m thinking about at two very different orders of scale.

First…that my life, our lives, a paramecium’s life, a dog’s life….rather than being actually existing things that share an abstract quality called life, are in fact all distinct abstract expressions of an actually existing thing…a thing that is called life.That matter itself, let alone living matter, is best metaphor-ed as “an island of localised order”…and is a temporary anomaly soon to be corrected…”in an ocean of entropy” - and if James Lovelock isn’t onto something with his Gaia hypothesis, I wish he was.

In terms of daily practice…that The Fly Room, the experimental space where the evolution of fruit flies has been messed around with by biology students since TH Morgan more than a hundred years ago, is where we live every day. That our daily practice of life is taking place in an experimental environment where we have no control and no guarantees of ever understanding what's going on and who or what the test is all about.

This is the world view my play will describe and that its characters will inhabit, and I’ll be reading and thinking about it and sharing it every so often…as I go looking around in it, testing it on their behalf.

And is that a paradigm? Is the world of a play a sort of paradigm? Where only certain actions can take place and are comprehended in specific ways…and if a character escapes from the world the playwright makes, does that break the play and make it unwatchable?

Or is that the shift we’ve been waiting for? Is that what makes it a hit?

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

This Is The Way The World Ends...not with a bang, but repeatedly passed through a ferret

2011-12-22T12:36:00.029Z

H5N1 is a strain of bird flu. Scientists in Wisconsin and Rotterdam have just proved its future transmissability between mammals by repeatedly infecting a chain of unfortunate ferrets, and the virus has evolved along the way, like viruses do. This hellish material now exists in a new strain that is airborne and can pass from mammal to mammal.

This research is of course essential. One of these days a virus is going to make the species jump that was made in the past by Measles (from cows), Scarlet fever (horses), HIV (chimps) ...and will one day become a threat to human health. And we need to know if and how that's going to happen. Hence the research.

But none of them, according to the US National Science Advisory Board for BioSecurity (NSABB) have got anything on this baby. NSABB chair Paul Keim said in November "I can't think of another pathogenic organism that is as scary as this one. I don't think anthrax is scary at all compared to this."

In 1918 and 19, a form of bird flu killed 100 million people...with a death rate of 2%...that is, for every 100 people who were infected, 2 died. This one, apparently, comes in at 60%.

Sixty. Six Nothing. So...do the wee bit of math...with the same spread as last time, that's three billion people...now factor in an increased human population and air travel...and...

AAAAAAGGGGHHHHH! Stop breathing! Everybody! Immediately!

The reason this has been in the news in the last couple of days is that the NSABB has asked Science and Nature to redact...censor...the publication of these results. They think that we're going to get some fundamentalists buying themselves some chickens and some ferrets and start making this stuff in a garage somewhere. There is a lot more horror from the scientific community about the censorship than there is about the apocalyptic potential of terrorists getting hold of this stuff. Research and prophylaxis will be hampered, they say, unless the the flow of information gets everywhere it needs to get.

And making a weaponised version of this stuff is going to be TOUGH...you can't just pop it in the post. It was a long time ago that the idea of how to make an atom bomb occurred to Leo Szillard. And no one's put one in a suitcase yet.

(He was crossing a road in London in 1933. He blanked out when he put one foot on the road...and when he found himself standing on the other side of Southampton Row, he knew that it would work. But it took a lot of time and money to turn his epiphany into a mushroom cloud over Hiroshima...after which he reinvented himself as a biologist and sci-fi novelist.)

Besides, and this is the real point, something is going to get us one day. Bound to. Nature works like that. Viruses evolve very very fast...and they're always looking for new places to live. HIV doesn't want to kill people...you don't want to blow your new house up...but it takes a while to adjust to each other. We'll be naturally immune in a thousand years or so...and we'll both be happy. In the meantime, however...

Remember Jared Diamond's "Guns Germs and Steel"? It was Measles that conquered America. John Wayne only had a bit part. The Europeans had immunity. And the Native Americans didn't...the rest was just mopping up.
And one day sooner or later evolution of some kind or other, cosmic, climactic or biological is going to give us a right good kicking. Asteroids, climate change, viruses are all waiting in the queue for the apocalypse.

(This is all ending up in the play I'm going to write, by the way. It's a science fiction play, and no good science fiction can miss the trick of wiping out humanity some way or other.)

I think I've just found the way it's going to be. But it won't be terrorists who do it. Nah. Who needs blokes with beards and fixed opinions on homosexuality? As Mark Honigsbaum wrote in yesterday's Guardian, when it comes to terror, nature is the man for the job.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/dec/21/bird-flu-bioterrorist-h5n1?INTCMP=SRCH

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Rare

2011-12-13T10:01:00.016Z

This is an illustration of the Drake Equation, which is a mathematical model that has been used since the 1960s (when CETI was set up) to calculate the number of intelligent life forms "out there" who might have something they wanted to say to us. Even a brief hello...or maybe something in exchange for the transmissions of the X Factor we're currently beaming into eternity. Like a death ray if there's any justice.

The first three numbers, entirely unfeasibly at the time of its first formulation, are creeping up and up and up. As measured by gravitational wobbling and periodic dimming of stars, the number of planets found is now in the hundreds, and those within the "ecoshell" as pushing half a dozen...probably. Even the fourth number, given all the water and vulcanicity which seems to be around in our solar system, is at least theoretically not zero...probably.

So what's keeping them? When will ET do his duty by us? And save us from ourselves?

Well, the more I read in the converging disciplines of developmental biology, chemistry, paleontology, climatology...and genomics, the bigger the conceptual gap between fl and fi, the fourth and fifth terms of the equation, seems to be. And the more apparent it is that we have to look to ourselves a bit sharpish for salvation.

Andrew Knoll, in his magnificent, every five pages mind-boggling ""Life on a Young Planet" , summarises it like this: "While the story of evolution undoubtedly includes human beings, it is not about us...life's history is a gripping saga of cyanobacterial survival, a cautionary tale of trilobitic fall, or the inspirational story of yeasts finding sustenance in rotting fruit...Whatever the merits of viewing earth as our world, we could not persist without the bacteria and algae, as well as the plants and animals"

The number of things that had to go right, and keep going right, for life not only to exist but for life to exist with the right chemistry for getting on for 4 billion years, with water having arrived here at just the right time, for the temperature to have ranged so narrowly, for the right abundance of oxygen and calcium to coincide for the formation of skeletons (a prerequisite for diversity of form and function), leaves a yawning, maybe more or less unbridgeable gap between there being life and there being complex, multi-cellular life...leave alone all the stuff that's happened since the Cambrian explosion gave rise to plants and animals...including mass extinctions and climate change that has fortuitously coincided with mutations in wheat grass to let us discover agriculture which is the sine qua non...etc etc etc...and I didn't even get to beating Hitler, which was helpful

Man made global warming is the least of it. Take a look at this graphic.

The present day is at the right hand end. As you can see, it's pretty damn cold at the minute...earth has usually been much, much hotter than it is now. It is, nicely for us, a bit parky.

And before Nigel Lawson gets all excited and says "Well there we are then...fire up my Hummer immediately", just because climate change is natural doesn't mean it's good for us. Our civilisation has emerged in a period of warming at the tail end of a glaciation period (whose end we are accelerating) and the climate owes us diddly squat.

God may be dead, but his shadow falls over us whenever we imagine that we are "meant" to be here. Meant by whom? Ourselves, of course, is the only possible answer to that question, which means that, as as ever, we are, like all forms of life ever, on a cusp between altruism and individuality as a survival strategy. We have to decide who "we" are.

The language of evolution has been hijacked ever since Darwin to justify the rich in doing whatever they feel like doing and paying no tax in the meantime. Progress and natural selection have been culturally identified with psychopathic behaviour in the marketplace and on the battlefield. Just like Divine Providence once upon a time.

The fact, however, is that the tension between cooperation and competition as alternatives WITHIN taxonomic groups is as universal as DNA itself...more so. I am finding it possible now to conceive of all our political conflicts within this view of life, and to read in the graph of climate change a political imperative to identify the values that will alone protect us from the next set of depredations of the rich, for which, honest to God, the latest unequal division of economic pain is only a minor rehearsal. If people like Murdoch are still in charge when the whip comes down, then the survivors are not going to be nice liberal folk like you and me...they're going to be unpleasant beyond the dreams of Al Quaida. There's an unnatural selection coming, and we really don't want those people making the rules.

I observe too, tangentially, that just as it was possible for Dante Alighieri to write a poem that encompassed the universe in 1309, for the first time since, that holistic view is possible again. And it's called human science. As above so below...uncertainty at every scale - convergence and homogony and happenstantial selection are everywhere you look. It is breathtaking and beautiful to be alive right now.

Science awaits its Dante. And climate change its Karl Marx. I don't imagine that's a job description I could fill...I'm just writing an undivine comedy about genetically engineered librarians. But to finish my blogs before the hols, I did want to attempt a brief panegyric.

We live on rare earth
At exactly the right time
We should act like it.

There. Stick that Boson up your accelerator and detect it.

Happy Holidays.
Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

11 Small Songs About Everything

2011-12-01T15:33:00.009Z

1

At the heart of
Lived and illusory experience
Is the feeling that there’s somebody watching

That we’re apart from the things we are a part of
That there are always two of each of us.

2

Our ancestors became objects of worship
So very early on,
Because it is unsettling that the dead
Those who are absent from the world
Stay present in our minds

I suspect that our being incomplete and double,
Has, Ab-originally speaking.
Something to do with feeling
that if, after we’re dead
We exist - Why not now?

3

The future tense
The ability to imagine consequences
To make plans, have ideas, write them down
And imagine alternative future versions of ourselves
(if we sow or eat the harvest)
Is a subset of this initial, unnerving intuition
And finding death when we discovered life

There are two of me in the future depending
on me right now

4

In compensation for the experience
of memory and anticipation,
We evolved or we invented
(it hardly matters which)
Our sense of self, a continuous being
With a name
Who was, and is now, and ever shall be.

Perhaps that’s what happened when
Eve bit the apple.
Perhaps that was the Fall

5

Our conversations with God
Have always been ways to talk
About the future with ourselves.

(The future briefly replaced God, even,
As an object of hope and worship
And as a repository for justification
But has been found to be equally untenable.)

6

While atheists are fond of saying,
(Leaning forward with a pipe and a pint)
"God has proved himself
An unnecessary hypothesis,"
Some of us, even atheists
Are not comfortable
With the future going the same way.

To live without God and Hope too
Makes us mean and instrumental
Narrow and unpleasant to be with

7

Reality isn’t good for us
But then
We’ve always known that

We’re still looking for something, anything, in reality
To console us for dying

In the molecules of our sameness
Of memory and inheritance,
Can we find in genomic longevity
A substitute for immortality?
In molecular homogony, for belonging?
Can we find in the changes and contingencies
Of amino acids our identity?
And ways to be happy about what happens next?
Can we pray to the way things really are?
Can we learn
How not to need God
And how not to be him as well?

8

There is the comfort
That our questions now
Across the wastes of time and political economy
Are the same ones we’ve been asking
Since we got ourselves kicked out of the garden.

Our answers too are all the same
Negotiations of the same dualities
Lostnessess and wishes,
And all of these have been useful.

We’ve made beauty from them
As well as thefts and murders.

9

Our deeper realities than the real
Called Brahma and quanta and the like
Are better means than they are ends.

Lovely things have been done with them
Our condemned and privileged, evolved or invented
loneliness and love

And terrible, terrible things.

10

We are adapted to watch ourselves experiencing
The unlikeliness of being real.

Like all adaptations to reality
The only end is failure
while reality goes on.

11

The measure of everything is everything
The rest is songs and silence.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

In Search of the Great Money River - Bacteria that Cheat and Biologists that Patent

2011-11-24T12:35:00.017Z

Following on from the philosophical ramblings in previous posts, I think I'm ready for a case study of living in two worlds at once. The source of the story I'm going to attempt to reconstruct is James Watson's racy and readable account of the making of the DNA business from inception to corporation (DNA : The Secret of Life Random House 2003). The immediate inspiration, however, is watching my colleagues here at the Forum, talented brainboxes to a man and woman, spending most of their time filling out funding applications. Whatever we think our jobs might be, our real occupation is seeking for the Great Money River.

(Hence the above illustration of John Manning Speke and his splendid beard "discovering" the place where the chaps in the background have been living for quite some time.)

"The Great Money River" fiction fans may recognize as the single most instructive image of capitalism ever devised...from God Bless You Mr Rosewater by Kurt Vonnegut Jr, who passed on to sit on the right hand of the Almighty not too long ago.

I quote:

" forget about hard work and the merit system and honesty and all that crap, and get to where the river is. Go where the rich and the powerful are and learn their ways. They can be flattered and they can be scared. Please them enormously or scare them enormously, and one moonless night they will put their fingers to their lips, warning you not to make a sound. And they will lead you through the dark to the widest, deepest river of wealth ever known to man. You'll be shown your place on the riverbank, and handed a bucket all your own. "

Well, for a while there the Human Genome Project was a ladder down the bases to the Great Money River...allaying anxieties and promising immortality to the rich. There's a book I'm reading published at the height of the genomic hype in the 1990s (BEFORE the thing was sequenced/published/drafted, significantly) called The DNA Mystique by Dorothy Nelkin and M. Susan Lindee where they quote entertainingly from the claims of universality and truth which were the marketing hallmark of the enterprise.

The scientists themselves, unless they're chasing money, tend to eschew what some call "astrological genetics" - where there are held to be, for example, genes "for":

"obesity, criminality, shyness, directional ability, intelligence, political preferences, violence, celebrity, pleasure seeking, sinning, saving and being a couch potato....Genetic essentialism reduces the self to a molecular entity, equating human beings with their genes"

Nelkin and Lindee go on to say that "DNA in popular culture functions as a secular equivalent of the soul. Independent of the body, the genome is immortal. Fundamental to identity, DNA explains individual differences, moral order and human fate"

That was the pitch...that was the temptation. And it ignored the fact that most of the genome isn't "genes" at all - but junk. It turned out later on that the junk - repeats, introns - was fascinating in its own right. As a structure, as a moleculer, the human genome is a biography of all of our "species" encounters with viruses, and with evolutionary paths not chosen...and some of it, in terms of the spaces between genes (and hence how they work together in different organs, different stages of life) is essential to how the genes...the exons...work

...none of this was (or is) of much interest to the rich...who want power and cures...and hence offers no route-map to the money river. So why I'm following it above all God knows...

Handing over to Watson, remembering the early days of the project from which he was edged out: "Why should we sequence the entire genome - why bother with the junk? There is actually a quick and dirty way to secure a snapshot of all the coding genes in the genome using reverse transcriptase technology" - that is, working back from the messenger RNA to the coding sections of DNA - "Purify a sample of messenger RNA from the brain...using reverse transcription you can create DNA copies (called cDNAs) of these genes...and the cDNA's can be sequenced."

Not just sequenced (cloned) but OWNED...patented...liscenced.

And that's exactly what happened...and would have kept happening had not the publicly funded scientists not just started publishing them in open internet sources...

(Gawd bless the public sector...sod you Michael Gove)

This meant that the new science od "Genomics" was already divided into two...one half (the sexy bit) was capable of being monetized, while the other remained "merely" a description of how things are and what it all means.

Which is, I think, a local manifestation of the dichotomy, or split personality, of all knowledge...which is what I think I've been going on about.

Anyway...

Cooperation and cheating, appearance and reality. An old story. Well...it's even older than you think.

I've been finding that "genomics" is altogether more nuanced, altogether more altogether than the hype threatened and promised. Genetics and environment interact unpredictably at all parts in the life cycle. Though this has the advantage of being true, it's a lot harder to sell. At the same time though, there is a holistic, fractional, metaphysic arising...a sameness, a conditionality which I find attractive. And I find it all over the place.

For instance, and to tie this entery together with stuff I wrote in earlier posts about human altruism and its viccissitudes, it turns out that it may well be that the only thing that has saved us from extinction (so far) may be that bacteria, like people, seem to have choices; to be able to choose to collaborate in groups or compete within groups. To "cheat"

(This harks way back in the blog to when I was writing about the problem of human altruism as tragically played out in the life and death of Geoprge Price...ie if we are all Darwinian individuals solely driven by reproductive genetic self interest, what makes us give money to Save the Whale? inter alia?)

I quote again...from up to the minute research:

"It has been suggested that bacterial cells communicate by releasing
and sensing small diffusible signal molecules in a process commonly
known as quorum sensing (QS). It is generally assumed
that QS is used to coordinate cooperative behaviours at the population
level. However, evolutionary theory predicts that individuals
who communicate and cooperate can be exploited. Here
we examine the social evolution of QS experimentally in the
opportunistic pathogen Pseudomonas aeruginosa, and show that
although QS can provide a benefit at the group level, exploitative
individuals can avoid the cost of producing the QS signal or of
performing the cooperative behaviour that is coordinated by QS,
and can therefore spread."

(Diggle et al. Nature September 2007)

Bacteria, having been around long before us and being dominant in life on earth now and long after we've all succumbed to whatever it turns out to be in the long list of things we're going to have available for us to succumb to...cooperate and cheat. Just like we do. And if they got it together, we'd be a meat store...

Gives a man pause, shore nuff. I wonder how I could sell THAT?

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Aristotle in the Cheeseshop

2011-11-22T13:37:00.013Z

"Aristotle's doctrines were a very strong and lasting influence in the history of the world because of their compatibility with observation. For us, as for Aristotle, it is the sun and the stars that rise and set...As we proceed on our daily tasks it does not appear to us that the Earth is moving at high velocity. If we drop a stone and a feather from a high cliff into the sea then of course the stone reaches the sea before the feather does. "

Bernard Lovell. In the Centre of Immensities.

I'm such an amateur, in both senses of the word. I look back over the stuff I've written on this blog since May, and sometimes I catch the sound of myself pontificating away at the Traverse Bar...and I think "Who do you think you're fooling?"

My job was supposed to be to respond creatively to the philosophical/social/political challenge of the genomic view of life. I was supposed to come up with a drama. Instead I'm doing this over weight and unconvincing Bronowski impersonation, regurgitating half digested information I've just come across as if I've known it all the time.

A playwright is an actor with a pencil.

But then when I read something like the above written by one of the most famous 20th Century British astronomers, and it makes me feel a bit better. See, I had a chemistry teacher at school who once told me I was "as stupid as Aristotle"...which even aged twelve and still basically reading Marvel Comics to the exclusion of all else, struck me as a peculiar put down.

(He'd asked me to name an element. And I'd said "Fire"...based on information about a character in The Fantastic Four, as it happens...and that's when he hit me with the above epithet. I wish I could say it became my school nickname, but it didn't. Not the "Aristotle" bit anyway.)

Stephen Jay Gould wrote a lot about the arrogance of the "now". The assumption that because the scientific world view has been so successful that previous thinkers from other, older times must have been wilfully thick not to see what now seems so obvious...when had these god bothered ivory tower dwellers taken the trouble to look out of the window, had they observed empirically like they should have done, they'd have quite clearly seen what we can clearly see.

Lovell's point is that if we look out of the window we only see what Aristotle saw...that we have to learn how to see the earth going round the sun, or the chemistry that fuels digestion...or, just maybe, that neutrinos, once in a while, seem to beat photons in a hundred yard dash...

We don't live, except intellectually, in the world as it is. We live in reality as an evolved element of it. We have to engineer reality in order to understand it, and understand it in order to engineer it. And for a non scientist like myself, for the bit of me that's a writer, what my attempt to assimilate the genomic "view of life" amounts to is an extraordinary enriching of available metaphors. Honest to God, it's like waking up in a sweetshop (or even better, a cheese shop). I don't know where to start.

Which is why, I think, what I've come up with as a scenario reflects that sense of both richness and disorientation. It's going to be publicised in the next Traverse Brochure, and will try out some ideas which may or may not become the play I write. Briefly, it's about librarians trapped with the total information of the universe at their disposal...but who've forgotten how to read.

I know...iffy...but it feels how I feel and you've got to start somewhere.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Queequeg's Coffin or The Lifeboat

2011-11-22T11:15:00.022Z

Before I get going, I want to think about this image for a second. This was how it was chosen to "market" the project for sequencing the human genome. We are contained and confined and defined by it. That's what it says. The gene is the essential us. Every branch of knowledge falls into its helical embrace.

Shudder!

Like every other "View of Life", genomics seems to me to be capable of being used in two ways: the way of Ahab or the way of Ishmael. A restless wish to master and control the experience of being alive... against a rather fluffier, more accepting, more systemic sense of being part of a continuum which we cannot seek to master. Religion, I think, has similarly bipolar potential.

What is wrong in the image above (and with almost all religions) is the idea that it's all about us. Take us out of the centre of the image, and genomics, I think, offers "us" liberation, not confinement. Freedom, not definition.

Like all good ideas, genomics is capable of being at least two opposite metaphors at the same time. But if you listen to the hype, genomics is all about mastery. Taking the stuff of life and making of it the raw material for commerce, for technical innovation. Oddly, the promise of total control of our biological destiny is the way this idea of life's interconnections and interdependence has been sold to us.

Now I'm all for enhancing our quality of life through an enhanced technical capacity. I don't believe I suffer from residual "essentialism", from any idea that life, as such, is sacred and not to be messed with. Far from it. If anything, my own "View of Life" is more rigorously material and relativist the more I find out about it through this residency. A molecule is just a molecule.

It's "mastery" I distrust as a metaphor for how we should regard ourselves and our relationship with nature. It's "truth" I distrust as a metaphor for our intellectual interactions with stuff. Including human nature. I don't think it's a coincidence that the financial technocrats whose delusions currently afflict us are referred to as the "masters of the universe", even if they had the plastic toys rather than the gods in mind. The track record of mastery in its financial manifestation is poor and the future prospects for that "view of life", if anything, are worse.

Bruce McKibben, in "the End of Nature", one of the founding texts of modern environmentalism, put forward the idea that our metaphor of being actors upon a stage...humanity in nature...was no longer tenable. Specifically, that "man made global warming" undermined our "stewardship" of this ball of rock and water we call home. That we are living in the Anthropocene era...that we are causing such fundamental changes in the climate, (and, if the 1 October edition of New Scientist is to be believed, in earth's geology as well) that we need to adjust our thinking to a different kind of reality. A different metaphor, in our terms. To quote David Cameron, that we are all in it together. But we have to mean it.

The temptation is to see ourselves as the devil. But we're no more the devil than we're God. It's the separateness of the ideas of "human" and "natural" that is being rendered incoherent by the new demands on us for living in the world consciously.

Genomics, I think, fundamentally challenges both sides of the "Human/Nature" dialectic. It integrates our biology fundamentally and practically with biology tout court. It fosters, as does the threat of environmental catastrophe, a systemic way of thinking about "life" which radically de-centres humanity, humbles us, in fact, while at the same time demanding of us urgent self-protection. To see ourselves as an accidental and temporary evolutionary product dramatises the contingency of our civilisation. Both terms, both metaphors - human and nature - are now of questionable utility in getting us to do what we need to do.

A very narrow window for "life as we know it" opened at the receding of the ice from the middle east 10 000 years ago that can just as easily and dramatically find itself closing. Human exceptionalism, like American exceptionalism, is a fantasy in the mind of Michelle Bachman. Rather the reverse of exceptionalism is more and more overwhelmingly the case, both in terms of how we hope to survive as a "civilisation" and of how we see ourselves, what metaphors we use to describe and think about ourselves.

I suspect that the fact that climate change denial joins manifest destiny and "the right to life" on every Republican platform is itself a response to the slippage of mastery as a tenable image of our relationship with nature and with each other. Fundamentalists of all stripes are insisting so loudly that "we are who we say we are" that one suspects that they secretly doubt it.

My last three blogs have all been heading in the direction of some sort of synthesis. Between Cezanne's renunciation of the joys of perspective, to Andrew Knoll's bacteria-centric model of "life" to Carl Sagan's celebration of the immensity of time, I think there is a liberating and emotional connection.

We are time and environment limited. Only by learning how not to be God, only by learning that we are not the centre of everything can we learn to be the centre of ourselves. We have to learn a new way to value ourselves and each other that not only does not seek to deny our contingency and material commonality with "nature" but takes inspiration and purpose not from our imaginary strength and uniqueness, but from our actual, demonstrable weakness, fragility and dependence.

For this purpose, may I offer a small selection of equivalences in the hope of their utility.

Complexity is evidence of improvisation
Natural selection is intelligent chance.
God is Dice.
Mastery is illusion.
We do not and cannot live in the world the way it really is.
Metaphors are how we make things useful to us.
To observe is to act upon the world.
There is no one but ourselves who cares to save us.
The measure of everything is everything
The measure of "man" is whatever we want it to be
Ishmael survived.
Ahab went down with the whale.

Shantih Shantih Shantih

Oh...quick recommendation, next time you hear someone describe Hitler as a Darwinist, (and hence Darwin as Hitler), send them this.

http://coelsblog.wordpress.com/2011/11/08/nazi-racial-ideology-was-religious-creationist-and-opposed-to-darwinism/

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Om - Traverse Bar 4pm November 24th

2011-11-15T15:39:00.013Z

Ah, Carl Sagan! There was a TV series in which no one said "I've had an incredible journey to discover just how much I care about cauliflowers"...and which actually WAS a journey.

It moves and does not move
It is far and near likewise
It is inside all this
It is outside all this

Whoever sees
All beings in the self (atman)
And the self in all beings
Does not shrink away from it.

For the one who knows
In whom all beings have become self
How can there be delusion or grief
When he sees oneness?

(Isa Uphanishad trans by Valerie J Roebuck - image of Mandala of Vajradhatu )

By "it" is meant, I think, what Carl Sagan called Cosmos, and what I call "reality" - or at least I'm calling it reality right now.

The thing about Hinduism, or one of the things, is that it eschews the Western hierarchy of Appearance as being less than Reality...which dichotomy underpins the languages of Western Philosophy and Science. Hence Hinduism's attraction to the great underminers of that tradition from the West itself from Schopenhauer on.

I'm doubtless going out on a limb here, but I'm starting to think of the different levels of "reality" in our biology, of the genomic perspective, as being related to this perspective, at least on the level of emotion... my emotion, anyway. So here goes:

Maya, or "illusion" as it is usually rendered in English, is the only way we ever see or understand or act upon anything. We intuit another level of reality, brahman, which is only ever accessible through the extinction of all desire. Including the desire for understanding. Hence our apparent God-like command of information is only ever apparent.

(Yes...this stuff does go round in circles...and doesn't get you anywhere except to a different part of the circle. The point being that is there is no such thing as a "point"...ask Max Planck if you don't believe me!)

To speak in terms of rude practicality, we can only sequence or read a genome by turning it into a not-genome...by cutting it up and cloning a bit of it at a time. Genomes as such and in situ cannot be read. Even here uncertainty is an absolute. We are never detached in our observation...to observe is to act. Language, including "scientific" language, does not DESCRIBE the universe, it acts within it - it interacts with it.

I trust this is sufficiently obscure.

Life, considered from the imaginary, objective viewpoint of a God-like observer, consists, so far as we can tell, of bacteria with temporary variants. This "life" exclusively exists, so far as we know for sure, only on a oblate sphere in the middle of nowhere, a fly-speck of chemical activity on a chunk of matter almost wholly surrounded by void.

Matter itself is anomalous...most of what we call the universe is empty of it. Life is an anomalous and insignificant subset of an anomalous subset of "reality"...or of "Brahma" if you like.

But Maya...illusion...is where we live. Our only possible relationship to reality is to live in it. Our only possible ambition is to live in it better.

Which is why it is useful to explore atoms and some of their special and unlikely arrangements in the form of molecules of DNA. In case they turn out to be useful, including "useful" in the sense of understanding where and what and for how short a time we "are". And what a statistically inestimable privilege it is.

(That's as near to religion and meaning as we can ever get...call it Jaweh or Krishna...what does it matter?)

Genes are not the "truth" of us. Truth as a concept is and only ever can be useful to us. Nobody and nothing else. Understanding life in terms of genes, and now genomics, is useful. True is something else again.

(Don't get me started)

Our sense of wonder...and inadequacy...in the face of the infinite, has been and will continue to be expressed in our explorations of what we call "reality", what the Vedas call "brahma".

But Maya...that is, our lives...will also continue to be the only actual measure of how useful, or not, reality is to us. And our decisons are only ever about how this unearned, accidental wealth of ours can be properly and most pleasantly distributed.

Anyway...that's the kind of stuff I've been thinking about...and would like to discuss in the Traverse bar on Thursday next.

ps Incidentaly, RIP Lynn Margulis, who as Lynn Margulis Sagan put forward the first model fior the evoltion of complex celled life - endosymbiosis - or one single celled creature living inside another - in 1967

pps : The resemblance between this image of a human genome from the University of Maryland and the Mandala above, is of course purely coincidental.

(as above, so below)

Do come.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Living in the Bacterial World

2011-11-15T12:14:00.014Z

You recognize this fella? Sure, it's the tree of life as sketched by Charles Darwin in "red transmutation notebook B" early in the 1840s. Famously, the words "I think" are clearly and charmingly visible up in the top left corner.

Darwin was lovably and maddeningly diffident. Afflicted with afflatus, he was always reluctant to discuss the implications of his work in print, let alone in public. But this scratchy graphic, with the figure "1" standing for the common ancestor of us all, ranks with Crick and Watson's model of the double helix as the icon of a materialist, historical understanding of what we persist in calling "life."

I've cut and pasted another and more recent version of this famous graphic at the bottom of this post. This one is derived from the microbiologist Karl Stetter, and reflects his research priorities as much as Darwin's did his. I saw it first in a cracking book by Andrew H Knoll called "Life on a Young Planet" which joins the book list I'm going to be posting as recommended reading at the end of this residency (once I've read them all myself!).

Knoll and Stetter are enthusiasts for the small and slimy end of things. You'll note that what we think of as "life" most of the time occupies a mere sliver of the diagram. Up there at the top right, look. Plants and animals and fungi. Overwhelmingly we are living, say Knoll and Stetter, in a bacterial world. And we always have been.

Shaded in red down at the bottom is a great big idea about the origins of life. What all our ancestors had in common, as well as the rudimentary chemistry of life in their combinations of RNA, DNA and amino acids, was thermophilia. . Most of what we know these days as "archaea" still live in hot springs and at oceanic thermal vents and under the earth's crust, which, while not recommended as holiday destinations, may well be where most of what we call "life" still lives. They all liked it hot

They also liked (and like) it without oxygen, which was lucky, as there wasn't any yet...or not much. Oxygen was poison to them. They excreted it as a waste product when they'd done munching on Carbon Dioxide. Which is lucky for us. Life itself, on a microbial scale, created, eventually, the conditions for large scale agglomerations of tissue like you and me and the elephants...and the fruit flies...but only after most life had derived energy from light and heat. Photo and Chemo-synthesis.

Darwin was famously flummoxed by the fact that life, or the fossils/traces of life, seemed to appear quite abruptly in the ground. It seemed that complex animal life, (overwhelmingly trilobites in Darwin's day and ours) were suddenly just there! Darwin's tree of ancestry demanded a root...at least one...that had to extend in time back beyond that borderline where hard bodied fossils had been found...that explosion of complexity in the Cambrian epoch, which we now know to have been around 480 million years ago.

That invisible ancestral world is where Andrew Knoll lives. And it's a riveting and exciting place to explore. Especially when one comes to understand that the earliest life yet found is in rocks in Greenland that have miraculously survived uncrushed by tectonic forces that have now been dated (using the wonder radioactive decay clock of Zirconium) as being something like 3.8 BILLION years old.

That's right, Martha. Plants and animals and fungi only arrived on earth eight ninths of the way to the present day. We are all Eucarya...that is, our cells have a nucleus surrounded by another membrane. And these two cell areas have precisely demarcated duties when it comes to memory (our genomes live on strands called chromosomes that live in the nucleus) and the more energetic activities of energy storage and expenditure -and reproduction -which all happen in the outer part of the cell, the protoplasm.

The overwhelming biomass of planet earth was and remains procaryotic, single-celled life with its genome nicely arranged on a single, circular chromosome. And nothing like us would work in the present, or would ever have evolved in the past, without "life" - that is, bacteria - working away at the heart of it.

It's not just "Yakult", you know.

You'll also notice a whole third kingdom on here. These "archaea" were discovered to be distinct from bacteria through genetics. They look pretty similar, even under a microscope. But they ain't according to their genomes. More recently, they've been found to be closer to us genetically than bacteria are, hence more recent shared ancestry. There is some other big news tucked away at the bottom of the chart.

Though our shared ancestors in the hottest world seemed to have used that heat to split into the three main kingdoms...two procaryotic, one eucaryotic...it seems that THEIR common ancestor arrived when it was cooler. 50 degrees or so. So that is now the temperature range in which these clever folk are seeking the materialist holy grail of what's called "abiogenesis" - where stuff that wasn't "life" became "life".

DNA, you see...couldn't possibly have evolved from RNA in those sort of temparatures. It seems that it had to have evolved before a mass extinction event, (which left only the thermophiles), and to have carried our chemical building blocks unused through the whole boiling epoch so that it could then be used as the information store that could make bodies.

Just as at the KT boundary, which killed the dinosaurs, and at the Great Permian Dying, the mass destruction of most life was as essential to evolution as all the cuddly stuff, like sex.

A final twist in the hierarchy is that the whole project of sequencing the human genome involves a heating and reheating of the source material...and so depends on using an enzyme called DNA Polymerase (to mark, isolate and multiply a selected snip of bases from a chromosome) that is derived from Thermus Aquaticus, a heat loving bacterium that lives in the hot Springs at Yellowstone, and can therefore survive the process.

(Thermus Aquaticus? Sounds like Monty Python made that up)

All this is fantastically challenging to my idea of "reality" at a far more fundamental level than I was expecting, and weird analogies with my equally patchy understanding of Hindu scriptures are starting to intrude uncomfortably on what I'm still pleased to call my "consciousness".

One thing for sure, "life" will never escape from quotation marks ever again.

Goodbye to Bright Ideas Fellow - Mairi Levitt

2011-11-15T10:07:00.001Z

by Mairi Levitt - Genomics Forum Bright Ideas Fellow
Senior Lecturer, Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University, www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/faculty/profiles/Mairi-Levitt

This is the final week of my Bright Ideas Fellowship but the point about coming here for 2 months was, of course, to make contacts and develop research ideas. So once I get the bright collaborative ideas into final shape, with help from colleagues in the law school, a research proposal (or two!) will emerge. I will then have plenty of reasons to come back - assuming I get the money.

Just as I am beginning to feel optimistic I see some news from one of the major funders about 'demand management'. This translates as the steps being taken to reduce the number of applications so they don't have to wade through so many and the success rate looks more respectable. But, even if the funding doesn't materialise, it has been a productive time - I have learned a lot more about criminal law, analysed data and given a seminar. One article is nearly completed, 2 more planned out and an idea sketched out for an edited book (after a very good meal at the Grain Store!).

So thanks to all at the Forum including Margaret and the lunch group, the creative duo I shared a room with (Peter, resident playwright and Pippa, writer in residence) and both Steves for letting me come. So to end with some snippets from my research on people's ideas about genes and responsibility .... freewill is about having and making choices. We all live within a complex network of environmental and genetic influences but some will find it harder to control their behaviour than others. Those who commit violent crimes must take responsibility for what they have done and (except perhaps in cases of insanity or extreme mental illness) must be treated as responsible by the courts for the legal system to work. But... to the assertion that 'genes are not destiny' respondents made different additions: genes are not destiny 'and never will be' ; 'but might be [much] more important in the future' ; 'must never be seen that way because of the consequences

"Eyeless" in Aix

2011-11-09T10:16:00.017Z

"This is What I See" becomes replaced by a question: "Is This What I See?"

Cezanne famously painted the same views over and over, obsessed with changes in light and atmosphere. As this residency goes on, and as I obsessively ask myself, over and over, "What is Genomics?" - I go through a rotation of answers. It's a set of techniques, it's the social and intellectual implications of those techniques - and I am eventually coming round to my own "perspective". Or rather, renunciation of any such thing.

Genomics is a way of seeing the world by being in it. It challenges ideas about scientific "reality" as something out there waiting to be discovered and both integrates "being" with "seeing" and renounces, like Cezanne did, the idea of mastery. Of the viewer as a one eyed stationary God looking at a world they do not inhabit.

Which brings me to "Eyeless".

Like most of the first identified genes, "Eyeless" is defined double negatively. It was the absence of "Eyeless" that made a fruitfly that was without eyes. It's on chomosome 4 of a fruitfly and was identified in the "Fly Room" - the Palo Alto lab of TH Morgan, the first great explorer of the connection between molecules found in the nuclei of cells...and how bodies were made, how those things we now call genes are "expressed."

In the 1990s, Eyeless in Fruitflies was one of the first genes to be sequenced and identified as being "homologous" with genes in...well...lots of things. Including us. These days, having sequenced the genomes of mice and people AND fruitflies (inter alia), we call it a Hox gene for short. Its ubiquity as a molecule in the cell, and as an eye making agent in developing animals as ancestrally diverse as flies and mice - whose last shared ancestor was kicking about a LOOOOOONNNNNGGGG time ago- argues for its extreme ancientness.

Indeed, the gene for making eyes may have been around, as a molecule (or bit of a molecule) for much longer than there have been things with sufficient complexity and size to grow an eye - or leg or spleen - at all.

The eye was once thought to be the proof above all of an intelligent designer. It turns out to be an elementary adaptation to light...at least as old and established as photosynthesis in the earliest plant life.

We - you and I - in this view, are accidental agglomerations of molecules that just happen to paint pictures and think thoughts - themselves activities no more or less miraculous than gravity and breathing.

Perspective...it's not reality. "Reality" is a place that only exists for animals big enough brained to imagine it. Making a theory, interpreting the points of light above our heads as distant-in-space/time nuclear reactors - may well be "accurate" or "useful" as ways of seeing.

But that is all they are, ways of seeing and imagining. And, in the case, here and now, of what we call"genomes", manipulating.

We only live twice...one life for ourselves, and one for our dreams.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Shh...You Know Who....

2011-11-01T11:07:00.013Z

"Among its many roles during development, Sonic Hedgehog patterns spinal cord and limb bud tissue differentiation and controls midbrain and ventral forebrain neuronal differentiation"

"The Sonic network functions as a genetic switch"

"Drosophilia hedgehog and Sonic Hedgehog, one of its three Mammalian homologs are canonical secreted signalling factors that regulate cell function and fate...)"

(Quotations from The Sonic Hedgehog Signalling System as a Bistable Genetic Switch by Lai, Robertson and Schaffer - Biophysical Journal Vol 86 May 2004)

One of the first "How it works" genes to be identified, Shh, as it's called, was found on Chromosome Seven of humans having been previously found on the genome of fruit flies (Drosophilia). Fruit flies are the workhorses of genetic research, and have been since TH Morgan first started battering their chromosomes before the First World War. The poor little blighters have been lured with rotting bananas ever since and irradiated, sliced and unnaturally selected for interesting mutations.

Geneticists found Sonic in the early 90s...and I suppose it says something about geneticists in the early 90s that this now-discovered-to-be-omnipresent little fellow didn't get named after a Roman God like the planets did...

Mercury was taken, I guess...

Thing is..this gene jumps about...like Sonic...and it grew spines on the first fruit flies from whose genetic material it was deleted...like a hedgehog...

Turns out it's both fantastically important and hence fantastically ancient. Sonic the Hedgehog has been around since fruit flies and humans (to name a mammal at random) shared a common ancestor...and has been acting as a switch...an on-off regulator...(telling genes where they are in the embryo and thus whether to switch on or off to make a leg or a nose)... more or less forever.

Sonic jumps around the embryos of pretty much everything that breathes, excretes and walks or flies about, telling us where to put our limbs, among other things. If Doctor Robotnik (or fate, or random mutation) inhibits its functioning, then any number of results from facial disfigurement to brain dysfunction to death (because the body builds itself wrong in the womb...or egg) can result.

The article I've cited is a good place to start if you want to know more. Can't wait till they find Duke Nukem!!!!

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Thursday 27th October 4pm at the Traverse Bar - some things beginning with M we might talk about.

2011-10-22T11:51:00.013+01:00

Just a few things to think about for our next wee chat. First, a TED talk on personalised medicine...the genome as Machine...Medicine...Material...all the Ms...

And here's a nice blog I've found run by biologists in Australia

http://www.bioedge.org/index.php/site

And last a nice chat given in Edinburgh last year on the genome as Memory.

As for the genome as "Molecule"...as Thing in Itself...here's something on evolution and the nature of truth from pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty which I'm trying to get my head around:

"To see the employment of words as the use of tools to to deal with the environment rather than as an attempt to represent the intrinsic nature of that environment is to repudiate the question of whether human minds are in touch with reality. No organism is ever more or less in touch with reality...to rid our thinking of the vestiges of Cartesianism, to become fully Darwinian in our thinking, we need to stop thinking of words as representations and to start thinking of them as nodes in the causal network which binds the organism together with its environment"

My contention on Thursday, ladies and gentlemen, is that what he means is that everyone needs to start thinking like playwrights. Language as ACTION!!!!

See you then.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Paddling Upstream at the Genomics Forum

2011-10-20T11:18:00.015+01:00

Traverse Bar...4pm ...Thursday 27th October!

Back in April when I started this blog, I seem to remember claiming I had a handle on the Genomics...on the science...but was a bit less clear on what the Forum itself was about. The first part of the sentence wasn't true, as it happens...I had a lot more very enjoyable reading and questioning to do...I think I'm making progress...but I want to take this morning to think aloud a bit about the Forum itself.

And I'm about to make another reckless claim or six.

The Forum is made up of social scientists...not biological scientists. Which means that society...ie you people...is the problem under consideration.

The political impetus behind the establishment of the Forum had a headline rationale, and a political imperative that were parallel but not identical. The headline impetus for its establishment was the enormous technical, commercial, philosophical and social potential of the sequencing of the "human genome". It would be interesting, it was felt, to study how "society" might engage with the new science as it unfolded in terms of information, products and possibilities, ideas and innovations.

The narrower political interest...the problem to be solved or at least addressed...derived from the public relations disaster of GM Crops in the UK and the EU in the last decade. It was felt that anti-GM activists of various ideological orientations had persuaded the "public" to be afraid...Frankenstien Foods...all that. And that this artificially engendered anxiety was capable of "getting in the way" of progress. This is where the idea of "Upstream Engagement" came from. The idea being that if you SLOWLY and CAREFULLY explain to people why they should be happy a bit earlier on, then they will be happy. If the little darlings feel involved...they may even give their positive consent. Or at least be less swayed by Luddite Propaganda.

"Upstream Engagement" would involve people in the issues in a "softer" way...more nuanced...through hiring the likes of me, for example...the Forum would create audiences...and better informed, more responsible citizens for future consultation.

In the Metaphor is the Meaning. The river's still gonna go where it's gonna go. But it's easier if the flotsam LIKES it...that's possibly a bit unkind. And it makes me and writing plays and doing public events and such a sort of tributary, I suppose.

It was all very New Labour...democracy as massage....but things are changing here as well as in the wider world, not least because public conflicts on the GM scale have been elided...but more because of the change of government, leave alone of the economy. So, the Forum won't exist in its current form quite soon. There are different political priorities. A refocusing and a reforming is well underway...resumes are flying around.

But the Genie of the Genome is out of the bottle. The impact of the new technology and new knowledge, as I can testify from my own research has indeed been, and is going to be, enormous and complex. But the mood music, even in genomics, is fatalistic more than messianic these days. We have a "public" who feel helpless to influence anything, being swatted around the head by the hidden hand of the market, and we have little belief that any other hand will be guiding research and development of anything at all, let alone of something with so much potential power. Protest against this and other powers, too, is visceral and anguished rather than articulate and focused. We occupy Wall Street and Dale Farm without any expectation of doing any more than spreading a bit of discomfort and embarrassment before we die...

And that is the greater and un-massageable reason why the Luddites won last time...on GM Foods in the UK and Europe...and why for all the talk of Upstream Engagement, the last thing that the commercial and scientific powers (or those who pay their wages) want now, or will tolerate in future, is "public engagement" in any more than a cosmetic sense. (As a distraction for us and a necessary cost for them.) This is not a chat about reason anymore, it's a fight about fear...and the gloves are coming off.

The current climate does not and will not admit of any of "engagement" for very much longer. The "debate" is not really a debate between "progress" and "dignity"...in the field of genetic medicine, for example. It's a tension between imperatives, and between instincts, and, consisting of any more than shouting and weeping, actual constructive democratic oversight of power is a luxury we can no longer afford.

(Democracy is becoming such a problem...don't these noisy, feckless people in Greece understand anything about banking?)

The Forum exists as a place for research and debate...for argument, for reasonable conversations. Reasonable conversations, I think, are history. As the climate changes and the oil runs out, we will look back with helpless nostalgia to a time when we thought that destiny was maybe democratic...and that the future was in our hands.

Which brings me to my wild claim, if those weren't wild enough. We are not afraid because we have been PERSUADED to be afraid. We ARE afraid. We are afraid of the motivation and competence of those in charge. We do not think they are honest. In turn, they think we're stupid and untrustworthy. They think we're "in the way."

They're right about that. Frightened people are not rational. But we're right too. Science is a social practice...progress IS a metaphor. There is still a role for epistemology as we man the barricades.

And metaphors are stories we tell about things to make us feel better. Even if we're scientists. And personally, "in the way" is where I feel comfortable. Metaphorically, anyway.

And THAT is what the play is going to be about! And what the second half of my residency is going to be rehearsing and refining. The conversation continues next Thursday at Four pm in the Traverse Bar.

For a more reasonable (but enjoyably sceptical) take on "Upstream Engagement" from Joyce Tait, one of the Forum's founding dignitaries, see below.

http://www.nature.com/embor/journal/v10/n1s/pdf/embor2009138.pdf

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

The RNA Tie Pin Club

2011-10-10T14:07:00.011+01:00

I'm reading James Watson's 2003 Book "DNA The Secret of Life" with which Katherine Mendlesohn at the Traverse was good enough to gift me before my showing there the other week, and lots of responses to it, and to its style, occur to me. I've just finished the first chapters on the "heroic" (my word) era...which are a reminder of not only the physical and chemical questions that Crick and Watson, Franklin and Wilkins were asking, but of the physical processes of research itself...of the distinction between the Gene/genome as "model" and as "molecule"...of the thing in itself...and what you need to do to it before it gives up its "secrets".

This is the original paper they wrote in "Nature" as published in April 1953. The first thing that strikes you, of course, is how short it is, how pithy for such an earth shaping discovery.

Now, we're used to a mythology of instantly shifting paradigms...and assume that after April 1953, no one ever thought of life the same way again...just as we also tend to assume that no one thought of life the same way again after November 1859 and the Origin of Species.

But only a moment's reflection is needed to realize that this is bollocks - that's Hollywood. That's not how things really happen. The full implications of neither event have nothing like fully really permeated our culture. (The very moment I use a phrase like "our culture" more questions get begged than answered.)

Truth is that NOBODY got it...or almost nobody....not for a while. What needed to happen even in the world of science was that this theoretical model for inheritance had to be physically demonstrated and explained...which meant that a pathway had to be found from the splitting and copying of the DNA molecule on the chromosomes inside the nucleus to the manufacture of proteins by amino acids in the ribosomes of the cell... (in the "other" bit of the cell, the cytoplasm) ...all this had to be tested for, confirmed and explained.

Ain't no DNA in ribosomes...what is there, however, is RNA, a similar molecule, now thought to be the senior synthesising molecule...

(RNA WORLD was Crick's idea - the idea, now widely accepted, that RNA made life first and that DNA evolved from it)

...RNA, which, in the meantime had to be shown somehow to transcribe and carry the "information" from the DNA to the amino acids which make the proteins which make the bodies...

RNA being necessary to life in the distant past and still necessary now demonstrates, incidentally, that evolution has thrown the cellular system together with the same disregard for "design principles" as our bigger more familiar "bodies" - which are obviously jerry-built botch jobs... the more that the cell is understood the more it is clear that it too is an accumulation of improvisations on a theme of adaptation.

Took till about 1966 to fix the process in more than a handful of minds as being the way things actually were.

In the meantime, in 1954, James Watson and George Gamow (one the great characters of 20th century science...and, like Crick, a refugee from nuclear physics to biology post Hiroshima) formed the RNA Tie Pin Club...assigning each member one of the twenty amino acid acronyms...and a tie -pin...marking their mission to think about how all this might work.

The club numbered Crick and Watson and Gamow as members, of course...and other figures who became legendary in Molecular Biology, like Sydney Brenner...but also Richard Feynman and Edward Teller...who were, of course, physicists.

There was plenty of room in this very tiny, very elite club for these luminaries...and both the elitism and the smallness of the group are redolent of the way things actually happen in science.

It was just the two of them at the very beginning, in the Cavendish Laboratory in January 1953...gazing with a wild surmise... then Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin...who were two of the only other people on earth fully qualified to see what this "model" of replication meant...then there were the twenty members of the RNA club...

And then there was DNA recombination in 1973...and the first regulatory and commercial implications till there was commercial genetic engineering by the 90s...then the sequencing of the genomes of humans and e-Coli and potatoes etc etc etc

And now the club, in a way, is a much more open, much more amorphous gathering of social scientists and politicians and even playwrights trying to work out what it all means...asking ourselves are we using our specialisms to interrogate the meaning of genomics...or is genomics, rather more disturbingly, that is interrogating us.

Is it possible for any of us to go on with any of our ethical and moral enterprises without being given pause by the questions asked of us by "This View of Life"?

And most of us, still, when it comes to an overview of the science and its development, are next door to clueless...while the number of people with a comprehensive, nuanced overview of the Science of Genomics, and of its rampantly expanding technology -leave alone of its implications as process and story, as well as information...is still a pretty tight little group. Perhaps there is no one who can see the whole thing anymore, so intense is the field's own specialization.

Most of Watson's 2003 book, though, seems to be about the human story of the science - not just ideas, but how those ideas were sweated for, negotiated and sold. I'm looking forward to reading his take on the politics...and boy were there politics...of the genetic industry as it developed in the 70s...and culminated with the evangel according to Bill, Craig and Tony in the White House in the year 2000 ...just before Bin Laden and the banks between them cancelled the future.

Another day, another day...

In any case, here is the man himself, maybe still wearing his tie pin, maybe a candidate for the maybe mythical role I describe, telling his own story in his own scurrilous style, at the opening of Ted Talks in 2005.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Adam's Tummy Button

2011-10-07T12:18:00.017+01:00

Entirely contradicting what I said in my last entry that I'd be talking about this time, I'm going to put a bit of a footnote to my performance last week at the Traverse, where we were exploring the good old God vs Darwin chestnut once again. First by a bit of back reference to my previous residency at the National Library of Scotland and the archive of Darwin's publisher John Murray.

I also apologise to anyone trying to read this about how strange it looks...the images are straining "Blogger" technology...which is oddly apposite.

Anyway …in the same month as John Murray
published On the Origin of Species - November 1859 - He also published an encyclopedia of the bible. That’s right…an encyclopedia -an alphabetical taxonomy -Of every place, plant, person

And Deity Mentioned therein.

The book
Is a testament, a rewriting or re-ordering of the scriptures
In taxonomic, "scientific" terms.

It’s fab, by the way…I especially enjoyed the entry
On “Adam”

It seems bizarre to us, but at that moment, it wasn’t.
Science for the Victorians, with very few exceptions
Was the third revelation of God’s works
There was the book of the Bible, then there was the Book of Nature
And the Book of Science as revealed to Issac Newton

Was a revelation of God's Laws of Motion, Gravity etc.

an Encyclopedia of The Bible is testament

To this oneness of all knowledge
And the working of those Laws
in the flora, fauna and personae

Of the Bible.

See?

(The same publisher! The same month as Darwin's Unholy Hand-grenade!Isn't history wonderful!)

In 1857, two years before Darwin,

Phillip Gosse published this:
“Omphalos”…which, like Darwin’s short synthesis
Is a total explanation of life…
Written by a distinguished and outstanding naturalist

(like Darwin)

Here he is with his boy and his book.

The boy is called Edmund...and his book about him

And his tortured relationship with

His dear old, tortured dad

("Father and Son" 1907) is a masterpiece by the way.

Gosse was starting exactly where Darwin was.
The evidence of the variation of life
Was inescapable. So it had to be explained.
But where Darwin explained variation according to deep time
By life having evolved over millions of years
Gosse explained the same thing
By means of an instantaneous creation of life
That APPEARED to have a history.

(Omphalos means belly-button - the old question being
Did Adam have one or not, not having had a mummy.)
Gosse said he did have one…

which means Adam was created as IF he had been born
Had been a foetus, a toddler, a boy.

God, Gosse said, must have created the appearance of time

…some females pregnant...some seeds as well as trees

Wear and tear on the teeth of hippos
As if they had been eating

And so on. As if things had a past

The world must have been created

(most famously)with dinosaur bones in the ground
that looked
As if they once had lived

a loooooonnngggg time ago.

(Robert Owen had come up with the name “dinosaur”
Only eight years previously)

Thing is, Gosse was an honest man
An honest believer…a great scientist

And this was an honest idea:

If creation had really been in an instant...

of COURSE God had to have created things in the middle of things

And as a man of Abrahamicly heroic faith
This wasn’t a problem for Gosse…

He thought that what he was achieving was
A definitive grand synthesis of faith and natural observation.
His book is exciting, excited, exultant.
(and well written...including his taxonomies and descriptions
of plants and animals)
He KNEW he had to be right
Just like Darwin.
BUT
His book ruined him…it was a joke
Vicars and naturalists crossed the street to avoid him

Actually…it’s the only account
of designed, instant, total creation
that makes ANY sense.

(Or that's coherent anyway)

It's the only honest and rigorous way
to believe in a literal creator God and see the world

in a modern scientific way.

(The death of God was when God's people fudged
all this and stopped looking for him properly
in Nature and themselves
All a bit embarrassing till
the Big Bang came along and believers could start saying
That God lit the touchpaper
And stood well back…

so far back he hasn’t been seen since)

Anyway…

My “History of Ideas” point
Is that religion as science only came along
Post Francis Bacon, post Descartes…

That is…it IS a kind of science

It's of scientific times

Biblical literalism - fundamentalism -
Which we think of as a medieval throwback
Is a purely modern phenomenon born
Of that third revelation.

No...it is.

Like Al Quaida, it's modern.

And, like Al Quaida, it makes a certain kind of sense.

The famous Bishop Ussher of Armagh
Who calculated the date of the creation by adding up the ages
Of everyone in the Bible and counting backwards
(arriving in October 4004 bc)
Was thinking like a MODERN

in MODERN times - after Bacon, after Descartes
and at the same time as Newton.

It wouldn’t have occurred to Augustine
Bishop of Hippo in the fifth century
To set a DATE for creation
And he was a smart cookie too.

The controversy between evolution and creationism is a modern thing
On both sides of the argument
It ain’t past vs future

It’s all in the present tense

So what? You might well ask.

Just this. Thought and language

including genomics and all that
are time defined and limited.
to the 21st century in this case.
And the language of evolution
Was couched in a time when
We believed in progress
The 19th century

From lower to higher forms of life

Yeah?

The paradigm proposed by genomics

I find
Will have none of it.
Blows progress out of the water
as definitively as Darwin erupted under the good ship Gosse.

There is no progress anymore
In economics, society...anywhere
Which is why genomics is the science of our time
no lower or higher

and I think the language of "science"
can't cope beyond the specialists
and tries with 19th century language
in vain to do so.

And I am struggling with the language too

with which I can think about this
let alone express it
let alone write a play

Because it's so NEW, damn it!

And I am wondering this morning
if my Abrahamic Faith
n the dramatization of everything
is as redundant as Adam's Belly Button.

'Lighting up '

2011-10-06T11:01:00.000+01:00

by Mairi Levitt - Genomics Forum Bright Ideas Fellow
Senior Lecturer, Department of Politics, Philosophy and Religion, Lancaster University, www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/faculty/profiles/Mairi-Levitt

It is week 4 of my bright ideas fellowship and the light bulb on top of my head has lit up a few times already! I am getting used to a blank diary that I can fill with reading, thinking, coffee drinking and discussions. In fact today I managed to be late for the only meeting I had not arranged myself. The Forum's team got together and I was ensconced in the university library law section reading about automatons in Scots law…well it might have been relevant to behavioural genetics (‘an external factor not self-induced’, that you could not forsee, that ‘results in a complete alienation of reason’ etc). But actually it doesn’t seem to be relevant after all since your genetic make-up is internal not external and the research I’m interested in shows correlations with problem behaviours not ‘a complete loss of self control’.

I share a room with Peter Arnott (playwright and most prolific blogger at the Genomics Forum) and he has not only read one of my journal articles (on genetics and crime) but wants me to come to an open meeting at the Traverse theatre in his Translating the Genome series to discuss it. Nice to be able to say yes without checking whether it clashes with teaching or other university duties. I could also spend each and every day in the National Library overdosing on a few of the 14 million items which can be brought to your desk and recommended for the coffee and free newspapers when you need a break. But I only have 5 weeks left after this one so I need to narrow down my interests a bit….why did I say I’d only come for 2 months?!

-------------------------------

Mairi will be holding a seminar on ‘Whatever genes one has it is preferable that you are prevented from going around stabbing people’: Genes, environment and responsibility for behaviour at the Genomics Forum on Thursday 3 November, please email forum@genomicsnetwork.ac.uk to register.

Start From Anywhere or All Roads Lead to Genome.

2011-10-05T16:56:00.010+01:00

I haven't posted for a week or so...partly because last week I was rehearsing and then performing my Men and Monkeys event...which went well, I think. But I'm not sure how much it tells me about what to do next. As witness my resorting to the appalling title of this post.

It's just that the thing about this subject matter is that the point of entry can be anywhere...you will eventually get around to everything no matter where you start...so where do you start?

Does that make sense?

Take the fact that the UK Police between them now have a DNA database, potentially...of 5 million people...and that the standard DNA mouth swabs that get taken when you get arrested could...with the merest tweak to Data Protection Law...get tested for a mitochondrial enzyme called Monoamine Oxidase A (MAOA)...whose absence (or low-activity) in the cytoplasm is a fairly good predictor for random acts of violence...especially when the possessor has himself (usually him) taken a few beatings down the years...

The information is already there...so why not test for it...it's not that we'd automatically lock people up...so what harm is there in KNOWING...?

Mairi Levitt from Lancaster University is visiting the forum just now...this is her area...and I think I've persuaded her to come and talk about it next time we convene our Traverse Bar discussion group...watch this space...

In the meantime...I'm spoiled for choice for other stuff to write about...and I honestly think I just want to throw it all up in the air in a room with a bunch of actors and say "You Pick One!"

Because the neat thing about everything being connected to everything else is that it doesn't matter where you start...in the end you'll cover all the bases...

(That's a nucleotide joke)

You might start with the 20th Century's leading Eureka! moment... Jim Watson ...possibly in his bath...in January 1953...cutting out bits of cardboard representing said nucleotides and noticing how the shapes of Gs and Ts and Cs and As coincide in an alluringly simple and repeating fashion ...then taking his new jigsaw to show his pal Francis Crick down in the Cavendish...who saw how the mapping worked really well if you ran the chains of bases in opposite directions...

and hey presto...bingo...whatever...they'd discovered a blueprint, invented an icon, envisaged a machine, an industry, an understanding...every metaphor all at once in a flash of structural and functional and conceptual perfection...and they ran downstairs to the Eagle to get pissed...and a very nice pub it is too.

You could start from there. You'd end up with juvenile delinquents' mitochondria eventually. But should us non scientists start at all is the question I'm suddenly confronted with.

Check this:

http://www.uabgrants.org/

It's a link to somewhere just 40 drunken seconds down the road from the Eagle. It's a new scheme being run from The Faraday Institute and St Edmund's College Cambridge.

"The aim of the interdisciplinary Programme is to investigate contemporary non-scientific uses and abuses of biological thought (beneficial, benign or negative) in the domains of philosophy, the social sciences, the media, religion and politics. Collaborative projects between those engaged in the biological sciences and investigators from other disciplines are particularly welcomed"

There's an essay competition and grant funding available...and as a serial abuser of biological thought myself, I must say it sounds most interesting. I might offer myself as a test subject.

Of course, even a playwright might have to point out that scientists themselves have been known for the odd abuses of science ... but maybe that's an essay topic.

Anyway, next time...Does DNA "know" how to make bodies the same way I "know" my pin number...or the way that I "know" that the quality of mercy is not strained...or neither of the above...answer me that one, if you can!

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Phew! Bang! Oops!

2011-09-27T15:36:00.019+01:00

At 7.30 on Friday Sepember 30th I'm doing an event with actors about these gents here...an exploration of the seminal God and Darwin slugfest in Tenessee in 1925. These ornery, gallused old bastards are Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan - and we'll be performing their words...and those of their fictional counterparts in the famous play and movie "Inherit the Wind" as well as dipping into more recent rematches between men and monkeys.

Meantime, we had a terrific meeting last Thursday, I thought, at our "Translating the Genome" gathering. I went away with my head buzzing, and many thanks to all who came and saw and contributed.

Below is a partial result. Another excursion into anthropoesis. Also brought on by devouring John Banville's great "Dr Copernicus" novel over the weekend.

PHEW! BANG! OOPS!

1.

Copernicus, like Darwin,
Could only see what everyone saw –
What he had to conquer, catastrophically
Was the certainty that
All of it was meant for him to look at.
That “he” existed.

The radical decentring
That made such sense
Of the recessions of Mars
(for example)
Required him to destroy himself.

He was not just a watcher of planets
He was on one. Darwin didn’t just
Collect things. He was one.

Intuition is all we have to go on.

2.

To make sense of ourselves
We are the centre.
To make sense of planets, the sun is.

But this frightful sphere of everything…

To make sense of everything
The centre is everywhere
and the circumference is nowhere, so
Centre is not the problem -
“The” is the problem.

Sounds simple. Is simple.
Sounds impossible. Is impossible.

Depressives, paralysed with horror
Are living in the real world

3.

Not content to live with the world as we find it
We also live with the world as we do not find it
Most of it’s not there, but we make maps of it
Impatiently, "it must be real", we say, while naming things –

God, like physics, stone and water
Does not need to know His name.

4.

Our original sin against being
Had something to do with names.
With creating things twice over – a miracle
And a fleshly trap, this seeking.

Star-gazing, we envy the couple in the next room
Drinking, we are troubled by infinity

We talk fondly about losing ourselves
And taste this freedom in crowds
And return to ourselves resentfully.
Yet in these little joys
We know there is a death,
That the only cure for mind
Is namelessness.

5.

Between 1300 and 1312
Dante Alighieri
(Whose legs are black and hairy)
Wrote a poem about everything
No one since has been able to do that.

Now everything is easy for poetry again.
In us is a map, a machine, stuff made of stuff
the same stuff as all the other stuff
the bosons and muons and so on.

All the same.

So we can look at life like stars now
As if it had nothing to do with us.

So...if...

6.

For everything
The measure of everything is everything.
Which is to say that nothing ever happens
As far as everything’s concerned.
Then
For men and women
The measure of everything is men and women
For us there is all of this activity...

Yet

Most of everything isn’t anything at all.
Which is a clue
And seen from here it’s all expanding
In every direction all at once
That’s a clue too.

(Men and women
Know about time and distance and matter
We are time and distance and matter
Which is why we look at things
Down this end of the telescope.
Infinity doesn’t. Eternity doesn’t)

7. Once upon a time

there was no matter
So space and time didn’t matter.
Everything and nothing were the same.
Without matter, there could be no distance
Between matter. Nothing changed.
So there was no time. Then

Oops!

There was matter
With distances between it, changing
All the time.

And that was the universe right there

8.
(The tricky thing to grasp is that everything always was everything and still is and always will be.
And that it is the expansion into space and time and stuff and spaces inbetween stuff and time
that was and is anomalous.)

9.

The apparent expansion of space and time
And all the lumps therein
Is the diffusion of an initial anomaly.
More of a big oops than a bang.

By way of correction, happily
This lumpiness can’t last
Eventually, expansion is infinite
(one might say it always was)

Eternity is eternal just until the rocks and beetles and men and women
Are broken, spread into molecular, atomic, then sub atomic constituents
Over so much space and time it’s as if nothing was there
and there was nowhere no-things might have been.

No matter - so no mass or energy
So no distance between matter - so no space.
No change - so no time.
The singularity of the zero restored
Everything - the same as nothing.
And nothing ever happened.

10.

Call that God or cosmos if you like,
I’m fine with it. If that’s how it is.
But it’s not you or me.

Men and women
Must learn not to be God
And be mistakes
And make the most of our not being here in the meantime

11.

There is no more to say on the matter.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

I Can See Ouranos

2011-09-20T14:50:00.013+01:00

My wife sings in a choir. As a result, for an atheist, I spend a lot of time in Church. And just on Saturday there, at Choral Evensong in St Mary's Episcopal Cathedral in Glasgow, perhaps as a consequence of all the reading I'm doing for this residency, I started hearing things.

I began substituting words for God...materialist ideas about the universe, the stuff of life and non-life...for the name of the Almighty...

And suddenly feeling, (having suspected as much) that there were deep connections between languages of belief that might reflect something deep in us, deep in our history, I speculated among the music and the architecture.

Pascal's wager...that it is better to believe in God, because even if you're wrong you can't lose...is mirrored by the scientific "bet" that the laws of physics are the same everywhere in time and space...both assumptions are pragmatically necessary for belief...or thought...even if they have different standards of "truth"

(A scientific truth has no obligation to be anything beyond "useful")

But the persistence of religious thought and feeling...even if it is only in the secular forms of art and beauty...whatever it's origin in our evolution, is a wager on the true as well as the useful.

(Which is possibly why capitalism is trying to abolish it)

In any case, this game I was playing while listening to a very good choir sing very good songs about things I don't believe in, drifted into this proposition:

What if we substitute, say, Ouranos, the Greek word for "sky"..."heaven"..."the universe"...and take it to mean all those things, all of "nature", all those processes of which we are part and which we now observe, God-like...but not God ...because we did not make ourselves? From chemical bonds to biased chains of DNA to quanta of light?

(Hey...if James Lovelock can use "Gaia"...)

Is there anything in the humility of Christian language which can teach us how NOT to be God...to educate our attitude towards our environment, human, biological, astronomical? So we don't mistake beginning to understand Ouranos... for owning it, controlling it? When it owns us...and doesn't care...

Glory be to Ouranos
As it was in the beginning
Is now and ever shall be
Ouranos shall never
Like proud empires pass away
Ouranos stands and grows forever
All thy creatures own thy sway.

And if all that standing up and sitting down and singing together and kneeling never did any more than remind the Kings and Cardinals in the congregation, that they, in common with the the peasants, were not God, then I think it had a social utility which the temple of global capitalism could do with.

They have made of the temple of Ouranos a den of thieves.

As a resource, all language, George Steiner argued, depends on our taking a wager on meaning. Without meaning, language cannot defend us, or define or value us...or Ouranos. We must wager upon meaning to have any hope at all of ever valuing anything.

Gaia, by the way...was Ouranos' mother...and wife...But we probably shouldn't go into that too deeply.

At four o'clock on Thursday 22nd in the Traverse Bar, I'll bring along some other stuff to think about. But no hymns. Promise.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Read Your Own on 22nd September

2011-09-16T13:48:00.010+01:00

This is another recent TED talk I think is worth a gander...not for those who are already familiar with what is going on in the life sciences so much as for those who aren't.

Like almost everything else I come across it's a mixture of hype and caution for me...and it's worth bearing in mind that the bio-industrial revolution here described is only one narrow corner of the whole picture : personalised medicine, individual genome sequencing.

To Resnick's credit he knows that it raises as many questions as it answers. But he gives a sense of how transformative the new thinking in biology is going to be. If you've got the cash...as insurance companies surely do, among others.

If I get the chance and the laptop, I'll be playing this at our Translating the Genome Free and Open discussion on Thursday next at 4pm in the Traverse bar.

May need a drink after.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

When is a Baby?

2011-09-15T11:49:00.011+01:00

The following is hot off the press...or CNN News...via the Why Evolution is True blog site:

This is a proposed amendment to the State Constitution of Mississipi coming to the popular vote on November 8th.

Be it enacted by the People of the State of Mississippi: As used in Article 3 of the State Constitution, the term Person or Persons shall include every human being from the moment of fertilization, cloning or the functional equivalent thereof.

CNN comment:

Voters in Mississippi will be given a chance to decide whether life begins at conception, a controversial abortion-related ballot initiative that the state’s highest court has refused to block. The Mississippi Supreme Court late Thursday allowed Measure 26, also known as the Personhood Amendment, to appear on the state ballot November 8. The decision was a rejection of a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and abortion-rights groups. The 7-2 ruling said those groups had not met the legal burden required to restrict the right of citizens to amend the state constitution. . .Anti-abortion forces hope the amendment, if passed, would ultimately be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, providing another opportunity for the justices to overturn the landmark Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

Now what really strikes me about this is that popular sentiment is assumed here to be capable of defining life. The religious right cannot, even in the US, use a religious definition...so they appeal to the other Vox Dei, that is, Vox Populi.

Now, while there is nothing new necessarily in the argument itself -

(indeed there are striking legal and political paralells with the Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1925 that I'll be exploring in my event on Sept 30th in Traverse Two...)

- I do think that this piece of legal flim flam from the Bible Belt does represent something new in it's underlying logic...or rather its dismissal of logic as "Just Another Opinion" you might or might not like.

The Enlightenment Project...or Age of Reason if you prefer, post Francis Bacon, was an attempt to transfer the truth defining authority of the Church to notions of "Evidence", "Science"...

But the underlying assumption here is that any attempt at an evidence based assessment of when a zygote becomes an embryo becomes a person...has lost any "objective" credence.

Reproductive politics, evidence based science, is now an episode of the X Factor.

In entertainment, economics, politics, and now religion and science, preference beats analysis, sentiment trumps evidence, sensation clobbers argument and voyeurism is better than story telling all over your TV.

Reality is whatever we want to watch on TV. If we like it, then it's true. Never mind that this law, were it to be tested, would define a miscarriage as manslaughter.

(Yes folks...that's in the wind too...there's quite seperate legislation coming up in Georgia right now that talks about "pre-natal murder" and puts the burden on the mother to prove that there was "no human involvement whatsoever in the causation" of their miscarriage.)

http://motherjones.com/blue-marble/2011/02/miscarriage-death-penalty-georgia

Knowledge and expertise are irrelevant snobbery...the market knows best. And whatever we choose as the truth is the truth...and so you're going to jail, and then to hell... if you lose a baby.

Maybe this isn't Georgia or Tennessee, but I think the same rot is eating at the heart of everything we might value across all of our public life. Does anyone else think we're in trouble? Or am I just whistling in the wind?

Come to the Traverse Bar at 4pm on Thursday 22nd and tell me about it.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Grow me a Robot, Skylar!

2011-09-09T16:11:00.006+01:00

Just a quick one. I'm just starting to think about synthetic biology...and what I carried in my head as a definition of this was the idea of people building novel organic forms...like clones...

Or chimeras...mice with DNA from other organisms...or with chunks of genomes missing...so we can test what the missing parts do...that kind of thing.

Or nanotechnology...manipulating natural substances...like oil...at the genetic level to make them do what we want for efficiently.

All fascinating, wierd, stressful. Everything I enjoy.

What I hadn't really appreciated properly was that there is a lot of thinking going on in the opposite direction...learning from how nature builds things so that we can build things better.

Check this out: and keep watching till he gets to the bit about "Biased Chains"

TED talks highlight some good showy science stuff from unfeasible teenagers like Skylar Tibbits here...as well as legends like James Watson and George Gamow.

There is no end to what's out there. Almost makes it worth getting up in the morning.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

The Epigenetic Book List

2011-09-08T12:19:00.011+01:00

Six months ago, when I was young and the weather was actually quite good, I asked Steve Yearley, who's the director of the Genomics Forum, for a steer towards stuff I should be reading. And he immediately named a book called "Genomes And What to Make of Them" by Barry Barnes and John Dupre.

On dipping into this immediately and obviously dense and elegant overview of my new subject matter from the University of Chicago Press, it was as immediately obvious to me that I wasn't ready for it yet. It does not assume prior knowledge, exactly...but takes no prisoners. It disallows dipping into chapters between TV shows or snacks...you have to sit down monastically and read it properly.

Most books don't ask you to do this anymore. Besides, I felt I had to read AROUND genomics first...orient myself. Take deep breaths. So I put it down for a while. Now I've started again. And it's great. I mean, not just good or informative...it takes you into its view of the world and shakes you till you accept it.

It is in danger of joining that personal shortlist of titles that I carry around in me like the remains of viruses...that have tranferred their genetic information after infection...so that I carry their information around with me now too, haunting anything I write myself. And everything else I read or come across.

Just for the record, this unnatural selection includes:

Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner, One Hundred Years Of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Labyrinths by Jorge Luis Borges.

And in non fiction, The Rebel by Albert Camus, Crowds and Power by Elias Canetti, The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt...

There's a few more...Sirens of Titan by Kurt Vonnegut, Crime and Punishment by you know who...

Oh and Antony and Cleopatra...

None of them very startling as choices, I know, as a list of great stuff...but they are all especially distinguished for me by the fact that I initially resisted them...I couldn't get through any of them the first time round. Then when I did get through them, I turned back to page one and read them again. Immediately.

That's almost a measure of "greatness" for me. Or "art". I was scared of being changed. Then I was changed.

Might be happening again. I'll let you know.

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Some Slime Reflects at The End of Time

2011-09-06T12:24:00.015+01:00

I'm just starting to get some notions about this play I'm going to write, and this has maybe got something of the flavour I'm looking for. At the End of Time, a single bacterium looks back:

"What they used to call 'life'
Began (apparently) as sickness
When one decent, simple cell
Like you or me
A long time ago, got invaded
Quite by accident
By AN Other.

Monsters like that die, usually,
But they found, these mutual parasites,
That they rubbed along together pretty well.

They compartmentalised, specialised.
And when they or it
got fat and split,
Their offspring kept on
going with the arrangement.

With fortuitous adjustments,
They positively flourished -
Gobbling up the neighbours,
Combining novel elements!

I know!

These experiments!
These upstarts
With their new fangled hearts!
Their sugars and their phosphates
Their guts, their mouths
Their University degrees!

But, of course, inventing 'life'
They'd invented 'death' as well.
Devouring them secerally, jointly
And eventually - utterly.

Leaving one life,
us
immortal, invisible, identical
us
As was, is now, and ever shall be.

Is it just me or is it getting hotter?

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Why Do They Think Like that?

2011-09-04T12:34:00.011+01:00

As I write, happily it looks like Nadine Dorries' abortion amendement to the Health Bill is going nowhere...leaving us time to concentrate on everything else that's pernicious about it.

But I wanted to take a sideways glance at the controversy and to ask: Why Do They Think Like That?

Why does Nadine Dorries think that NHS clinics try to talk women into having abortions? They're not paid by the filling like dentists used to be...(or was THAT a conspiracy theory?) ...so why would she think like that?

Why does President in Waiting (at the moment) Rick Perry buy into the idea that "scientists" are a criminal interest group who use the chimera of climate change to fraudulently extort his tax dollars?

I'm working on a play at the moment, and if I'm going to have characters who think like that, I've got to get inside their skin.

I have to grit my teeth and imagine them feeling that way in good faith - something the evangelical right is quite incapable of when it comes to its "enemies".

But as a dramatist, I can't just say to myself, "well they're just evil...or just stupid...or just lying...so I don't have to think about it."

I have to imagine people like me who genuinely feel that way...Not because I'm fair minded at all. I'm not. But I have to give an actor a steer as to how to play the part.

Elias Canetti, in "Crowds and Power", an old fave, or Amin Malouf in "On Identity", a newer fave, both argue that identification with a group is most keenly felt and clung to when it seems to be under attack. That very often, identities only come into existence when that attack is felt.

"I never knew I was a (fill in identity here) till they made it illegal."

The evangelical right attack "materialist science" because they find it self aggrandizing to characterize the scientific project as being all about them - as being an attack on them. Charles Darwin hated God - that's why he saw what he saw. Stem cell scientists want to kill babies...climate scientists hate free enterprize.
It's not so much a conspiracy theory as a conspiracy feeling.

And I do know how that feels. When the phone never rings unless it's someone trying to sell you something, when you feel you have to act under the assumption that EVERYONE is trying to rob you ALL the time...I can see why the only way to maintain self worth is to decide that you're being persecuted because they are out to get you.

It's that sense of being attacked and defined by the attack...that feels real to me, and I suspect to an audience, so that would be the way to go.

Meanwhile, as so often, the comment boards on a story online are a lifting of the bandages to reveal the wounds in the public psyche.

"Scientists have only got themselves to blame," one opined. "If they weren't so smug and rich we might believe them."

Unpick that psychology at your leisure.

It's something of a theme for the science vs religion slugfest I'm presenting at the Traverse on September 30th...

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

The natural history of remembrance

2011-08-30T09:43:00.002+01:00

Pippa Goldschmidt is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum Writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

W. G. Sebald was one of a small number of writers who gazed at the literal and metaphorical wreckage of the Second World War and attempted to describe as truthfully as possible what they saw. Born in 1944, he was clearly deeply marked by the simultaneity of his seemingly happy childhood in Germany with appalling events such as the deportation of Greek Jews from Corfu. According to Will Self in his lecture on Sebald, this clash of events in his psyche led him to see history as a sort of synoptic vision where everything happens at once, and can only be conveyed through a painstaking accumulation of fact and details. His books weave backwards and forwards through the past and present to build up layers of meaning. They have an apparent artlessness and immediacy to them, they are ‘easy to read’ but the lives of his characters weigh heavily on the reader.

And he didn’t just examine the Nazis’ legacy; his essay ‘Air War and Literature’ makes for uncomfortable reading in its detailed depiction of the physical and biological aftermath of the Allied bombing on German cities. Nobody should be allowed to claim the moral high ground here, he implies, all we are able do is remember and document. But he was not in favour of all types of remembrance. Self said that he would likely have thought that the British ‘Holocaust Remembrance Day’ was too one-sided, too capable of being subtly used for propaganda to demonstrate the moral superiority of the Allies, and perhaps we should have instead an ‘Allied Blanket Bombing of Germany Day’.

As Will Self started his lecture, a black and white photo was projected onto the screen behind him. I found out afterwards that the photo is actually a painting by Gerhard Richter, of a photo of his ‘Onkel Rudi’. It shows a smiling young man in Nazi uniform.

The photo seemed curiously weightless as it fluttered and bobbed behind Self. And this was a quite fitting visual counterpart to the lecture; Sebald’s books are illustrated by anonymous photos that have an uneasy relationship with the words. The photos are never explained or even directly alluded to in the text, and their effect upon the reader is to make you question what is real and what is fictional. As Self explained, Sebald was exposed to images of the Holocaust when he was at school, without any explanation or context. He spent the rest of his life trying to find that context in his writing, an extraordinary unclassifiable mixture of fact and fiction which tells the tales of emigrants and immigrants, people rendered passive by war who make what they can out of their lives.

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Originally from London Pippa used to be an astronomer. Now with an MLitt in creative writing from Glasgow University she has had several short stories published. Much of her writing is inspired by science and she is currently writing a novel about a female astronomer. Visit her website for more information www.pippagoldschmidt.co.uk

13 THINGS I HEARD LAST NIGHT

2011-08-29T17:47:00.008+01:00

On Friday 26th, I was at an event at the Edinburgh Book Festival, where the topic under debate was the Kindness of Strangers. How do we understand "the good" in an evolutionary framework? Taking part were Oren Harmon, author of the George Price biography I've been recommending (The Price of Altruism: George Price and the Search for the Origins of Kindness), along with Dominic Johnson, Reader in Politics and International Relations at the University of Edinburgh, and Ruth Chadwick, director of Cesagen at the University of Cardiff, with our own Steve Sturdy in the Chair. Oren signed my book which was nice, because I'd been scribbling my own gibberish all over it...realizing I was doomed to write a poem made of their thoughts rather than a proper report of my own.

So forgive me everyone. But here goes.

13 THINGS I HEARD LAST NIGHT:

1.
That we invented language
then Language invented us.
So we could experiment on strangers -
Knowing all the time
That the best way to be thought to be good
Is to be good.

2.
That the same electricity fires in action, memory and imagination
That the mind doesn’t care what’s really there.

3.
That if selflessness did not exist
We’d have to have invented it.

4.
That biological altruism is a fact
while psychological altruism is an intention -
so if we can learn to pretend to be scared
By the fictional mechanics of a horror film
Can we not learn to be good the same way?

(Why not?
Why does that sound wrong?)

5.
Is there an architecture for choice
A place where choosing the good is more likely to happen
If we get it’s dimensions right?
Can we learn how not to be God
And still live in a nice place?

6.
Like a thrush feeding a baby cuckoo
We balance saints and bastards.
Love is not altruism
But it’s all we’ve got, unfortunately -

7.
What we find in the world
And in ourselves
Is all we have to work with

8.
That we do feel we ought and ought not
And we hate the people who take advantage of us for feeling that way.
Does it matter if it’s biology or not?
If it’s only culture we’re still stuck with it.

9.
That only God is one thing or the other
Life, however, is on a spectrum somewhere
Process not article
Always tense, strung between futures.
Kant and his starry nights
And necessary assumptions
was crossing his fingers, really

10.
So how did the sociopaths take over?
Why are people so deficient in sympathy in charge of everything?
Well, who else would want the job?

Anyone who wants the presidency
Should on no account ever be offered it.

(Douglas Adams said that)

11.
That all human kinship is partly choice by now -
Reciprocity with your parents, your children.
Complex relationships are evolved things too
So is anthropoesis, anthropic delusion
Memory and hope
The future tense...
How can kinship selection explain someone giving money to save the whale?

12.
The parable of the sower:
That he or she who invented the future
- foregoing today's bread for tomorrow's harvest -
was a slave, don’t forget.

13.
"I rebel
Therefore we exist."

(Albert Camus - L'Homme Revolte")

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

‘Who are your people?'*

2011-08-27T21:31:00.001+01:00

Pippa Goldschmidt is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum Writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

Yesterday Alistair Moffat talked about the genetic identity of the Scottish people and the emerging science of tracing our ancestors using DNA. This essentially uses mistakes in DNA (mutations that occur by chance) which are then propagated. If we share these mistakes with other people, we must share a common ancestor, and by looking at where these mistakes are the most common, we can find out where that ancestor originated. So, for example, a fifth of Irish men are related to a single man, Niall Noigiallach, who lived about 1500 years ago.

There are two ways of tracing these markers back through the generations, by examining the DNA on the Y chromosomes that men inherit from their fathers, and by examining mitochondrial DNA that both men and women inherit from their mothers.

Alistair Moffat said that people are quite often moved when they find out about their ancestry and their links to Vikings, or Celts, or Irish kings, as this allows them a way of imagining their pasts. But using Y DNA or mitochondrial DNA only gives us two routes back through the complex network of our ancestors; we may have proof that we’re descended from an Irish chieftain but we shouldn’t forget that we’re also descended from a zillion (roughly speaking) other people too.

Perhaps it’s not the differences, but what we share that is more important, and also more moving. In 75,000 BC a vast volcanic eruption led to mass extinctions of species, and killed off all but a handful of Homo sapiens, who escaped because they were living in the narrow rift valleys of East Africa. These humans emigrated north, and in a relatively few generations had established themselves in Asia and Europe. We’re all descended from those tenacious people.

* The Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean (see Ken’s blogs below) apparently asked this when he first met people.

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Found in Translation

2011-08-26T11:48:00.001+01:00

Ken MacLeod is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum Writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

After enjoying the 'Nothing but the Poem' event on Sorley MacLean, I couldn't miss Wednesday's major session on his work at the Book Festival, marking the centenary of his birth. Again the event was packed and all the tickets sold out; again the proportion of Gaelic speakers in the audience was low, and again the audience was mainly of an older rather than a younger generation. Aptly enough, a great deal of the discussion concerned the 'doube-edged sword' of translation and the parlous situation of the Gaelic language.

Chaired by Mark Wringe, the panel featured Scots language scholar Derrick McClure, who has translated MacLean's Dàin do Eimhir as Sangs tae Eimhir; Peter Mackay, journalist, poet, and author of a new biography and critical introduction (2010); and novelist, poet and scholar Christopher Whyte, who has recently published the first complete text of An Cuilithionn (The Cuillin) as MacLean wrote it in 1939, and has with Emma Dymock produced a forthcoming (October 2011) Collected Poems.

Here are a few notes from what they said.

The outstanding Gaelic poet of the 20th century, MacLean is far more widely read in English than in his native Gaelic. This results in complex problems. Hearing him in Gaelic without understanding the language can convey what's lost in all translations - the music of the original - but it can lead to reading and hearing him as a traditional bard, whereas for a Gaelic speaker what is remarkable is how non-traditional, innovative and radical his use of the language is. You don't expect in a Gaelic poem an invocation of the Red Army as a response to the Clearances.

Self-translation, from a minority language into the language that has defeated and marginalised it, is never innocent - it's done under pressure. And MacLean's self-translations are not always in themselves poems. Translating him into Scots means using the resources of that language, its spiky sound and harsher rhythm, to make a poem that can stand beside the original. MacLean's work has bought Gaelic fifty years of life, but the language can only survive in conversation with other languages.

The event was itself a fine example of that necessary conversation.

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Born in Stornoway, Isle of Lewis, Ken has been a full time writer since 1997 authoring thirteen novels, including The Star Fraction (1995) and Intrusion (forthcoming, 2012), plus many articles and short stories. His novels and stories have received three BSFA awards and three Prometheus Awards, and several have been short-listed for the Clarke and Hugo Awards. In 2009 he was a Writer in Residence at the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum. Learn more from Ken’s blog The Early Days of a Better Nation

8.7 million and not counting

2011-08-24T13:34:00.001+01:00

While Ken and Pippa are assiduously covering the book festival, I'm still in my garret dealing with basic texts.

I've just finished a first draft for my Traverse Event on September 30th..."Of Monkeys and Men"...which is a re-examination of the famous Scopes Monkey trial in Tennessee in 1925...that got dramatised with great success as Inherit the Wind by Lawrence and Lee.

You remember?...the movie is a real Sunday afternoon classic on TV...Spencer Tracy and Fredric March acting the belt and braces off each other in the deep south..where the teacher gets arrested for teaching evolution?...Dick Yorke? He's the teacher? Remember?...Samatha's husband in "Bewitched"? It's got Gene Kelly in it too...wearing a really bad suit and not dancing...? No?

You're probably all too young...Kevin Spacey revived it at the Old Vic a couple of years ago.

Anyway, I've been digging around in this old story and I believe I've unearthed some good new stuff...as well as some properly dodgy dramaturgical practices...which, along with the Creation Scientists' Strategy Document for attacking evolution right here and now, I'm keen to share...

(The strategy is called "The Wedge", by the way. Which is a Darwinian joke.)

In other news, the title of this latest blather refers to the number of different species currently living on earth...as reported in this morning's Metro...and if the number is anything like right, most of them haven't been catalogued or numbered.

(They're probably all beetles, of which, as JBS Haldane pointed out, the Creator is excessively fond...)

8.7 million? How can you possibly know that? I wondered...and the internet being the wonder that it is, in two shakes I'd found the paper in PLOS BIOLOGY from which the Metro article had descended with modifications...

(that's another Darwinian joke)

Here's the reference and citation

www.plosbiology.org
Citation: Mora C, Tittensor DP, Adl S, Simpson AGB, Worm B (2011) How Many Species Are There on Earth and in the Ocean? PLoS Biol 9(8): e1001127.
doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.1001127

After an unworthy chuckle at one of these enumerators of unregarded phenotyopes being called Boris Worm, I quote:

"Here, we document that the taxonomic
classification of species into higher taxonomic groups
(from genera to phyla) follows a consistent pattern from
which the total number of species in any taxonomic group
can be predicted. Assessment of this pattern for all
kingdoms of life on Earth predicts ,8.7 million (61.3
million SE) species globally, of which ,2.2 million (60.18
million SE) are marine. Our results suggest that some 86%
of the species on Earth, and 91% in the ocean, still await
description."

I'm not here to argue about statistical methodology.

(pshaw!...as if?)

My questions are a lot more basic...like if the evolutionary advantage of speciation in the first place is to diversify between, and compete for, food supplies, does speciation have an upper limit in a given eco-system?

If natural selection primarily operates at the level of genes, and there really are THAT many species, how meaningful is it to talk about species at all beyond whether Organism A can or cannot breed with Organism B? Do we need to do what Darwin did, and question what the word might mean given a Darwinian View of Life?

(The word itself has a neo-Platonic heritage: Species = Special Creation = Ideal Dog modelled in the mind of God.)

Is speciation wholly driven by progressive divergence due to genetic mutation? How big an influence are epigentic factors like viral infection, gene transfer, environmental change? Can mutation alone account for 8.7 million species?

If potatoes have got twice as many active genes as we have...and ferns...which have been around FOREVER...are just loaded with the things - despite their comparative simplicity - then is the number of coding genes analagous to the time that has passed since speciation...and what would that tell us? Am I completely off the wall here?

If natural selection still operates as a total explanation of speciation, (which it must...what else is there?) what is all the fuss about epigenetics I've been hearing? What on earth is "epigenetics" anyway??!?

Much watch the blood pressure.

On "epigenetics", I'm grateful to have been sent a link to Jerry A Coyne's excellent blog "Why Evolution is True"...and specifically a discussion about epigenetics' supposed challenge to "Darwinian Orthodoxy" aka "The Synthesis"

It's much better explained here than I could do.

http://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2011/08/21/is-epigenetics-a-revolution-in-evolution/#comment-128131

I also have to confess, from the point of view of my own unworthy dramaturgy, that the comments are fun too...in that it's fun to see scientists getting pissed off with simplifying populists like myself.

So I've started following it.

So much to read, so little time!

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Peter Arnott is Resident Playwright at the ESRC Genomics Forum April 2011 - April 2012. Appointed in partnership with the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, Peter will be hosting a number of public engagements as he explores ideas and seeks inspiration for a genomics related play.

Fiction shines a light on the Universe

2011-08-24T12:59:00.000+01:00

Pippa Goldschmidt is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum Writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

Tomorrow Stuart Clark is talking about his novel ‘The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth’, the first in a trilogy about the birth of modern astronomy. This is Stuart’s first novel but he’s an experienced science communicator and has written many non-fiction books. I caught up with him before his talk to find out more:

You were a professional astronomer for some time before you moved into science communication – why did you make that move?

I realised that I was more interested in the broad pictures of astronomy than in the nuts and bolts of doing research – debugging computer codes and arguing over marginal data held no appeal for me. So writing about astronomy provided a more natural fit.
There have always been two passions in my life: story telling and space. Story telling developed into writing, and my interest in space turned into a BSc and then a PhD in astrophysics.
I self-funded my PhD by writing for science fiction magazines, reviewing films and interviewing actors and directors. I even wrote the video sleeves for Star Trek for five years – it was that job that largely funded my PhD. I was also asked to write my first astronomy book at that time, Stars and Atoms, an illustrated family encyclopaedia.
However, I think my research allowed me to develop the critical eye that I use to get to the bottom of stories. And my interest in story telling allows me to present it in a hopefully accessible way.

And then you made another move – to fiction. How big a jump was that?

When I began writing The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth it didn’t feel like a big jump at all but looking back I realise it was a leap into the dark.
Having said that, I’ve always written fiction. There are a couple of finished and half-finished science fiction novels lurking on my hard-drive and a detailed synopsis and sample chapters for a novel called The Stone Ocean about Mary Anning and her fossil discoveries. However, Tracy Chevalier beat me to that one with her wonderful Remarkable Creatures.
I’ve been a voracious reader of fiction all my life, starting with science fiction. Now I read widely across genres and the main stream, looking for stories that resonate. As for the writing itself, it is very different. You simply can’t ‘tell’ in fiction, you have to ‘show’. Journalism or non-fiction writing is more direct; you have to tell as clearly as you can. I’m not saying either is better. They suit different stories. I have a number of ideas for possible books that would have to be large-scale narrative non-fictions rather than fiction. But fiction is something I’m concentrating on at the moment. I’ve just completed the second volume of The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth and I’m looking forward to starting the third book in the autumn.

Your first novel is actually a fictional account of real historical events. Why did you decide to tackle this in a fictional format?

The Sky’s Dark Labyrinth came about when an editor mentioned to my agent that the history of astronomy was like the plot of a thriller. It had danger, power plays, rivalry, intrigue. We found this fascinating and perhaps a way to move popular science onward.
So I began to think seriously about whether you could write convincing fiction based on breakthroughs in science. I wanted to stick to the facts as much as possible, flexing things only where necessary.
As I was researching the lives of Galileo, Newton and Einstein, which form the bedrock of the three parts of the trilogy, it became obvious that the stories were so dramatic the best way to write them was indeed as novels. I took inspiration from authors such as Philippa Gregory and Robert Harris who are both brilliant at this style of historical fiction.
I figure that if the public enjoy stories about kings and queens, generals and soldiers, why not about scientists too? After all, they helped shape their times just as certainly as the rulers of the day.

Were you hoping to attract new audiences with this approach? People who might be put off by non-fiction science books?

Yes. Everything I do convinces me that many people are fascinated by science but that they perceive a barrier to understanding it. These novels show science not as a daunting edifice but as a personal endeavour, driven by individuals with belief and passion. I think that makes these stories something that most people can relate to.
I want to present Galileo, Newton and Einstein as real people, embedded in their times and cultures, and grappling with new thoughts that blossom into science and a new way to understand the universe around us. Don’t we all want to make some sort of sense of our lives in the time we’ve got?
I’ve learnt so much about what science is and what it isn’t by writing these books that I hope others will do the same.

Do you think a fictional treatment adds to our understanding?

Yes, because it invites us to empathise with these scientists as fellow human beings. As we follow them through their stories we confront the same question that they do: what does it take to stick to a belief or a course of action, even though you are being pressured by the authorities to stop and your family are suffering because of it?
The first book takes place as Europe is ripping itself to pieces in the aftermath of the Catholic-Protestant divide. Into this uncertainty, Galileo in Italy and Kepler in Germany bring new insights into Nature, new ways of understanding the Universe and mankind’s place within it. They hope for certainty in an increasingly uncertain world. The story is how they follow these personal convictions and the consequences for them and their families for doing so.
At the very core, these stories are about how do you believe? Do you need evidence or are their certain beliefs that require none? Evidence or faith? And I’m not just talking about science versus religion. All of us decide how much faith we place in individuals and beliefs, and how much evidence we need to be persuaded otherwise. The benefit of the doubt, the burden of proof – we’re obsessed with this tension of faith versus evidence. It’s one of the key balancing acts in every one of us, and there are no concrete solutions.
It’s an individual’s choice, and so exploring it in a fictional setting is the best possible way to do it.

Thank you very much! I’m looking forward to the remaining books in the trilogy.

Stuart is speaking at the Book festival on Thursday 25th August, at 3:30pm.

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'How do the cells know about the jungle?'

2011-08-24T12:19:00.000+01:00

Ken MacLeod is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum Writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

Joan Bakewell is a speaker who needs no introduction, and in this capacity she's been introducing and interviewing speakers on key ideas for the 21st Century. Yesterday's topic was numbers, and the speaker was Ian Stewart. She introduced him by saying that of all the topics in her series, she found mathematics the hardest to understand, but that Ian Stewart was the best person to explain it.

Professor Ian Stewart is one of the great science popularisers - and not just in his own field of mathematics. Some of his many books on science were written with Jack Cohen, reproductive biologist and oft-invited speaker at SF conventions. In recent years, the two have teamed up with the wildly popular fantasy author Terry Pratchett to write (so far) three books on 'The Science of Discworld', which cleverly exploit the contrast between the eponymous flat planet (which runs on the rules of magic and the caprice of gods) and our universe (which doesn't) to explain an astonishing range of serious scientific points ... including the ways in which magic does work in our world, through the human propensity for Story.

Stewart began by asking 'Why maths and biology?' Biology has after all traditionally been the science for people who want to do as little mathematics as possible. (That was certainly why I took Zoology. How I ended up with an MPhil in biomechanics is another story.) The only mathematics used in most biology is statistics. We do experiments, and then we test whether the results are statistically significant (i.e. that they're unlikely to be chance). Ian's new book, Mathematics of Life, is not about that. It looks at ways in which mathematics is informing the science itself, in fields such as understanding how proteins fold into the shapes that (largely) determine their function, how ecosystems hold together and whether diversity is indeed the key to stability, and even in considering the possibilities of life on other planets.

To illustrate, he picked two topics in current research: animal markings, and animal gaits. Both are about patterns, and patterns are what maths is very good at explaining. As far back as the 1950s, Alan Turing studied animal markings and worked with equations whose solutions (when shown graphically) looked very like animal markings. Cue diversion about Turing wandering about with a sheet of blotchy paper, telling his colleagues that 'this looks like a cow' and being patted on the back - 'Yes, Alan, that does look like a cow'. Anyway, modelling reaction and diffusion together produces patterns similar to most of those found in nature, and the equations generate interesting predictions - such as that on a small animal, the stripes will move, and it turns out that they do, very slowly.

Gait, likewise, can be patterned, and the structure of the arrangement of nerves that would have to fire to generate the various gaits can be predicted, and one can even predict gaits we don't often see - Stewart and a colleague in Texas suddenly realised that one anomalous pattern was being acted out before their very eyes, as they watched a bucking bronco at a rodeo.

Joan Bakewell then asked a few questions. Why are tiger stripes vertical, rather than horizontal? Well, said Ian, it's because the stripes are camouflage, and tigers live in jungles, and tree trunks are vertical. Yes, but, Bakewell asked - and this is a direct quote - 'How do the cells know about the jungle?' Ian Stewart then broke the news about the recently discovered principle of evolution by natural selection.

The second part of his talk ranged from the discovery of evolutionarily stable strategies that follow the paradoxical pattern of the 'rock, scissors, paper' game, to the contribution of mathematical modelling to showing the possibility of plate tectonics (and therefore, by a long chain of inference, life) on rocky planets much larger than Earth. An even more wide-ranging discussion followed, and we all trooped out into the sunshine and the Book Festival and its magical buzz of Story with some new stories running in our heads.

PS: The principle of evolution by natural selection is explained in a book by Ian Stewart, Jack Cohen, and Terry Pratchett: Darwin's Watch. Other popular introductions are available.

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Just My Type

2011-08-23T15:48:00.000+01:00

Toni Freitas is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

Do you know what your font choice says about you? Have you ever really thought what people might feel when they read a letter or email that you have typed without considering the font? Do you just use the default setting? Or have you carefully chosen your font?

On Friday, 19 August, the Edinburgh International Book Festival hosted Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type. You might think a presentation and discussion about fonts would be quite a geeky, specialist talk, but you would be wrong! Fonts influence our lives every day: every email, billboard, newspaper article, junk flier through your mail slot, and wedding invitation you read has used a font that, no matter how subconsciously, evokes an emotional response.

Simon gave a fantastic presentation, giving examples of the stories about fonts that he tells in his book. He even interviewed Sir Paul McCartney. What does Sir Paul have to do with fonts? Just think of that particularly long ‘T’ in the Beatles logo. And did choosing Gotham as THE font for his campaign get Barack Obama elected President? Read Just My Type for the full story.

This event made me really think about how much fonts influence our lives. You may not be able to name more than two or three fonts (Times New Roman, Arial, and Helvetica perhaps) but you will feel something when you see a font. How does this make you feel? Or how about this font? And what about this one? That last one, Comic Sans, may be the most controversial and emotional of all. There are campaigns and documentaries about Comic Sans; many want to ban the font from the world, others think it is the greatest font out there. You can also take someone back in time by using fonts that are iconic of the 1920’s or the 1960’s or a Ye Olde English font.

Many of the world’s biggest brands have logos that don’t have any symbols, but rather an iconic font that is recognised by everyone. Just think Coca-Cola or Disney, or even Gap. I’m sure you can instantly conjure up what these logos/fonts look like. These companies and thousands more know what fonts can make people feel. You may be aware of the furore that Gap encountered when it tried to change its logo in October 2010. ‘Tried’ being the operative word; after only one week, the company ‘listened’ to the public, who resoundingly ridiculed the change and font choice, and changed it back to its original logo/font. Many companies have run into outcries due to font choice. London 2012 Olympics is another one everyone loves to disparage. That one took me two days to figure out that the shapes in the background were supposed to read ‘2012’.

More things I learned from Simon Garfield: do you know why the phrase ‘the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog’ exists? It’s a pangram used by typesetters and font makers to display all the letters of the alphabet. Ironically, thanks to YouTube, there is now actually a video of that very thing happening.

But more than anything, I learned that fonts aren’t to be taken lightly. When writing anything, I certainly don’t want to choose a font that someone may find offensive, or even worse, boring! So do you have a favourite font? Or is that pull-down box at the top of your Word document gathering dust? Go on, you know you want to play around…And if those don’t satisfy your font craving then there are thousands of fonts out there on the internet just waiting to be downloaded. If you were a font, what font would you be?

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As the Events Manager at ESRC Genomics Forum, Toni Freitas is responsible for conferences, exhibitions, seminars, workshops and public lectures. Originally from Washington State, USA, Toni has a Masters in Creative Writing and has had several short stories and poems published.

Total Recall

2011-08-23T10:22:00.000+01:00

Ken MacLeod is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum Writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

The problem of personal identity - of what makes you, you - has for a long time been investigated through thought experiments. John Locke asked us to imagine what it would mean to say that your immortal soul had in a past life been that of a warrior who fell at, say, the seige of Troy - given that you have no actual memories of being that warrior, and only the most coincidental resemblances in personality, outlook, knowledge, and beliefs. Leibniz asked us if we'd agree to 'become' the Emperor of China, on the sole condition that we took with us no memories of our present actual life. In this way, they tried to bring into focus our intuition that what matters in personal identity is continuity of memory and personality, and that our belief or lack of it in any immortal spark is strictly irrelevant.

But the self itself may not even be a mortal spark.

At a session chaired by Steven Gale, Julian Baggini spoke yesterday (Monday 22 August) on his book The Ego Trick, in which he explains the 'bundle theory' of personal identity, long familiar in the teachings of Buddhism in the East, and first explicated in the West by Hume. This is the recognition (attained, by Hume and by Buddhist practioners alike, through introspection) that when you look into your self, you find thoughts, perceptions, emotions ... but nothing that you can identify as yourself. On the bundle theory, that's all there is: the self just is the passing show of thoughts, perceptions, emotions ... there's no there, there.

But, Baggini went on, in his book he hadn't just expounded this philosophical idea, he'd gone and talked to philosophers and other thinkers who'd developed it. To clarify the notion of reincarnation, he'd talked to Tibetan lamas who believed that they were reincarnations of identifiable dead people. To investigate the ways in which bodily continuity is important to identity, he'd interviewed people who'd changed sex.

The self, he argues, does exist, but it's not what we take it to be, and it's in this sense that it is an illusion - the ego trick. This seems to me to approach from a different angle the idea that the self is what the Danish science journalist and mathematician Tor Nørretranders has called 'the user illusion', by analogy with the 'desktops' and 'folders' and so on through which we operate computers. We no more see the workings of our minds than we see the workings of our computers. Instead, we see icons on the screen. As one of my characters put it: 'All is analogy, interface; the self itself has windows, the sounds and pictures in our heads the icons on a screen over a machine, the mind.' By windows he, and I, meant Windows.

One of the many interesting aspects of science fiction (SF) is that through it you can not only conduct such philosophical thought experiments, but experience them in imagination, through stories. Someone unfamiliar with SF might be a little taken aback by a novel opening with: 'He woke, and remembered dying.' How (assuming it's intended to be literal) does that even make sense? SF readers, I'm sure, took it in their stride, but it may be worth spelling out the assumptions they'd have brought to the sentence.

In a world where computers are familiar, we know what it means to take a back-up of a computer's memory. Imagine it was possible to take a back-up of the contents of our brains (which it isn't, and may never be, but suppose). What if we were to flip the Locke/Leibniz question, and ask how we'd feel knowing that someone with all our present memories and dispositions, and a body that was a clone of our own, would walk the Earth (or another world) after we had died? Would you think, 'Wow, I'm going to live again!'? Would you think, 'Well, lucky for so-and-so, but that doesn't really help me'? Or would you think: 'Well, that's tough on the poor clone, denied a life of its own and saddled with my memories.'? If we knew we were about to die (but with all our faculties intact) would we feel relieved when the nurse or technician placed the mind-recording apparatus on our brow? Or knowing we'd sensibly made one of our own regular back-ups a couple of weeks ago?

I've imagined these situations, and others yet more bizarre, in that novel (The Stone Canal) and later in Newton's Wake, and of course I'm not the only one and far from the first. I don't know of an earlier example than John Varley's The Ophiuchi Hotline (1977) but there must be some. In another medium, other questions of identity are played with in the film Total Recall, based on a Philip K. Dick story. don't let Arnie's muscles fool you: that film is worth a philosophy seminar. Years ago I and my daughter had a long discussion of it on the bus, and some of the conclusions we came to went into my novel.

My daughter was with me at Baggini's session - we're both big fans of his books - and we posed some of these questions to him at the signing. He answered helpfully and cheerfully, and sent us away still talking. I hadn't asked him the question I should have, about the bundle theory. The first time I looked at my daughter, when she was less than an hour old, I was sure there was a person looking back, and I'm sure it's the same person still. But I didn't ask how that could be.

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A Treatise of Humean Nature

2011-08-20T15:27:00.001+01:00

Ken MacLeod is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum Writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

When the hero of Alastair Gray's Lanark was a typically tormented teenager, he happened to open a book. The book began:

All the perceptions of the human mind resolve themselves into two distinct kinds, which I shall call IMPRESSIONS and IDEAS.

As he read on, he found that the text soothed his mind by lifting him right out of his problems, and giving him something else to think about. This is one way that philosophy can be applied to everyday life. Another, of course, is by mining the great philosophers for nuggets of practical wisdom. Not many of us have time to do that, or have any idea where to begin prospecting, but thanks to the division of labour (you'll find that in Adam Smith) someone else can do the mining for us, and package the result in a book you can read on the bus.

On Thursday Peter Guttridge chaired a session - billed as 'Philosophers who get to the core of being', a rubric which all concerned promptly and modestly disavowed - with two philosophers, Simon Blackburn and Robert Rowland Smith. I'll follow their own cheerful convention and call these distinguished gentlemen by their first names.

Robert began by outlining his books Breakfast with Socrates and Driving with Plato as showing ways you can find philosophy relevant to life, without necessarily trying to 'get to the core of being' with Plato and Hedegger. Driving takes life's milestones, from birth to death via school, work, relationships and so on, and looks at what philosophers can teach us about them. Simon said he wasn't keen on philosophy as therapy, or the philosopher as sage - he's an academic philosopher, and having spent most of his life among philosophers he can think of only one he could call wise. What we can learn from philosophy about life is what we can learn from art: an example of what a dedicated life is like. His own current book, Practical Tortoise Raising (not actually about practical tortoise raising), was 'a bit of a hard read and I don't really recommend it'. He'd been shocked that the Book Festival had no celebration of the tercentenary of Hume - 'Britain's greatest philosopher, and Edinburgh's greatest son'. Hume's greatness was in his firm placing of the human intellect in the natural world, as that of a thinking animal, with all the limitation and dysfunction that carries with it - and in his dedication, despite that, to just getting things right.

The questions from the chair and then the audience drew from both authors clear and strong statements of their views on far too many points to cover. You had to be there - and that's what makes such events so worthwhile.

A question from the audience about confirmation bias found the two authors in agreement on this Humean point: that it's difficult to escape. Robert said that if he tries to present both sides of an argument fairly, he sometimes finds himself undecided. Another memorable comment, in response to a point about the increasing managerial regulation of academics: 'Press, politicians, police, the bankers are all corrupt. Doctors and university lectureres are the only people who are any good.' Which of the two said that, I leave to the discretion of the reader to decide.

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Reading in one language and hearing in another

2011-08-19T10:06:00.000+01:00

Ken MacLeod is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum Writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

I'm a native non-speaker of Gaelic: my parents spoke the language to others and to each other, but not to us. Many parents must have done the same, stopping the transmission of the language dead in its tracks. No doubt they had the best of intentions. As I once wrote about the background to all this, the story is peculiar and contorted. That story leaves me with very mixed feelings about attempts to revive the language by such expedients as road-signs. But I love hearing it spoken.

I went along to Thursday's Nothing but the Poem event, chaired by Robyn Marsack, Director of the wonderful Scottish Poetry Library, a great place and (like Robyn herself) a good friend of the Forum, for which it has hosted several successful events. The topic of the day was two poems by Sorley MacLean. The Writers' Retreat tent was packed out with about seventy people. Robyn said she'd only expected the dozen or so who turn up for such events of close reading at the Poetry Library. Sheets were handed out of the two poems: The Cry of Europe and Dogs and Wolves, each with an English rendering by MacLean and a poetic translation by Iain Crichton Smith. We had the privilege of hearing Dr Niall O'Gallagher read the poems in Gaelic. The rhyme and rhythm and associations of these originals came across strongly even to those of us, all but a handful in the room, who didn't understand a word.

Niall and Robyn led the discussion, which was - like the poems themselves - wide-ranging and intense. There's something about the concentration that's quite invigorating. The SPL has two more 'Nothing but the Poem' events at the Book Festival, and yet more in its regular programme. No preparation or previous knowledge is assumed, so the whole atmosphere is open and welcoming, but at the same time you can explore a poem in surprising depth. If you have any interest in poetry you should give them a try.

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Gold-Farmers, 3-D Printers, and Bad Actors

2011-08-17T20:28:00.000+01:00

Ken MacLeod is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum Writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

Cory Doctorow, at the Book Festival on Sunday to talk about his novel Makers, is well-known not only as a science-fiction writer but as a social critic and activist in the hot fields of copyright, online security, and emerging media. Boing Boing, the blog he co-edits, is itself a social media phenomenon: when he posted about The Human Genre Project - one of the Genomics Forum's literary initiatives - our site's Google results went through the roof as it suddenly became world famous for the proverbial fifteen minutes.

He kindly gave me an interview that ranged over the possibilities for post-industrial society, the role of thought experiments - what physicists call 'gedanken experiments' - in devising science-fictional scenarios, unequal exchange in the global economy, and whether cracking down on Twitter and other social media would be a sensible response to the anti-social behaviour they sometimes enable. Naturalised as a British citizen only days earlier, Cory has lost none of his liberal bite - though it's characteristic of him that as we continued to chat afterwards he explained how carefully he'd considered his oath of loyalty to Her Majesty and her lawful successors.

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What's unnatural?

2011-08-17T14:55:00.000+01:00

Ken MacLeod is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum Writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

On Tuesday evening I went to the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum's second debate, Natural v Unnatural: The Strange Business of Making People. Held in the Speigeltent beneath roaring downpours and above a rising miasma from the mud under the floorboards, the event was packed out. Chaired by Sarah Parry, the panel featured the Forum's Director Steve Yearley, science writer Philip Ball, and designer, writer and artist Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg. (Last year, Daisy and her colleague James King took a week-long Visiting Fellowship at the Forum, amazing us all with their imaginative designs for future applications of synthetic biology.)

Philip Ball, who had spoken at the Festival earlier that day on his new book Unnatural: the Heretical Idea of Making People, kicked off the discussion by pointing out that 'natural versus unnatural' is not a dichotomy of categories but a moral judgement with its roots in the medieval concept of 'natural law', as expounded by Thomas Aquinas. In antiquity, contra naturam was a neutral term for anything, good or bad, that forced an object or process to go against its natural course: a hoist was unnatural becuase it countered that natural inclination of weight to fall. The moral concept that contravening 'natural law' was wrong is still the basis of Roman Catholic opposition to assisted conception including IVF, as well as to contraception and homosexuality - all of which separate the sexual act from its 'natural purpose' of procreation.

But today 'unnatural' can also express a secular condemnation, of disturbing 'the balance of nature' as well as of new reproductive technologies. God has been reimagined as Nature. Although few now see IVF as 'unnatural' in this sense, old anxieties continue to haunt our debates.

Daisy Ginsberg explained that she she was an architect, who had at first investigated genetic engineering because she felt uncomfortable about it. Since then she has taken part in several sci-art projects, including actual genetic engineering of bacteria, but she still feels some of that unease. We need, she said, a new cultural and design language to to classify life that is the product of human design, and even a special place for them on the tree of life: The Synthetic Kingdom. We need to evolve the idea of design as we prepare to design evolution.

Steve Yearley argued that while both Philip and Daisy had referred to the notion of unnatural as a conservative force, and one that becomes outflanked and outdated by experience (as with IVF), it has had a different and more succesful dynamic in environmental debates. We've now reached the stage where the unintended consequences of human action are a greater source of fear than the forces of nature, and we don't have 'moral experts' to call on. In a secular society we may think bishops are nice to have around, but they aren't the founts of moral guidance they once were - and bioethicists can be just as ungrounded in their pronouncements as the bishops.

A lively discussion followed, to the sound of rain hammering on the roof. One final question was whether we should be sceptical of climate change, and Steve answered that by saying that the sceptical arguments are repetitious and don't add new and surprising knowledge, whereas the climate scientists keep coming up with unexpected and powerful discoveries.

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Art and artifice.

2011-08-17T14:31:00.000+01:00

Pippa Goldschmidt is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum Writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

Further to Peter’s blog below, I went to Philip Ball’s talk based on his book ‘Unnatural’, about the fears and myths provoked by the processes of creating life through assisted conception, such as IVF.

Ball listed eight myths of what he called ‘anthropoeia’, the art of making people, and showed how those myths are frequently based on anxieties about the nature of human identity itself. If we have dismissed the idea of a soul as a physical entity, then how do we define our so-called uniqueness? Where does humanity enter the scientific process?

There are of course different ways of ‘artificially’ creating life, probably a continuum from the low-tech turkey-baster approach, to pre-implantation genetic diagnosis; where embryos created by IVF are screened for genetic disorders. And different myths attach to different processes. Some relate to the anxieties about the process apparently replacing the ‘natural’ method, as articulated by the Catholic Church’s claim that artificial insemination turns the domestic home into a ‘biological laboratory’. Others are concerned about the genetic content of people created through these processes. If their DNA has been manipulated, are they real people? What is the status of clones?

It’s clear that literature has been one of the most powerful way of rehearsing and expressing these fears, but often the literature is more nuanced that its popular representation. Countless media stories about IVF invoke Frankenstein, but Ball argued that the main message of the book is often lost; the Creature is at his most human and gentle when he is living near and interacting with humans. And the Scientist is at his most inhumane when he is isolated from other people. It’s in the immaterial relations with each other that our humanity exists, not in the chemical formulations of DNA, or the processes by which we are created.

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Unnatural in the Rain

2011-08-17T12:15:00.002+01:00

Yesterday to the Ediburgh Book Festival, there to meet and talk to author, (The Music Instinct, Bright Earth, Critical Mass), former editor of Nature...and theatre maker...Phillip Ball.
He has a new book out called Unnatural: The Heretical Idea of Making People. This is his excellent and surprising website: http://www.phillipball.co.uk/.

He was also polite enough to give me fifteen minutes of his time...without really knowing what for...and I demonstrated why playwright is a total job description for me by entirely failing to properly activate the recording device to properly capture his graceful and pithy answers to my questions...which were more like setting up the cue ball for Hurricane Higgins than in any way interogative.

His answers ranged across his range in the book: a history of anxiety, you might call it, and a demonstration that what worries us about cloning and stem-cells is not so much techne as psyche...and has very, very deep roots. In the book he goes from Genesis through Plato to Paracelsus (he did a play about him) and beyond: the Golem, Frankenstein's monster...The book is a contribution to the history of ideas, but also of feelings, anatomizing our fears: our fear ultimately of ourselves...and what we make of ourselves..."anthropoesis" is his word...and I shall be dropping it into sentences whenever possible. It may even be a suitable bewildering title for a play...

Phillip was also the star attraction at the Genomics Forum discussion along with the artist Daisy Ginsberg and our own Steve Yearley - the event chaired by Sarah Parry from Edinburgh University's School of Science, Technology and Innovation.

As the rain battered on the Spiegeltent in an irresistible metaphor of the vanity of human wishes, moral judgement was dissociated from taxonomy, Aquinas' doctrine of the equivalence of the good and the natural was dissected, nature was reified and complexity woken up to...the thing he said that I scribbled down in the biggest letters was that what can be done in science is not the same as what can be understood...which took me back to a lecture he gave on the ethics of nanotechnology some years back...where he defined science as what scientists do.

I've always been a sucker for pragmatism.

But then there was the GP who spoke next to last from the audience...

(just before the climate change denier/conspiracy theorist...at whom one internally shouted - have you LOOKED outside the tent???!!! They're going to have to do this on a HILL soon...)

The doctor was talking about offering IVF to patients and how wonderful it feels that such a thing exists for those for whom it works...and how torturing it is for those...around 50%...for whom it doesn't. How torturing it is to feel your self to "fail" to take advantage of a miracle.

The moral and the physical are inextricable...whether our reflex is that nature knows best, or science knows anything...and our imagination, Phillip said, siezes on what goes wrong far better than it understands what goes right.

Unlike mine, his is a very sane voice. And the rain still falls.

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The Revolution Will be Followed by a Signing Session in the Adjacent Tent

2011-08-15T14:23:00.001+01:00

Ken MacLeod is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum Writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

This year's theme for the Edinburgh International Book Festival was decided last year. With what was described at the launch party as uncanny prescience, the theme was 'revolution'. There was a definite echo of that in the voice of the first author I heard on Saturday: Alan Warner, Edinburgh University's newly appointed Writer in Residence. Catchily if clunkily billed as 'Sopranos author does trainspotting', the event, chaired by Zoë Strachan, centred on Warner's reading from the MS of his forthcoming novel The Dead Man's Pedal. It's about a lad who by mistake becomes a trainee engine-driver on a West Highland railway line in 1973-74: a moment when Britain seemed to edge closer to a pre-revolutionary situation than at any time before or since - though not quite as close as some of Simon's more radical work-mates think, as they trade banter in the station hotel bar. Warner first came to prominence with Morvern Callar, which like his later The Sopranos and his current The Stars in the Bright Sky was hailed for its brilliant evocation of young female voices. In the section he read, the man from Oban showed a similar - and on the face of it less surprising - fluency with a range of male voices, from political badinage over a pint to pained recollection of war's absurd horror between swigs of the hard stuff. But catching the cadence of the industrial work-place, and indeed of working-class socialism, isn't as easy as it seems or as easy as it used to be - not that many have tried.

Answering questions from the chair and the audience, Warner explained that The Dead Man's Pedal takes place in the same 'place of the imagination' as his other novels set in and around 'The Port', a town which is not quite Oban. The place has become so vivid over the years that on visiting Oban he now finds himself wrong-footed by his own imaginary geography. His approach to writing is not to attempt a 'perfectly crafted 220-page Booker novel' but - following his exemplars Beckett and Kelman - to give his characters scope and freedom to develop, to say their piece; and then to edit down the long manuscript that results. He begins on more than one novel at a time, and works until he knows which is the one that demands to be finished - for which approach he's thankful he has an understanding editor with a steady nerve. Asked why the sentences in his later novels were easier to understand than some of those in his first, Warner wasn't sure he agreed, but added that he'd found that writing doesn't get easier if, as he does, you set yourself harder challenges as you go along. This bracing directive was followed by a reading of a passage he said was as close to its real-life source as he could make it: an account by the narrator's (and Warner's) father of a grotesquely needless loss of four lives in an armoured car in an Italian ditch. This sobering account was lightened by the interruption of loud explosions, from the fireworks opening the evening's Military Tattoo.

'Eighty-eights,' Warner said, cocking an ear. 'I'd recognise them anywhere.' Even the most realistic writing has to go beyond experience. .

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Silence goes faster backwards.

2011-08-15T11:09:00.000+01:00

Pippa Goldschmidt is part of the ESRC Genomics Forum Writers team covering the Edinburgh International Book Festival 2011.

It seemed appropriate to go and listen to Tom McCarthy talk about Orpheus, the first poet, on the opening day of the festival. Actually, this was more of an audio-visual event than a straightforward talk. The author of the Booker prize short-listed ‘C’ and founder of the semi-fictional International Necronautical Society showed clips from Cocteau’s film Orphée, as well as a video of Kraftwerk performing their song ‘Antenna’.

The Orpheus myth (one of the oldest of the Greek myths) tells how Orpheus was the first poet and musician, making the animals and trees dance to his music. After his wedding to Eurydice and her subsequent death, Orpheus goes down to Hades to fetch her back to the land of the living. He is allowed to do so, on condition that as he leads her away, he doesn’t turn back to see if she is following him (perhaps a reminder to him that he is not in control). But as they make their way up the surface, Orpheus starts to doubt if Euridice is following him, and turns to look. That backward glance banishes her down to Hades, and Orpheus, having remorsefully foresaken all other women, is torn from limb to limb and his remains scattered over the land and sea.

So, according to McCarthy, what we do when we create poetry is gather up the pieces and broadcast them again in a never-ending cycle of reception and transmission. Even the word ‘broadcast’ has its roots in agricultural practice; it means the spreading of seed.

Cocteau’s Orphée shows the poet being inspired by listening to messages from the dead transmitted over the radio, illustrating McCarthy’s point that transmission and reception of poetry and literature are symmetrical events; the idea that writers create something out of thin air is more of a myth than the Orpheus story. Rilke’s writing ‘Sonnets to Orpheus’ in a single month is a classic example of the poet channelling rather than creating from a vacuum.

And, although McCarthy didn’t mention this, perhaps we also know this from physics. The same antenna can be used to transmit radio waves as well as receive them. A couple of years ago, the radio telescope at Jodrell Bank, normally used to receive information from stars and galaxies, was used to transmit poems to the Moon.

At one point, the talk was interrupted by a deafening roar from planes overhead, taking part in the Tattoo. Pure noise, or pure transcendence; it seemed appropriate.

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The Blazing Light in August | Online Only | Granta Magazine

2011-08-13T18:26:00.000+01:00

The Blazing Light in August | Online Only | Granta Magazine

For a less pretentious take on the riots, and my last post, this from my good friend Gabriel Gbadamosi in Granta.

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I Want a Riot of My Own

2011-08-12T11:42:00.002+01:00

Riots, like nature, get interpreted according to pre-conceptions and their accompanying metaphors. So while we read "the message the kids are trying to send us" as an expression somewhere along a moral spectrum between good and evil, we can also, if we like, use political and commercial metaphors. From Primitive Accumulation to Conspicuous Consumption.

From the point of view of the latest stuff I'm trying to cram into my weary head, it's all about inherited behaviours, specifically group behaviours as opposed to individual choices. Our judgement of group behaviour being itself a group behaviour.

Deep breath. Start again.

It goes something like this: just as Hamilton and Maynard Smith came up with the idea that population and individual traits are actually explicable if we think of natural selection operating at the level of genes - an idea developed and popularised by Dawkins - so when we think about good and bad things to get up to, we have inherited instincts for group behaviour that actually determine our conduct far more any system of morality can comfortably cope with.

According to this group behaviour way of looking at things, we jointly and severally belong to families, gangs, groups of mates, football colours, nations, interest groups...but we belong to each one of them slightly differently at different times.

What makes an association real to us is that the association is FELT. And you feel differently depending on your context...your perspective is contingent on who you FEEL yourself to be with. The problems are experienced at the points where the interests of these associations are contradictory. Where we have a war. Or a riot. Groups are made not born.

The observations that the rioters have no stake in society or no proper fathers are observations of this kind. Each implies and reinforces the group to which "they" do not belong.

This shifting of identity is analagous to our biological status as, on the one hand, witless carriers of selfish genes...but, on the other, as social primates with all our complex accumulations of genetic material and associated behaviours, most of which is shared with most of our near nieghbours on the tree of life. And then there's culture...history... It's a question of levels, and all levels are "true". One level does not invalidate the others. We are subject to natural selection from our quanta on up. Same with group behaviour.

What is asked of us by moral and political codes is that we make a hierarchy of these personal identities and affiliations and stick to it. That we permanently scale their importance according to a moral and social prescription. Sometimes national identity on top, sometimes Celtic supporting, sometimes family...Never forget, my head teacher used to say, that you are representing the school when you pan in the window at WH Smiths.

David Cameron is placing family affiliation (because he's a Tory) at the apex of this hierarchy...his analysis being that it is a breakage of family self-identification that allows the gang collective identity to overwhelm social restraints agreed upon by "society" - which itself, in Tory-world, is a voluntary association of families who have agreed that only certain forms of robbery are legal. He is conflating social and legal definitions of selfhood with "family".

He also thinks that this hierarchy can in some way be jointly policed by all of the above. He wants us all to agree on that. To redefine our association. He is responding to group behaviour, then, by forming a "better" group...

The truth is, probably, that you can redefine a hierarchy, but you can't make it stick.

From the genomic view of group and social behaviours, humans and most other animals share very widespread (and hence very ancient) hormones expressed all along their genetic material that has been found to work on a large range of group/social/moral behaviours, all the way from monogamy (or not) to kicking the crap out of sexual competitors (or not)...through herd animals to multi-organism "collective" beings like ants.

Which means group behaviour as such is something we're all stuck with...and credit and blame are all part of the package. They too are evolved behaviours for managing the group. And not something we can take the credit or blame for.

We have evolved in a way that means we have no option but to have ideas about why things happen...but our feelings about why things happen (which are more ancient than our ideas) are rooted in the very ancient dynamics of making groups of us work.

Groups of altruists survive better than groups of self servers...but a self server can do rather well inside a group of altruists. Our outrage and humilation about being conned or attacked without provocation...that FEELING...is probably as old as the hills. We evolved to feel hurt and angry. Our metaphors of good and evil and society and all that...probably came later.

We hate it when our sense of ourselves is undermined or threatened...whether we're being stopped and searched or sweeping up broken glass in our shop. The feelings are the same, and they are undeniably powerful and part of us.

When I'm writing a play, the characters' feelings...how they experience themselves, is obviously central. But to write those feelings, I have to be morally neutral about them.

Everybody in a play thinks that they are A) the good guy and B) the most important person on stage. They're all right about that and they're all wrong. Bad guys must talk and think of themselves just like good guys do. (Unless you're writing crap)

Exactly the same values of love and solidarity and courage are required to join a criminal gang and keep faith with it, as to keep a family together or invent a better society. Those feelings are experienced the same way by the just and the unjust. It's a pious fraud to pretend otherwise.

What we have inherited genetically, it seems, is not a destiny...or a set of instructions. To tell us that family will always come first... or the master race or the working class...

What we have inherited is a tension within a hierarchy of loyalties and identities that never has and never will resolve. So the best we can do is come to temporary agreements with each other on what works. For the moment, anyway. For the individual, the family, the gang, the country, the human race...

So no problems there then.

ps

The government's instructions to magistrates to ignore fripperies like sentencing guidelines and rules of evidence somewhat prove my point I think.

God on the Bus

2011-08-06T17:39:00.000+01:00

I was at a seminar on Thursday with John Evans from the University of California in San Diego. He's a forum regular, with a background in religious studies, and was talking about a linguistic conundrum which in some ways is quite specifc to current US Culture Wars...which meant it was up my apples and pears. I love the way Americans actually TALK about this stuff.

As Alistair Campbell once put it, in Britain we don't do God.

What John was talking about was, roughly, "When is talking about God not talking about God?" When and how do religious critics of (say) stem-cell research translate their objections from a language of faith to one of "the public good". There was some intense discussion about the Rawlsian Orthodoxy that governs public discourse...(I didn't know there even WAS one, Martha!)

...where, as one participant put it, (based on his experience of trying to get EU nations with a rainbow of religious and secular traditions to agree on notions like "Human Rights") ..the only way to get anything good done in the world is not to tell anyone what you're doing.

Hey...the last contribution of the day came from the Deputy Chief Constable of Lothian and Borders Police...there's serious chat in the ACPO going on about a working definition of the "good". I suspect because they ain't gonna trust politicians to tell them what it is anymore.

Anyway, a fine time was had by all.

Then, after a jar in the Tolbooth, I was on the bus home...and it was one of those central belt sunsets...with high white cloud, low black cloud, cobalt sky...the golden hour, and an invisible sun pouring golden curtains between the cloud cover like the searchlight in Close Encounters...but much better.

And I thought...what is the language for THAT? Is God involved? Does it make it any less staggering and humbling to live on this planet if it's all a series of imagination numbing coincidences that brought me onto one of Brian Soutar's buses on the M8 to be in the time and place to see THAT?

Do God or the public good have anything to do with it...what would they have to say about it if they did?

Maybe I'd better get back to specifics next time.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

From Malick to Melville by way of Bacteria

2011-08-04T13:34:00.000+01:00

The Tree of Life...not necessary to drive a car through it...but from the Norsemen to Eden, and on to Darwin and Terence Malick, the tree as an image of/metaphor for "life" has been pretty pervasive.

Is the Tree of Life the same one as the Tree of Knowledge...I forget...

I saw Malick's movie yesterday, and other than bitter reflections that Hollywood only has room for one artist at a time to be both fully funded and fully autonomous (Kubrick was the last one) - I had a pretty good time with it.

"There is the way of nature, and there is the Way of Grace"

I liked that. As an expression of all our inherited tensions, seemed okay to me. Some people got hacked off with the "creation" segment...from planetary accretion through the invasion of one single cell by another to make a complex cell etc, etc, etc but I rather enjoyed all that...The Book of Job plus dinosaurs...worked for me.

...and seeing glimpses of old favourites like the Grand Prismatic Lake...which looks like it came out of 2001: A Space Odyssey, but is actually in Yellowstone Park (see below) and is rich in the anaerobic (ie non oxygen breathing) extremophiles from which it seems all life came...

(Had to...there WASN'T a breathable amount of oxygen for the likes of you and me for simply yonks - till the bacteria manufactured cells from sunlight and carbon dioxide and EXCRETED it -we are all breathing bacteria poo...you heard it here first!)

All very Stephen Fry...

But my point, I think, is that Malick's audio/visual PRAYER...which is what that movie is...has the same preoccupations as I'm finding myself contemplating with this residency...that is, how do you relate one human life...a life cut short at a young age, in his case...to a grand vision of how everything works and where it all came from...

The cautionary thing for me was that whatever its joys, and it held joys aplenty, "The Tree of Life" wasn't a story. If I'd been in a bad mood, or even had had a head cold, I'd have dismissed it, as some reviewers have, as vacuous...

A bit like the Price equation in my last blog, if something is about everything, in some sense it is then also about nothing at all. The grander and more inclusive your metaphor, the less of a story you've got.

Stories are about the holes in the story that you leave for the reader or viewer to occupy...as well as the stuff you do show and tell...

The thing about the genomics eye view of life is that it's nuanced, holistic, much more so than the more driven, purer agency of the gene eye view...
It's more Ishmael than Ahab, and all the better for it...But still there is the Whiteness of the Whale...the blankness that comes from contemplating the sheer scale and depth of it all.

Wonder Ye then at the Fiery Hunt?

------------------------------------------------------------------------

Addicted to Pretty Things

2011-08-02T12:20:00.000+01:00

Talk to a biologist about goodness, and they'll talk about "Levels of Selection".

At least, that's what happened at our last meeting on Thursday, when I'd brought along various materials that had caught my eye on the history of "The Goodness Problem" in evolutionary thought. JF Derry, who's been a regular attender, insisted that we talk about selfish genes, selfish organisms, selfish kin, selfish groups, selfish species...because that hierarchy of self-interested behaviour is the governing paradigm within which science currently talks about the stuff we used to talk about in Church.

Natural selection is the cornerstone of This View of Life...therefore all behaviours MUST make sense within its parameters.

"The Selfish Gene", of course, is Richard Dawkins Ur-text, and was itself in some ways an expansion upon the work of Bill Hamilton, whose altruism equation I quoted a couple of blogs back.

To me, however, what matters most, I think, about "The Selfish Gene" is that it's an an extraordinarily powerful metaphor...as is "Evolution" itself.

I'm still processing what we talked about, and what I'm reading...but (and forgive me if this is obscure) I think it is the persuasive and political power of metaphor around which my thoughts, such as they are, are coalescing.

Let's face it, for most of us, metaphor is what science is. It is the prettiest of ideas...like Einstein's mass energy equivalence...that we latch onto...our scientific judgement is aesthetic.

(And Darwin was on about the heritability/adaptation of beauty back in 1871....)

Or Jeff Goldblum as James Watson in the fantastic BBC dramatisation of the modelling of DNA "Life Story" years back, saying "It's got to be pretty".

George Price's covariance equation, now widely used in the study of animal behaviour, neatly and prettily conjoins evolutionary notions of fitness and inheritance with pseudo-moral ideas of benevolence to make a case that "goodness", "self-lessness", "altruism"...or whatever is your metaphor of choice...MUST be itself heritable...that there must be a benefit attached to selfless behaviour, which means that selflessness, paradoxically, is naturally selected.

At the level of genes, cells, organisms, kin groups, species...maybe even life itself.

His equation has been described, however, as a tautology...Its critics argue that if something so neatly describes all possible behaviours, it is ipso facto meaningless, unfalsifiable, unscientific...

But addictive. Like Price himself, addicted to his own ideas of goodness that led him into some very dangerous acts of altruism among the homeless of London...finding miracles in his own mind. All this as detailed in Owen Harmon's splendid biography, which is being featured as a Genomics Forum Event at this year's Edinburgh Book Festival.

Like I say, I have no conclusions yet, but I do have the growing conviction that the play I end up writing is going to have the power, beauty and seduction of metaphor at its heart.

For an overview of the "levels of selection" problem, see Samir Okasha in Human Nature Review Vol 3, 2003. http://human-nature.com/nibbs/03/okasha

Next Meeting Thursday 28th July Traverse Bar

2011-07-25T11:19:00.001+01:00

Where we'll be talking about morality and nature...the attempts over the years to find moral guidance in the world around us...or justification for being amoral, of course...

In the meantime, I thought I'd share a bit of a play I've been working on with you. It's an adaptation of The Cone-Gatherers by Robin Jenkins I was working on in Aberdeen last week with a splendid team of actors...

This particular speech, maybe, betrays some of my own pre-occupations with such questions:

DUROR

It’s everywhere. It’s all around…it’s in you and me and the trees and the stone…it’s all the one thing. It’s all the one substance. Matter. You see? Every creeping thing. You can’t fight the truth…you have to submit…you have to agree…you have to say…yes…

(He stops suddenly. Then suddenly starts again)

if there’s no God, and no soul….if all there is…is trees and stone…then there is no me or you…is there?…not really… And when we die…we vanish so you can’t believe it was ever real, that there was ever life, that there was ever…

(Pause. He starts again, mechanically)

…people get shot in the head…don’t they? …their bodies are still there…but where are they?…they’ve gone…bodies in a pit, covered in sweaty earth, naked, white, rotting…what are they? What is the difference between a dead man and a living man…can you feel that?…can you touch it?…no…you can’t…it’s not a thing…

(Sudden pause. Sudden resumption)

…what happens if we just stop? What happens if we just stop? When we die…or have a stroke…or get hit in the head…if we can stop being ourselves, what are we? Hah? What are we?

(Pause….he’s got something. The following is more considered, rising to triumph)

We pretend to be ministers or doctors or soldiers or fathers or wives…we just pretend…it’s not true…we know it’s not true…we know we’re nothing…we’re not anything…we’re the world… we’re all made of the same stuff…we know that’s all we are…and sometimes we can see it, we can feel it… there’s nothing…nothing but the forest and the fear and the pain and the joy and the feeling…the feeling…that we’re all one thing…I’m not me and you’re not you…it’s all just…we feel it….

(Pause. He slides into despair and terror)

And we’re scared …we don’t want to be alone…we don’t want to know , we don’t want to see it…but sometimes we do see…we can’t help but see ourselves, and there’s nothing for us…no hope, no joy, no meaning, no purpose, no wars no world no stars no flesh no skin no trees no stones…there’s just …it…this dead…horrid…huge…nothingness…but I see it…I see it now…right now…it’s all lies…all of it…all of it...all of it…

Well...you see the kind of thing...

Come for a jolly chat!

The Altruism Equation

2011-07-14T15:32:00.001+01:00

rB>C

Yup. That's it. That's everything explained right there.

Where "r" is relatedness...how closely genetically related you ( the subject) are to the recipient (object) of your kindness...

and

"B" is the benefit this cousin of yours acquires from your sacrifice...

Then if the product of these two is greater than (>) the cost (C) to yourself of that sacrifice or expenditure of energy...

Then you won't eat your grandson at Christmas instead of getting him a book token.

Or, if you're a drone bee or worker ant, it's why you will still contribute to the hive when you aren't, personally/reproductively speaking, going to get anything out of it. You may die but your genes will thrive. To put it yet another way, all social (or familial) behaviour is really nepotistic survivalism in disguise.

This equation was Bill Hamilton's way of accounting for selfless behaviour within the "selfish" paradigm of Darwinian Nature. He came up with it in the sixties, and it's still quite popular.

It's an early highlight for me in my current reading for this project, which is Oren Harman's biography of George Price "The Price of Altruism".

(See that clever thing he did there with the title?)

The first part of the book sets the scene for Price's own work...and strange demise...by an historical survey of the various ways that various minds have tackled this paradox, from Kropotkin's Anarchistic reading of nature as modelling "Mutual Aid" as the answer to all our problems, to the neo-liberal free market in genes offered by Dawkins et al that is our current orthodoxy.

(I know whose side I WANT to be on...I know who I WANT to be right)

But it begs the question - do we really read nature as it is, or do we map our desires and values onto it? Like we used to do...still do...with God? Isn't the word "nature" itself an instance of that?
And a further maybe broader question...which I think will be the theme of our next gathering in the Traverse Bar

(Thursday July 28th 2pm to 4pm- be there or be excluded from kinship selection) -

Can Understanding Nature Ever Tell Us How to Be Good?

I'll try to dig up some interesting stuff to look at...meanwhile, here's some bees.

Religion and science fiction

2011-07-14T13:16:00.001+01:00

My contribution to the Guardian discussion on SF and religion is now online.

If science is the theology of nature – with the wilder reaches of physics standing in for its scholastic philosophy – SF is its mythology, its folklore, its peasant superstition. Television, film, anime and computer games supply the statues and holy pictures, which (this time) really do move.

Humans 1 Potatoes 2

2011-07-11T10:56:00.000+01:00

In today's Metro you may have seen a piece showing that the James Hutton Institute in Dundee, of whom we are very proud, have just completed sequencing the Spud Genome. My title today refers to the comforting fact that it turns out potatoes have got roughly double the number of active genes as you have.

Why do I find this comforting? Well, it's just another demonstration that the cultural assumption that humans must be the most complex of nature's creations because we're (allegedly) the smartest...is based on a false paradigm of "evolution as an advance in complexity" with us at the top of the pyramid.

It's what Thomas Kuhn called a "paradigm shift". Suddenly, everything looks different because the frame of reference within which we interpret the world has been irrevocably altered by the genome's eye view that has been emerging into "viewability"over the last twenty years.

That which was carved in stone now comes with quotation marks round it. There are some, like the philosopher John Dupree who is attached to this forum at the Exeter branch - "Egenis", check him/them out - who would have it that it is becoming less and less meaningful to talk about "genes" at all.

Which has got what to do with the price of potatoes? Well, the lovely little things are afflicted every so often with virulent and catastrophic crop failure...and having a DNA map may well be useful in understanding and dealing with that...Potatoes are the third most important carbohydrate source we've got. (After rice and wheat).

And if someone could do for rice what Norman Borlog did for wheat back in the sixties (some deft hybrid making...dwarf wheat it's called, and it has saved millions of lives) then that might give us some options when the environmental whip comes down.

(And, yes...that's going on too in a lab near you)

Finally, I have been reminded by correspondents that the number of areas of possible human interest opened up by my having this opportunity are, pragmatically speaking, limitless. My choice of focus has to partly be driven by circumstance as well as volition. But please keep suggestions coming.

One of these circumstances is that another of my colleagues here, Steve Sturdy, is chairing a discussion at the Edinburgh Book Festival with Oren Harman, who has written a biography of George Price called "The Price of Altruism".

This is, even at a glance, an extraordinary story...into which I'm going to be delving over the next couple of weeks. It's all about altruism...the puzzle of kindness...of selfless behaviour...and the attempt Price made to mathematically reconcile "good" with the imperatives of natural selection...

To put it another way, it's asking what sound you get when you bang two paradigms together.

I'll let you know what I hear...and keep you updated about our next Gene Therapy Session at the Traverse Bar.

After the Bar

2011-07-01T14:35:00.000+01:00

Well how was it for you?

We had our first informal gene therapy session in the Traverse Bar the other day, and a small but select band of pilgrims came to view the relics of my digging around in the genome. (see left)

I brought along the Act passed in the Tennessee Senate banning the teaching of evolution in 1925 -the act that John Scopes deliberately broke, thus prompting the three ring circus of the Dayton Monkey Trial, the founding act of political theatre in the long, still ringing tale of the post Darwinian culture wars...

I brought along another piece of legal history, the US Supreme Court Decision of 1927 (written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, no less) upholding the enforced eugenic sterilization of Carrie Buck - "three generations of imbeciles is enough" - from 1927...

And more up to date, the current hoo ha around the stem-cell regenerated pitching arm of Bartolo Colon of the New York Yankees...

And a story from last week about women in the States being prosecuted for harm done to the children they were carrying through pregnancy... up to and including murder...that I found in the the Grauniad last week.

(Why are all of these stories AMERICAN? Maybe because us Brits are too buttoned up to argue about belief in public. God Bless Michelle Bachmann! - He will if He knows what's good for Him!!!)

I didn't really have an agenda...and I don't know if we were any further on towards discovering one by the time we got to the end and I needed some Dutch lager.

But it was stimulating anyway. The conversation. And the lager.

We'll be doing it again in a while...and soliciting responses and contributions to the online poetry/prose poem/thought anthology "The Human Genre Project"

(My contact details are on there)

But in the meantime, having looked at the genome at the top of this posting, have a swatch at the cladogram below.

This is the modern take on the "Tree of Life". With a topologically appropriate model of "descent with modification."

Once again, if there really is a paradigm shift implicit in "Genomics" it has to be something along the lines of "sameness" - the homology of all life at the genetic level. Something to do with the near enough inestimable privilege of being alive at all...on a ball of dirt on the edge of the western spiral arm of the Milky Way. And how, Goldilocks like, by bizarre yet accountable happenstance, the primordial soup turned out to be "just right". And here we are. All of us. Even Michelle Bachmann.

Whatever else it does, it has to give us pause from living to have a look at life.

Or stop and smell the cyanobacteria or something...

Back the week after next!

Genomics Come all Ye to the Traverse Bar

2011-06-28T10:53:00.000+01:00

So our first meeting is on Thursday. Our first "experiment". To be honest, a good part of the "experiment" is whether anyone shows up...or it becomes a meeting about meetings...

Anyway, I'm bringing along some juicy things to talk about, all connected to the same question -

Whose View Of Life?

I blogged earlier about Darwin, and Sean Carroll...and their view of life. The question is...what's yours? Does it depend which Church Pew or Lab Bench we sit at when it comes to assigning a sense of value to what science tells us is accidental? Where do you look for morality? Is there a gene for it? Or a kinship equation?

Let me put it this way:

I live in the world. We all live in the world. More or less inadequately. (Or maybe that’s just me...or Scotland). We do what we do. We do our best.

It’s not enough. It’s never enough. For our families, our societies or for ourselves. Never.

Why not? What, exactly, is the matter with us? Is there a design flaw? Or if we evolved this way, what’s that about? Is the lacking we sense in ourselves something we're stuck with...like tonsils?

We worry away at this. That’s why we build things, make things, write things…it’s why we rape continents, start wars, paint pictures…sequence genomes…It’s all questioning and not answering…why be human? Why live? Why do we die?

We attempt lots of answers to the same damn questions over and over again. Our attempts are what we call “culture” . That's why you will find exactly the same damn questions in every damn blog…in every damn thesis about every damned thing…and in the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first story ever written…

Every answer we come up with, we secretly suspect, is a lie, a con, something (anything) to get us through the night. We always intuit there's something more.

I suspect that’s roughly what Einstein did to get him through the night…and Mother Theresa…mind you, I think that’s what Himmler did too…
Why do we DO that?

The search for a reason…a shared search...however Hopeless…and not always Harmless. I think that’s what “genomics” is about for the non scientist (and the scientist)…especially as it aspires to being a science of “everything”

Anyway, I'm going to bring along some thought provoking hunks of text I've come across in the hope that we can start an argument...then go away and write FURIOUS poems and plays about it all.

Do come.

Traverse Bar, Thursday 30th, 2pm

Traverse Bar Thursday 30th June 2pm

2011-06-21T10:46:00.000+01:00

Activity…all of this activity…on and on we go, trying to engage in good faith with all that we encounter…and what does it mean? What is it for? Where do we search for meaning to our lives? And why do we do that at all? Is that search built into us? What do we mean by that? Is it soul, God? Is it something that evolved in us, this consciousness lark? And if it is, is it adaptive? (That is it, does it work for us? And if it HAS been working for us so far, do our CO2 emmissions mean it's not going to be party time much longer?)

Not every capacity we evolve is good for us…We evolved the predisposition for cancer and heart disease as well as the capacity to run, jump and enjoy chocolate…

(We must have done…where does it come from otherwise?)

We, like every other phenotype on earth, are evolution making the optimal (naturally selected) use of available materials. The genome…which is nothing more than the sum of our stringy chromosomes considered holitically…is the bit we inherit directly from our parents…and it defines our limits and capacities.

Completely?

Well, there are genetic fundamentalists as well as religious ones…but most of the things I’ve been reading of late would say “Probably not”

There is also memory…and cultural memory…

Mind you, some people put “cultural evolution” right alongside the physical…

Hum hum hum

Some people (I’m not one of them) have even created a unit of cultural inheritance and learned characteristics and abilities…Memes they call them…

Which is a metaphor that makes a similar sounding word to “genes” as far as I can make out…and not much else.

Whatever the metaphors, we are, a fair chunk of us anyway, defined by our inheritance…

So what about free will and all that?

Again, fundamentalists of all stripes don’t believe in any such thing…or rather, the religious fundamentalists argue that only God is truly free, while genetic fundamentalists argue that our bodies and the lives we live inside them are incidental to the immortal and invisible will to duplicate of our God like genomes…

I get the increasing sense the deeper I plunge into all this that there is a big old disconnect between how professionals in the gene trade think, and how the rest of us struggle to keep up.

I’ve no idea how I’m doing in bridging this gap…and would like to talk about it to the two constituencies of which I am professionally now a part….

One is theatre and scribbling folk who like to think about science, the other is science folk…who like to scribble...or read what other folk scribble

These conversations are the point of my being here.

If you fancy joining in…I’m starting a gene therapy group meeting on the last Thursday of every month in the Traverse bar. First one as above

I’ll bring along some stuff I’ve been reading…and just throw it in the mix…elicit some responses from whoever turns up…some of which I want to publish online via the Human Genre Project…the neat science and poetry website started by Ken MacLeod, my illustrious predecessor and science fiction novelist.

We can talk about science fiction too, if you like. Sometimes…and increasingly at the moment…I think it’s the only genre of modern writing that’s about what’s really going on.

The Metaphor in Question

2011-06-14T11:26:00.004+01:00

"I live in a world of poetry," she said. "Everything seems significant to me. Everything has meaning. It's what gets me into trouble"

Una Persson in The Entropy Tango by Michael Moorcock.

1.

History, besides BEING a metaphor
Is MADE of metaphors.

I want to EMPHASIZE that.

Evolution is a metaphor -
one that Charles Darwin
much resisted.

The word does not appear
In the eighteen fifty-nine
"Origin of Species"

("The survival of the fittest"
Didn't turn up till the fifth edition
and there as a quotation
from the work of Herbert Spencer)

Being classically educated
(led-out)
Darwin knew that "evolution"
means "a rolling out from"

He didn't like that a bit

Implicit in the word
is the idea that the organic present
has rolled
- progressively, Whiggishly
and inevitably –
from out of the past.

That’s what his predecessors (and successors)
Meant by the use of that metaphor
That's not what Darwin thought he saw
In the garden at Down
Or the volcanic lumps of the Encandatas

Niether did he see
The History of Life
As a ladder
From lower to higher

On his "entangled bank"
all life,
plant, insect, mould and duck
was exactly as "evolved"
as every other "form most beautiful"
Every bit as lovely...
Every bit as interesting

2.

He didn't like his title either.

"Origin of Species" was a
publisher's echo of the earlier
(Best selling)
"Vestiges of Creation"
Robert Chamber's anonymous blockbuster
of 1844
To which, many people thought,
"Origins" was a sequel.

In Vestiges, Chambers talked
of "evolution"
of higher, better forms
succeeding, lower, simpler breeds
till at the pinnacle stood man
(white, male, possibly Scottish)
with mutton chops and a waistcoat -
a monkey's paw
fiddling in his pants

On the publication of Origins
(which didn't sell like hotcakes - or Vestiges)
Huxley, Darwin's bulldog, snapped at bishops.

But Huxley never accepted -
Descent with modification
Naturally selected in the struggle for existance -
as the engine of life's changes

But he, like Herbert Spencer,
Andrew Carnegie, and, yes
Adolph Hitler
"believed" in "Darwin"

Darwin the metaphor, that is.

3.

In the beginning, then
Man created Darwin
just as Man created God

as a metaphor
out of metaphors

as a belief
a cause
an explanation

4.

The Revd Adam Sedgewick
Who taught Charley his geology
broke his pupil's heart
when he wrote to Darwin
how he loved him
and how he hated his ideas.

But Sedgewick hated "Vestiges" more,
Despised it,
Assuming the anonymous author
to be a woman -
Like Eve, seeking out of vanity
For things she shouldn't know.

(Original Sin, also
Is a metaphor
But not for "knowing" No.
For "meaning"

Because till Eve took the apple
Nothing had a meaning
Everything had names for what they were.

So there was no need for metaphors
In the Garden.)

5.

Pace Aristotle,
a human being (since Eve)
is a "meaning" reed

It must have happened first in Africa
Possibly with a yam or a banana

We've been in trouble ever since.

Meeting Up

2011-06-14T11:16:00.000+01:00

Anyhoo…the next bit of my masterplan is to start meeting people and talking about this. If there’s anybody out there reading this, this means you…

Last Thursday of the month…June 30th…2pm … and the same in succeeding months…excepting August and December

I want to convene an informal group discussion around key texts I’ve dug up…Trav staff, writers’ groups, anyone else I can dig up…

(Burke and Hare made their contribution to the materiality of bodies and knowledge just round the corner, don't ya know)

The idea being to run a few of these ideas past and through some craniums (crania?) other than mine…to talk about this stuff not as people who UNDERSTAND genomes necessarily…

Just people who’ve GOT one…and are interested in what it means.

I’m posting a sort of poem I’ve written with some first thoughts a bit later on today…and we’ll see what kind of conversations we can get going.

Last for now on Sean Carroll’s “Endless Forms most Beautiful”

2011-06-09T12:20:00.000+01:00

Carroll’s essential tool kit genes…Hox Genes they’re called (for reasons he explains a lot better than I can…)

Anyway, it turns out these clever little monkeys have been around for what is effectively forever…so all the variations of all the bodies we see around us from wasps to whales…were sort of…(and here I’m getting foggier and need help) …potentially already there too.

In embryology (which is suddenly REALLY interesting again, having not been sexy for ages, according to Carroll) what these clever folk are finding out at the moment is that building bodies is largely a matter of time and space…of the same Hox Genes, the same toolkit… being switched on and off in the earliest stages of development in ALL animal embryos…so that your leg ends up THERE (if you’re a fruitfly) as opposed to THERE (if you’re Simon Cowell)…

And that switching OFF is possibly more important more of the time than switching ON.

(No…don’t put a leg there…or there…or there…or there…wait for it!…NOW)

This may be just bonkers, but doesn’t that view of life (as lots of no-es punctuated by well placed yes-es) rather tend to argue, or lie on similar lines, for and to Stephen Jay Gould’s proposed “inversion” of the cone of diversity as alluded to in my last post?

That evolution…natural selection…progressively favours simplicity? Maybe maybe.

That evolution is an arrow with no built-in direction? Bet your shirt on that one!

And doesn’t (as Carroll also thrillingly describes) the evolution of the same parts (from the same genes being expressed) into wings in one animal and gills in another…tend to point the same way?

That complexity has always BEEN there…

Just a thought.

Leading (me anyway) to lots of other thoughts…which I may berate you with when they’ve stopped swirling around my cranial cavity…

Meanwhile I hope that someone who’s cleverer than I am in these matters is reading this rubbish so they can electronically belt me over the head and tell me to stop being silly.

Or give me the Nobel Prize for my insight…either will do.

Next time...a bit of a poem...and almost immediately...a call to conversation!

Welsh Wonders

2011-06-07T11:04:00.003+01:00

Another recommendation for reading…Stephen Jay Gould’s “Wonderful Life”…not an essay on the cinema of Frank Capra…but a radical, readable exposition on the fossils of early Cambrian creatures found by Thomas Walcott in the Burgess Pass in the Rockies more than a hundred years ago now…and reclassified in the 70s and 80s by Simon Conway Morris inter alia…

Gould uses the bizarre (to us) features of these creatures to propose a radical new model for evolution…that instead of the story of life on earth being one of simplicity evolving into complexity…we all of sudden STARTED complex…and have been getting simpler ever since…

(Conway \Morris’s own book on the Burgess Fauna – and more recent discoveries in China - The Crucible of Creation, I also recommend. Morris thinks that Gould’s use of the fossils to turn all of conventional evolutionary thought on its head is “premature” – which is science speak for “bollocks”)

I love a good fight, me.

A wee note…Cambrian means “Welsh”…because it was in Wales that rocks of that age were first ordered by geologists…though they didn’t know then WHAT age…and take a peek at Hallucigenia or Anomalocaris …(two of the oddities found by Walcott) and you think:

“ Wales…hum…isn’t that where they’re making Doctor Who?”

Thats Opabina with five eye stalks up there by the way...and Hallucigenia is the wee fellow with the spines bottom right...

Genes Forever

2011-06-03T11:11:00.000+01:00

I’ll try to paraphrase some more of the cool stuff I’ve been reading…

Sean Carroll talks mostly in “Endless Forms Most Beautiful” about ten or so “Hox” genes…which biologists have been rather flabbergasted to discover are shared by ALL animals…everything…from flatworms to Simon Cowell.

What all these animals sharing the same essential body building tool kit means…from an evolutionary point of view…is that the common ancestor of all these bodies…phenotypes…already HAD many of the essential ingredients all animal life would ever need…genotypes…long before they were actually needed.

(It is also decisive proof, if more were needed in this day and age, that they all HAD a common ancestor…so yah boo to the Creationists)

That is, before the Cambrian Explosion 550 million years ago, when complex animal forms suddenly appear in the fossil record…many of the essential genes that make the amino acids that make the proteins that make the eyes and scales and legs and teeth and kidneys were already kicking about in the biomass - which till then consisted almost exclusively of the kind of blue green slime you clean off an old toilet…

(By the way, life on earth is still overwhelmingly bacteria…as it was exclusively in the beginning…and shall be exclusively again for almost all of the hereafter…till the sun blows up anyway)

Well WHY for goodness sake? Why have all the genetic material you need for building bodies, when there aren’t any bodies to build yet???

There is no “why”…is the answer that whispers on the pre-historic wind…that you can’t hear because there aren’t any trees for it to whisper through…

Just cos…

All of which I think goes to show that if the universe really was put together by a watchmaker, he wasn’t just blind…as Richard Dawkins would have it…but blind drunk.

What do genes do right?

2011-05-31T13:58:00.000+01:00

Before I splurge further into the joys of Sean Carrol’s “Endless Forms Most Beautiful”…a swift update on ideas for up coming events

I had a mutually enthusing meeting this morning with Jennifer Williams, who is the Traverse’s point person for this project, and we were exploring a number of possibilities for public events …including setting up a monthly series of public/invited “Genome Encounters” that I’ll host…maybe in the Trav Bar…maybe starting at the end of June.

We also talked over plans for events in the autumn…and indeed the Spring of next year…

Watch this space for the stuff of life…

Meanwhile…

There’s a poster up in the office the Genomics Forum have so kindly given me in which to type this gibberish….produced by the US Department of Energy (I don’t know why) that exemplifies the “classical” view of genetics…

This is it here: http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/posters/chromosome/chooser.shtml

It’s a chart of nicely coloured representations of 22 human chromosomes

(and the X and the Y chromosomes…the X we’ve all got one of…girls have two- and us boys have got the Y chromosome instead, dangling off the end of the chart rather unimpressively as it happens.)

Anyway, these stripey slugs of information are accompanied by wodges of text…and they’re mostly a list of the genes that activate or code to proteins (or fail to code) for stuff that goes WRONG…from breast cancer to red hair…that is the primary interest in genes as expressed by this poster is in stuff which we might be able to find a cure for…

(Is there a “career in the theatre” gene we can surgically remove from the unfortunate children of actors and such folk?)

What Sean Carroll and his chums do is start from what the whole thing DOES RIGHT as a constituent of an eco-system…in building embryos of chickens and butterflies as well as actors…

They suggest that we imaginatively leap to a genome’s eye view of making eyes…for example…

Just on eyes for a minute, one cool wee thing I learned from this book is that if you take some Hox Genes – the tool kit, Carroll calls them - from a mouse embryo that make eyes in a mouse…and inject them into a fly embryo (in the wrong place…the thorax, say) …you get an eye being expressed…but you get a FLY eye…which is as unlike a mammal eye in structure as you can imagine.

I don’t really know what that means yet…but it blows my tiny mind…

What I’m Doing 2

2011-05-26T15:22:00.000+01:00

While I’m reading and researching for these possible events... these “Encounters with the Genome” as it were…and thrashing out what’s the best way to present and market such things…and thinking about the play, I’ll also be posting on what I’m finding out about as I go.

And although right now I’m swimming about in all this like a stray protein in a Petrie dish, there are a couple of things I hope to be able to do when I can occasionally attach myself to whatever it is stray proteins might attach themselves to.

For one thing, sometime soon I’ll be inviting submission to a website called “The Human Genre Project”…a snazzy online collection of poems and stories and jokes inspired and collected on a neat wee cartoon of the 23 chromosomes shared by you and me. Check it out at www.humangenreproject.com

Another thing I can do is recommend reading…if I come across something I find useful and/or exciting, I can say why and pass it on.

One I can immediately and whole heartedly recommend is Sean Carroll’s “Endless Forms Most Beautiful”, its title deriving, as I’m sure you recognize, from Darwin’s uncharacteristic flight of prosody at the tail end of “Origin of Species”.

What Carroll does is elegantly and rather movingly to demonstrate the key shift in perspective between “classical” genetics and “genomics” when it comes to thinking about animal evolution…

(No, I wasn’t aware there was one either…not till last week anyway)

That is, to stop thinking quite so much about what goes wrong with bodies and where to find the “gene for it”…the smoking gun…

And to use the holistic viewpoint of the whole genome to look at the structures of what goes so miraculously, improbably RIGHT…

Most of the time.

What I’m Doing Here

2011-05-24T10:47:00.000+01:00

I’m planning to write a play for the Traverse called “The Fly Room” - about power, property and knowledge - at the end of all this, but in the meantime I’m going to be putting together what I hope will be a series of provocative public events that share and invite comment on the thinking I’m putting into it.

Me and some actors will be presenting and interrogating key texts and events from the making of the modern world of genomics…not simply as a subset of techniques of biological and medical enquiry and innovation…but as a way of understanding “life”…whatever that turns out to mean.

These are found texts…to be culled and winnowed…and debated between...I’ve already got a pile of books and pdfs to read. Over the next few weeks I’ll be letting you know what I’m reading and a bit of what I’m thinking.

The first of these events is hopefully going to be towards the end of June…a kind of trial balloon we’re going to send up…maybe in the Traverse Bar…?

(hint to Traverse)

I’m going to start out with a bit of an old classic…The Scopes Monkey Trial…Tennessee 1925…that first big clash of world views…base camp for America’s culture wars on evolution in education…the clash of titans (Bryan and Darrow) memorably mis-represented in the hit play and movie “Inherit the Wind”…and revived by Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic not long since

(See how I’m deftly marrying our worlds together)

Plus, of course…the Dover School Board in Pennsylvania going through exactly the same stuff on Intelligent Design (or Creationism Lite) much more recently...(2004)

Creationism...in some disguise or other... as maybe coming to a Foundation School near you…Michael Gove’s stipulations not-withstanding. The debate about evolution in education in the States is very fast moving…they keep changing the terms and I'll be trying to get current on all that too...

Meanwhile if there’s anybody out there…I’m looking for suggestions…I’m looking for folk to talk to…

I’m here now. So you know where to find me.

Hello.

"A playwright? Be serious!"

2011-05-19T10:48:00.000+01:00

by Peter Arnott, Resident Playwright – ESRC Genomics Forum and Traverse Theatre

The other reaction I’m getting is from the other pole of this sphere…from the scientific types with blue sparks emerging from their frontal lobes (which includes my own brother, actually) looking at me with deep scepticism…a playwright?...engaging with genomics?

That’s nice, they say…dismissing the idea as a bit of cross-cultural-public- engagement- blah blah blah-box ticking.

(They’re far too nice to SAY that, of course.)

And they go back to their work. Back to “reality”.

Hang on…I say…(or I’m saying now)…I’m here to learn things. I’m here, first and foremost to read and to listen…

And anyway, I don’t think you can divorce the personal politics of moral values, from scientific discourse…you can’t put moral questions and scientific questions into discreet monadic boxes…any more than who owns the copyright on my chromosomes is none of my business.

I don’t think that scientific work can ever be divorced from the society it happens in, any more than play writing can. I think a public understanding of science is more than a tokenistic shibboleth for getting the funding application approved…I think it’s an imperative.

Policy on matters scientific isn’t any less democratically accountable because science is hard for non-scientists to understand.

Gawd…I work in the arts, and if that’s true for us, it’s true for you.

Even more importantly, I don’t think we can arrive at any coherent moral arguments about anything unless we take account of the best thinking available about how things really are.

Values and reality cannot be allowed to remain opposed as though they were mutually exclusive. We can’t leave values to the fundamentalists. If for no other reason than because that would leave “reality” to the amorality of the global marketplace.

I won’t have it. Either way.

So you’re stuck with me. Here now. Bothering you.

" "What Forum?" "Genomics What?" "

2011-05-17T15:22:00.000+01:00

by Peter Arnott, Resident Playwright – ESRC Genomics Forum and Traverse Theatre

I've got a residency at the Genomics Forum I tell people.

And the ones who nod wisely and avoid saying "Eh?" are just pretending they have any idea what that means. (I should know. I was bluffing when I got the gig.)

"Genomics Forum" - people do keep asking me what that is. They're mostly puzzled about the genomics bit. I'm getting a bit of a handle on that, maybe. It's the Forum bit I'm still wondering about.

Anyway I'll start with the first bit:

Genomics - this is:

EITHER a catch all term for techniques and research developed in the life sciences since the specific event of the sequencing of the human genome.

OR a bold new all inclusive paradigm for the understanding of absolutely everything...honest!

Hum...my patchy recollection of Thomas Kuhn suggests to me that a paradigm shift cannot be willed. It happens or it doesn't. Maybe it has happened, or IS happening...I hope to find out.

What does seem to be rock solid already in the papers I've been reading is that "old style" Genetics is currently being rather huffily and contemptuously dismissed.

(Genes code to proteins, proteins to body parts and functions...Hah!)

That's now known as Astrology in the biz, apparently.

The most important thing we seemed to have learned since 2000 - (I say "we" , I mean "they") - is that we know a lot less than we thought in terms of one to one functionality between genotype and phenotype - or a lot less than we thought we were going to know by now.

Getting the whole genome was supposed to have been getting an easy-to-read shopping list of miracles and nightmares...It hasn't turned out that way. This is philosophically reassuring and (maybe) politically and commercially disastrous.

Jesus! All that money! Where's my leukaemia cure already? -

(I do stand open to correction on all this by the way.)

The only other thing I know is that as far as the general public is concerned, it's all gone very quiet...since Dolly the Sheep and Venter the Press Conference...nothing...zip...

So...the second half of the phrase: Forum? To which all I can offer so far is a bad rhyme.

For whom?

When the Edinburgh International Science Festival and Gengage met each other...

2011-05-09T12:02:00.000+01:00

Blog by Alicia Lopez Cuesta - ESRC Genomics Forum Intern

You’re probably familiar with the Edinburgh International Science Festival but not with Gengage…? It is time to remedy that! Gengage, also known as The Scottish Healthcare Genetics Public Engagement Network, exists in symbiosis with the ESRC Genomics Forum. Gengage has the challenging mission of connecting people who are working to enhance public engagement with healthcare genetics in Scotland.

As part of the Edinburgh International Science Festival, Gengage held a successful event on Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD) on the 20th of April, titled “From Healthy Embryos To Designer Babies: How Far Is Too Far?”.

From 2pm to 5pm, more than 50 participants filled the room to learn about PGD and to share their opinions about such a delicate and controversial topic. Should PGD be offered for all genetic disorders? Should PGD be permitted for the creation of ‘saviour siblings’? or Should PGD be used for non-medical reasons? were some of the questions on which the public had to discuss and ‘vote’ on.

The stimulating presentations of the speakers, the generous help of the round-table facilitators and the victory of the organisers over the last minute whims of technology, generated a rich base for the participants’ various and interesting thoughts.

Gengage is grateful for all the positive feedback given by the participants, particularly the moving thanks from the retired GP who entered medical school in 1942.

I have been embedded in Gengage and the Genomics Forum as part of my studies in Science and Technology Studies at Science Po Grenoble for 6 months as an intern. Helping to organise this event was for me a good opportunity to take part in public engagement around science and medicine and to chat with welcoming speakers. As I am likely to deal with PGD in the future, I think this event was well-balanced with pros and cons.

I hope to find these kind of events in France where the last year of my science and technology studies is waiting for me!

How Dr Atkins brought me to the Genomics Forum

2011-04-21T15:47:00.000+01:00

I came to work at the Genomics Forum by a somewhat strange route. As an undergraduate I studied English at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. When the time came to think about a PhD, I was keen to research something more “socially relevant” than literature. I’m not sure I agree with my younger self any longer about the social irrelevance of fiction – or indeed, that “relevant” is even the relevant word. Nonetheless, that wish back in 2003 to study something “relevant” is responsible for my career path to date.

Back in 2003, one of the hottest topics in the media was the craze for the Atkins Diet, and other low-carbohydrate, high-protein weight-loss diets (such as South Beach, Protein Power, and The Zone). Low-carbohydrate diets were hugely popular in the late 1990s and early 2000s in English-speaking countries such as the UK, US and Australia. For those who haven’t tried them, they recommend a more or less drastic reduction in starchy and sugary foods, including bread, rice, pasta and potatoes; all foods with added sugar; and certain high-carb fruits and vegetables (bananas, tropical fruit, sweet potatoes, corn, etc). The rationale is that these foods raise blood sugar and insulin levels, causing weight gain and type 2 diabetes.

My younger self put together a research proposal on low-carbohydrate diet books and took this to Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Human Nutrition Division. I was lucky enough to receive joint funding and support from CSIRO, though I continued to be enrolled and co-supervised by the English department at the University of Adelaide. As my project progressed, I became especially interested in the evolutionary and genetic explanations for obesity and diabetes that low-carb authors used. I looked in particular at two different but closely related theories: evolutionary nutrition and the thrifty gene theory.

Evolutionary nutrition is a relatively straightforward model, based on the idea that the human body has adapted to function best on the diet eaten in the Paleolithic era. The thrifty gene theory (first proposed by geneticist Dr James Neel in 1962) is more complex. It suggests that feast-or-famine conditions during human evolutionary development naturally selected for people who could store excess energy as body fat for use later on, when food might be scarce. The theory suggests that in today’s circumstances of constant food availability, the so-called thrifty gene predisposes people to obesity and type 2 diabetes. Low-carb diet books use these two models to justify their recommendations, which are supposedly closer to what “our primitive ancestors” ate, and therefore healthier.

For my PhD I looked at the scientific evidence for these theories, as well as their ethical, social and policy implications. I found that representations of Paleolithic diet and human nutritional evolution in bestselling diet books are often inconsistent and lack scientific or historical evidence. For instance, The Zone (Barry Sears, 1995) makes claims about the nutritional breakdown of Paleolithic diets – how much protein, carbohydrate and fat they contained. But these claims are actually contradicted by the same scientific paper that Barry Sears cites in support of his figures.

Similarly, low-carb diet books routinely present the thrifty gene theory as fact. But James Neel only ever proposed the thrifty gene theory as a hypothesis – the evidence for a specific “diabetes gene” or thrifty gene is sketchy at best. Critics from a range of academic disciplines have questioned the evidence for feast-or-famine cycles in prehistoric hunter-gatherer life (the assumption that underpins the thrifty gene theory). These critics point out, too, that it would be impossible either to prove or disprove the thrifty gene theory – since we can’t go back in time.

With my “social relevance” hat on, I was (and am) most concerned with the effects of these theories on how as a society we think about obesity and its causes – especially since these diet books were so incredibly popular. Blanket evolutionary explanations for obesity and diabetes distract attention from national and international inequalities in health and nutrition. Neither obesity nor diabetes is equally distributed within Western societies, or across the globe. Yet this doesn’t rate a mention in low-carbohydrate diet books. Instead, talk of evolutionary and genetic causes for obesity distracts public and policy attention away from the association of overweight and ill-health with poverty and socioeconomic disadvantage.

The end of this story for me personally is that all this thinking and writing about genes, evolution, science and policy got me a job at the Genomics Forum after I finished my PhD. At least I think it did! – maybe the interview panel would say something else. Regardless, 3 years later, the research has finally been published (the wheels of academia turning slowly, as they do!). Read all about it in Public Understanding of Science online.

Christine Knight. “Most people are simply not designed to eat pasta”: evolutionary explanations for obesity in the low-carbohydrate diet movement. Public Understanding of Science, published online ahead of print 10 February 2011 (institutional subscription required to access full text)

Telling a story of body parts

2011-04-06T09:09:00.000+01:00

Blog by Ann Lingard - Genomics Forum Bright Ideas Fellow

Would you donate your eyes, your brain, biopsy samples or an amputated limb? And why would you do it - for research, to help someone who needed new organs, for teaching purposes, or for display in a Museum? If you have donated bits of yourself, for any reason, would you like me to write the story of how and why you made this decision? And if you are long, long dead, would you mind if I tried to find out more about you, and wrote your story too?

Amongst the extraordinary collections at the Surgeons' Hall Museum there are skeletons, plaster-casts of faces, amputated limbs, fixed pathological tissues and foetuses, and a collection of surgeons' 'memorabilia' - drawings and tools of their trade - which help us to put in context just why some of the human specimens have ended up in Museum shelves. But 'specimen' is a dry word: these organs and bones were 'donated' by human beings, each of whom had a life, perhaps in a town, on a farm, perhaps with a family and friends; or perhaps he or she was ridiculed and despised.

As a bioscientist I was well-used to looking at 'things in jars' in museums, and as a parasitologist I looked at some pretty gruesome things, but it was not until I started visiting anatomy collections as research for my most recent novel that I really began to think about the people from whom the specimens had come. Because Edinburgh had been so important in producing high-calibre surgeons, many of whom practised in Scotland -- and whose patients subsequently provided specimens -- the Surgeons' Hall Museum was the obvious place to go. And Andrew Connell, the Collections Manager, has such a great interest in and empathy with the donor-patients, that every visit to the Museum has helped me attempt to understand more and more about the donors' lives.

I chose various specimens with his help, and the hunt for background details has taken me to the National Library, the Lothian Health Archives, the National Portrait Gallery, and to meetings and conversations with a great variety of people, from artists and poets who have created work about specimens at the Museum, to a lady who lived and played in Hill Square in the 1930s, to an amazing county archivist who tracked down all kinds of personal (and subsequently anonymised) details about one of the specimens.I have been enormously helped with all this by Steve Sturdy, through his own great interest in 'making sense' of the Museum's Collection.

It was often a relief to escape from the occasionally heart-breaking and puzzling Museum Collection to the brightness and welcoming friendliness of the Genomics Forum! The physical warmth and good coffee were especially welcome back in December, when the army had been called in to help clear the streets of snow (and there was a special bonus to being a Visiting Fellow that month in that my visit coincided with the excellent and very sociable Christmas lunch at Iggs). That time I had to dash across to Glasgow a day earlier than expected because of the heavy snowfalls that were forecast in the evening -- I had arranged to meet someone who runs the 'eye retrieval unit'. That has been the other part of my work as a 'Bright Ideas' Visiting Fellow - to talk to and write the stories of people who are involved in the modern donation process, whether as donors, potential donors, or even collectors, of tissue, DNA, organs. I've been really privileged to have the Forum's support and help in this, as the contacts I have been able to make and the people I have met through EGF have been so helpful and enthusiastic (if occasionally a little surprised!).

The Forum, too, provided a home for an informal get-together that I arranged and that Steve Sturdy chaired, to discuss some of the stories that I had already written: poets Diana Hendry and Christine de Luca, artist Joyce Gunn Cairns, Andrew Connell from the Museum, Robin Morton from Generation Scotland, Calum MacKellar from the Scottish Council on Human Bioethics, and of course Pippa Goldschmidt, the Forum's own Writer in Residence, were invited. It can be pretty terrifying as a writer to stick your head above the parapet, and hand out your fiction for comment, especially to other writers! But all kinds of helpful and often surprising comments and ideas arose -- and one of Pippa's comments made me wonder subsequently whether my curiosity about the donor-patients could be seen as a form of voyeurism or sensation-seeking? I hope I will have found an answer to that troubling question before the pieces of fiction and non-fiction appear on the Forum's forthcoming 'Creative Space'. But I also hope that if you read "Lisa's story" under Chromosome 4 on Ken MacLeod's Human Genre Project, and follow the related links, you might, as one reader commented, find yourself "made aware rather uncomfortably of some prejudices I'd rather I didn't have!"

Ann Lingard
A former academic and research scientist in zoology and parasitology, at Cambridge then Glasgow, Ann Lingard changed career to write novels and non-fiction. As well as collaborating with artists and other scientists herself, she works to bring scientists and writers together, through talks and workshops and by setting up the resource for writers, SciTalk, http://www.scitalk.org.uk/. She especially enjoys finding ways to enthuse non-scientists of all ages about science, whether through illustrated talks, walks on the Solway shore, Café Scientifique, or even poetry events. Her latest novel is The Embalmer's Book of Recipes, and her websites are http://www.annlingard.com/ and (under her married name, Ann Lackie) http://www.plumblandconsulting.co.uk/

Mon aventure écossaise chez les chercheurs en science sociale ...

2011-03-22T14:58:00.000Z

Blog post by Cécilia Claeys - Genomics Forum Bright Ideas Fellow

Coming from the South of France, I had some prejudices about Edinburgh: Wet, dark and cold! As a sociologist, I should have known that prejudices are a mistake, and indeed, I have spent two weeks with cool and rather sunny weather… But that was not enough to take me out of the Forum (except during the week-end!), because here is the brightest light of my journey.

When getting in, Margaret, the Administrator will give you the first friendly welcome. The place is cosy and seems quite. Despite, everybody is very busy here! European programs, publications, surveys, meetings, seminars, ... well just a day in the life of an ordinary research team? Not that sure! Because, at the Forum, there is no scientific routine. Interdisciplinary, of course, and ready to meet people from all disciplines, biological, sociological, medical, sciences, ... But, that is not enough, because here come also social and economic actors, and even artists. What for? To escape from scientific routine, for sure!

As an environmental sociologist, my journey at the Forum was an opportunity to bring more sciences studies in my work, as knowledge, expertise and incertitude are central in the comprehension of the evolution of nature management. And so I did as I was able to access a wide range of scientific literature offering rich material to discuss with the researchers of the team.

Thanks to Steven Sturdy who has opened a completely new issue to me. I did not suspect before to be in strong links with my own topics: genomics as a new field to question relationship between scientific and popular taxonomies. Thanks to Steven Yearley who has highlighted to me at the same time the meaning and the escape from the old Anglo-Saxon debate “realism versus constructivism”. Emma Frow gave me the opportunity to share with her our respective interdisciplinary experiences underlining the similarities and differences between English and French way of doing things. David S Ingram, from the Forum Advisory Board gave me a stimulating short introduction to the botanist tools I missed to explore a hidden part and nevertheless a hotspot of biological invasions: the pathogens.

All these exchanges helped me in going further in my own reflection about the management and perception of biological invasions, as a case study of the changing taxonomies crossing nature/culture, wild/domestic, anthropocentrism/biocentrism and other divides, in a context of social changes and uncertainty. Finally, I had the opportunity to attend a special event organised by Gengage (based at the Forum) in Glasgow, called “What should happen to your brain after you die?” ... an example of interactive exchanges between science, decision making and citizens.

Cécilia Claeys

Lecturer in Sociology, University Aix-Marseille

Email : cecilia.claeys@univmed.fr

Cécilia claeys is a Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Aix-Marseille (France), where she teaches environmental sociology, sociology of science, political sociology, as well as theories and methodology. As a researcher, she is attached to field surveys as a stimulating and indispensable first step to develop sociological analysis. The South of France is her favourite playground, following debates about the management of “nature” and uses conflicts. Throw different cases study regarding floods, biological invasions, mosquitoes control, National Park creation, she questions, in a context of social and environmental changes, the meaning and operability of cultural and scientific dualisms as nature/culture, wild/domestic, anthropocentrism/biocentrism and other more divides.

Short list of publications:

Claeys C. 2010, « Les « bonnes » et les « mauvaises » proliférantes : Controverses camarguaises », in Etudes rurales, N°185, Juin-Juillet.

Claeys-Mekdade C. (2003), Le lien politique à l’épreuve de l’environnement. Expériences camarguaises, Peter Lang, P.I.E., Bruxelles, 240p.

Claeys-Mekdade C. (2006), « La participation environnementale à la française : le citoyen, l’Etat … et le sociologue », Vertigo, revue électronique, Montréal, Vol. 7, N°3, Décembre.

Claeys-Mekdade C. and Jacqué M (2008), « Nature protection associations in France », in Protectiong Nature. Organizations and Networks in Europe and the USA, ed. C.S.A. (Kris) van Koppen and William T. Markham, Edward Elger, U.K – U.S.A..

Claeys-Mekdade C. et Allard P. (2007), « Managing the environment and metamorphoses of the State : the French experience, Desenvolvimento e meio ambiente, N°16, jul/dez, Ed. EFPR, Brasil, pp. 39-54.

Gendron C., Vaillancourt J.G., Claeys-Mekdade C. et Rajotte A. (2007) dir., Environnement et sciences sociales. Les défis de l’interdisciplinarité, PUL, Québec, 432 p.

Picon B., Allard P., Claeys-Mekdade C. et Killian S. (2006), Gestion du risque inondation et changement social dans le delta du Rhône. Les catastrophes de 1856 et 1993-1994, Cemagref, 122 p.

Darwin, Dawkins and the Left

2011-02-23T11:25:00.000Z

By Ken MacLeod - Genomics Forum Writer in Residence

A few months ago Chris Williams, an OU history lecturer and political activist whom I've known for years online, asked me to give this year's Darwin Memorial Lecture to the Leicester Secular Society. I suggested the topic because, a couple of years earlier, I'd put together a stash of notes and links for a blog post that I'd never quite got around to writing.

The event, at the Society's splendid Victorian red-brick Secular Hall on 13 February 2011, drew a large and lively audience, from that cross-section of radical England that you so often find in its socialist, secularist and peace movements. Their searching and informed questions often had me thinking fast on my feet.

Here's the gist of what I said - a longer version will no doubt appear on my own blog.

I grew up in a household where evolution was considered unsound, and where we got a constant supply of creationist tracts and books. By the time I went to university I was a convinced atheist, but I still thought that the anti-evolution tracts had made some telling points. This misconception didn't survive a reading of the first chapter of the first-year biology textbook, Keeton's Biological Science. Reading Darwin's The Origin of Species, I saw for myself how it had been misrepresented by creationists - mainly by what later became known as quote-mining: taking a quote out of context or mangling it, so that it seemed to be conceding a point against evolution. I also read popular works about evolution - Konrad Lorenz's On Aggression, Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape, Robert Ardrey's African Genesis and The Territorial Imperative, Lionel Tiger's Men in Groups and Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox's The Imperial Animal.

I soon found that my teachers in biology and zoology didn't think much of these books, and that the message of most of these books was pretty conservative: that human nature was rooted in animal behaviour and was unchangeable. In the early and mid-1970s, there were very intense struggles going on in society, and an argument used by the conservative side in those struggles was precisely that the hopes of the left were futile and destructive because human behaviour was rooted in biology. This was linked to the argument that intelligence was genetically determined, and that the social inequalities between classes and races and sexes and nations were a straightforward consequence of differences in their genetic endowment. Workers and women and blacks and the Irish were just thick, and that was why they were what the left called oppressed, and that was that.

There were, of course, answers to these arguments from the left, some of them from distinguished psychologists and biologists, and I read them and listened to my lecturers who explained why the likes of Robert Ardrey weren't quite sound on evolution. This may help to explain but not excuse why, when I saw a copy of The Selfish Gene in 1976, I didn't read more than the title. I thought it was just more of the same.

Many years later I read the book and discovered that it was not at all what I'd thought.

The 'selfish' gene is, among other things, an explanation of how genes for 'unselfish' traits - traits that work against the individual organism's own reproductive fitness - can emerge and persist. It's because it doesn't matter to the gene's prevalence that its copy in one particular body is, let's say, eaten by a predator - as long as other copies of the same gene thereby get a better chance to be reproduced. To take a simple and familiar example, the 'gene for' the scut: the white underside of rabbits' tails. The white scut flashes like a warning light whenever a rabbit runs, and presumably makes the flleeing rabbit more visible to the fox. But it also makes copies of the gene in all the other rabbits more likely to get away.

The earlier 'group selectionists' explained this sort of thing - and there's lots of this sort of thing in biology - by arguing that behaviour or characteristics that benefited the group but not the individual were selected for because they helped the group survive. What the gene-selectionists showed mathematically was that this was unstable - that if selection took place at that level, genes that helped the individual to survive at the expense of the group (e.g. a rabbit without a white scut) would tend to spread through the population.

But I also discovered that over the years and right up to today, some people on the left (I gave some hair-raising examples) still haven't read past the title! They seem quite unable to grasp two simple points:

(i) that the selfish gene is not a gene for selfishness

(ii) that the gene-centred model of evolution is not about genetic determination or genetic determinism.

They also seem unaware that the 'group selection' theory, which the 'selfish gene' theory displaced, was in fact the basis for the arguments advanced by some of the conservative popular biology works of the 1960s and 1970s - those of Ardrey, for example. They saw natural selection taking place at the level of societies, and argued that Western societies were losing out in the competition.

I suggest that part of the reason why geneticists and population-geneticists are not at all impressed by left-wing criticism - including criticism by left-wing scientists such as Gould, Rose, and Lewontin - is that several key figures in the development of these disciplines, notably J. B. S. Haldane and John Maynard Smith - were themselves on the left in 1940s and 1950s and had heard this kind of thing before. As Communists, Haldane and Maynard Smith had been severely burned by the Lysenko affair. In the Soviet Union at that time, mainstream genetics had been smeared as complicit in class privilege and racism. Lysenko wrote that all knowledge, including science, had a class basis. Not even Stalin fell for that. Looking over Lysenko's draft, Stalin scribbled in the margin: 'Ha-ha-ha! What about mathematics? And Darwinism?'

And it was indeed mathematics and Darwinism that did for Lysenkoism, and also did for group selection.

In conclusion, I put it that the only kind of 'genetic determination' that Dawkins sees as possibly relevant to human social orders is 'kin selection', which may have had powerful effects in the small, closely-related social groups of humanity's pre-history. And if kin selection creates a biological basis for any human trait, it's fraternity.

So, brothers and sisters, why worry about it?

Show Time! ESRC Genomics Forum/Traverse Theatre Resident Playwright 2011

2011-02-09T10:45:00.000Z

By Alison Caldecott - Genomics Forum Press and Communications Officer

My initial reaction to the idea that the subject of genomics can inspire creative works was, I must admit, one of skepticism. But that was before I took on my new role as communications officer for the Genomics Forum. Before I had been introduced to the Fourm writers in residence - Ken MacLeod and Pippa Goldschmidt and had a chance to relish a collection of genomics short stories by writers who had let their imaginations go wild on the bizarre sounding Zipper, Mad/Max, Hip/Hop, and Disheveled Zinc Finger genes.

Now that I have inherited a successful poetry competition attracting entries from across the globe, and learnt about the Forums visual artist in residence Alistair Gentry and designers Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg and James King, the enthusiastic ambition of the Forum to work with a playwright seems entirely reasonable. And one that on past experience is likely to deliver some exceptional outputs.

So last week, in partnership with the Edinburgh Traverse Theatre, I was delighted to help launch a new artistic venture to find an experienced Resident Playwright to be based within the Genomics Forum.

The hope is that working alongside Forum members, attending our events and meeting with experts and fellows across the Genomics Network will inspire the creation of a genomics related play. While the ambition is to work towards a public showing late in 2011/early 2012 we also hope to offer any interested parties access to the creative process as ideas develop and the subject of genomics is explored.

Curtain up for the residency will ideally be March 2011 and this means a tight deadline for applications – Tuesday 15 February 2011.

If you know any experienced playwrights who have had at least two professional stage productions of their plays or, if you are such a playwright who is interested in the creative challenge posed by this residency – we would love to hear from you.

Simply tell us why this Genomics/Theatre Residency is of interest and send this letter, along with a CV, to Pauleen Rafferty, Finance & Personnel Assistant, Traverse Theatre, 10 Cambridge Street, Edinburgh EH1 2ED (or jobs@traverse.co.uk) by 5pm on 15 February 2011.

Interviews will be held on Thursday 24 February 2011.

For further information visit the Traverse Theatre website

If you have any specific questions please phone Katherine Mendelsohn, Literary Manager at the Traverse, on 0131 228 3223, or Professor Steve Yearley, Director of ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum on 0131 651 4747.