Differently the same...................

 "The imperfect is our paradise," Wallace Stevens wrote.  If the entry of genetics into the human world carried one immediate lesson, it was this: the imperfect was not just our paradise; it was also, inextricably, our mortal world.  The degree of human genetic variation—and the depth of its influence on human pathology—was unexpected and surprising.  The world was vast and various.  Genetic diversity was our natural state—not just in isolated pockets in faraway places, but everywhere around us.  Seemingly homogeneous populations were, in fact, strikingly heterogeneous.  We had seen the mutants—and they were us.

-Siddhartha Mukherjee,  The Gene: An Intimate History

Inversion...........................

       Inspiration came to Sanger unexpectedly in the winter of 1971—in the form of inversion.   He had spend decades learning to break molecules apart to solve their sequence.  But what if he turned his own strategy upside down and tried to build DNA, rather than break it down?  To solve a gene sequence, Sanger reasoned, one must think like a gene.

-Siddhartha Mukherjee,  The Gene:  An Intimate History

Sort of like us humans........................

      Ironically, the very features that enable a cell to read DNA are the features that make it incomprehensible to humans—to chemists, in particular.  DNA, as Shrödinger had predicted, was a chemical built to defy chemists, a molecule of exquisite contradictions—monotonous and yet infinitely varied, repetitive to the extreme and yet idiosyncratic to the extreme.

-Siddhartha Mukherjee,  The Gene:  An Intimate History

And it will be ever so...............................

      The revelation of the structure of DNA by Watson, Crick, Wilkins, and Franklin brought one journey of genes to its close, even as it threw open new directions of inquiry and discovery. . . . Old questions were replaced by new ones.

-Siddhartha Mukherjee,  The Gene:  An Intimate History

A vital reservoir......................

 Nature was not as hungry to homogenize genetic variation as human eugenicists had presumed.  Indeed, Dobzhansky recognized that natural variation was a vital reservoir for an organism—an asset that far outweighed its liabilities.  Without this variation—without genetic diversity—an organism might ultimately lose its capacity to evolve.

-Siddhartha Mukherjee,  The Gene:  An Intimate History

Seems about right..............................

 There is no such thing as perfection, only the relentless, thirsty matching of an organism to its environment.  That is the engine that drives evolution.

-Siddhartha Mukherjee,  The Gene:  An Intimate History

Three from my favorite optimist............

As for the concern that genomic selection for intelligence, if it comes, will be available to the rich but not the poor — well, the same is true for good education. Opportunities to buy the best genes for your children will be dwarfed for decades to come by the ability of the rich to buy the best education for their children. If you must do something, do something about that instead: and preferably do so by making all education as good as the best, rather than as bad as the worst.
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I mean that human achievements are always and everywhere collective. Every object and service you use is the product of different minds working together to invent or manage something that is way beyond the capacity of any individual mind. This is why central planning does not work. Ten million people eat lunch in London most days; how the heck they get what they want and when and where, given that a lot of them decide at the last minute, is baffling. Were there a London lunch commissioner to organise it, he would fail badly. Individual decisions integrated by price signals work, and work very well indeed.
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What changed was not some bright spark of a new gene being turned on, but that we began to exchange and specialise, to create collective intelligence, rather than rely on individual braininess. To put it another way, dozens of stupid people in a room who talk to each other will achieve far more than an equal number of clever people who don’t. The internet only underlines this point. Human intelligence is a distributed, collaborative phenomenon.

-Matt Ridley, as taken from this post

Our complicated world...............

...................................is about to become more complicated.

On Ted Williams's eyesight.............

Deliberate practice is necessary for success, but it is not sufficient. The people at the top of any competitive field are both well-suited and well-trained. To maximize your potential, you need to not only engage in consistent and purposeful practice, but also to align your ambitions with your natural abilities.

-James Clear, as excerpted from this article about matching genetic advantages with deliberate practice.

Designer genes........................

Fred Reed takes a reasoned look at the coming future of genetic manipulation, evolution on the quick.

"A crucial point: A great deal of behavior is unmistakably genetic. Babies nurse, toddlers of two raise hell, teenagers rebel and copulate, men of thirty get into bar fights and women don’t."

He asks, but doesn't answer, the question:

"Do we redesign ourselves, or don’t we?"
I'm thinking that genie is already out of the bottle.  You?

An interesting quote.....................

" Self-knowledge is at the core of our quest for enlightenment, and the knowledge of our genetic ancestry is essential this process. 'Know thy ancestors, know thy self,' we might put it, in a riff on the motto at the Temple of Delphi. Mukherjee's opus is illuminating, cautionary, and a riveting read. Race may be a social construction, but genes and mutations are real. All humanists and social scientists should read this book, especially those who haven't taken a science class since sophomore year in high school.”


-Henry Louis Gates, Jr., as excerpted from this short review of  The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee (a copy of said book has just been ordered from Mr. Bezos's crew).

On the inevitability of biochemistry............

Genetic determinism, or at any rate predisposition, can have detonative consequences.  If the conservative’s tendency toward paranoia and truculent tribalism (as distinguished from the liberal’s characteristic googooing inattention to realty) is innate, we will have wars as long as we have generals. (It would be interesting to do brain scans of four-star generals. I recommend Xanax and a double Scotch before looking at the results.)


-as culled from this pre-destined essay from Fred Reed