Melinda Cooper in Equator:
Among the weirder features of the contemporary American far right is the emergence of primal fathers – Old Testament patriarchs who want to sire not just a family, but a race. Elon Musk is the best known of these Aspirational Abrahams, although he is by no means the only one. A long Wall Street Journal report has documented Musk’s desire to beget what he calls a “legion” of children who would save humanity from demographic freefall and bear his superior genes into the far future. A Space X rocket stands ready to transport his seed beyond Earth in a process akin to inverse panspermia, the theory that organic life arrived on our planet via space dust.
Musk is currently thought to have at least fourteen children with four women, whose legal and financial affairs are partly managed by Jared Birchall, the director of his family office. “We will need to use surrogates”, Musk texted one of them, to “reach legion-level before the apocalypse.” In preparation for this scale up in operations, he has acquired a multi-residential compound in Austin, Texas.
Silicon Valley pronatalism is generally understood as eugenic – a reading that captures the desire for racial purification, but not the distinct process by which purity is pursued. The “classic” American eugenicists of the progressive era sought to banish genetic abnormality, which they saw as responsible for mental degeneracy and other social ills. By contrast, Musk and his ilk are steeped in the pseudoscience of transhumanism – less concerned with the elimination of error than the exaltation of exceptional deviance.
More here.
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The large question going through the book is whether setting God as our moral exemplar makes much sense. If God is understood to set the ultimate criteria for goodness, the idea seems unproblematic: emulating God simply means becoming as good as possible. But when we look deeper into what these criteria entail—as the book’s chapters do from various perspectives—problems arise.
Ask most opera lovers what comes to mind when they think about Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle, and they’ll likely mention the huge voices and lush, booming orchestras of the so-called golden age of the 1930s and ’40s—not the transparent, mellow instrumental sounds and light, flexible voices typical of period-instrument performances. Indeed, when I mentioned to friends that I’d recently attended a memorable historically informed performance of Siegfried, the third opera in the Ring cycle, I was met with bemused looks.
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Proteins are the building blocks of life. They make up our hair, bone, skin and muscle and are constructed of folded sequences of amino acids. Scientists knew how to create one-dimensional chains but were unable to predict how the resulting strings of amino acids would fold up to form three-dimensional proteins, whose shape determines their function. This greatly restrained their ability to generate new proteins.
Let’s start with a tragedy: Since the 2020 election, 37 states have introduced legislation designed to limit how Black history can be taught, especially in its relation to institutional racism, and 14 states have successfully imposed such laws, 
Well children … Well there is so much racket there must be something out of kilter. I think that betwixt the Negroes of the South and the women at the North all talking about rights these white men going to be in a fix pretty soon.
There are two principal reasons for the superior conditioning of cross-country skiers, according to Laura Richardson, a clinical exercise physiologist at the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology. First, theirs is a quadrupedal sport, with arms and legs working hard at the same time, along with core and back muscles. Because the body’s cardiovascular system is not accustomed to serving those large muscle groups simultaneously at high rates of exertion, they all compete for the available blood. Over time, the body adapts by increasing blood volume, so the heart pumps more blood with each heartbeat. This sends more hemoglobin with oxygen throughout the body. As a result, most elite cross-country skiers like Diggins have an especially powerful heart muscle and an especially large and strong left ventricle to pump out more blood per minute. The mitochondria in muscle tissues — the powerhouses of the cell — in turn grow in size and in numbers to handle the rise in oxygen.