by Yohan J. John

The DNA molecule is often described as the book of life, as a blueprint for constructing the organism, or as a program for computing the organism. These metaphors have become so pervasive that we often forget that they are metaphors. In this essay I'd like to take this class of metaphor —the life-as-information metaphor — seriously, and investigate what some recent findings in molecular biology look like when mapped onto the world of books, blueprints and programs. I'd like to run with the information metaphor, seeing how far it can take us. I think this will help us understand the limits of the metaphor, but more importantly, it can help us appreciate the richness and complexity of biological processes, and the sheer scale of the ongoing endeavor to understand the science of life. [In part I of this series I looked at the origins of information theory and computer science, and in part II I traced the history of genetics, up to the discovery of the genetic code. This essay continues the themes from those columns, but can be read as a standalone article.]

The discovery of the double helix structure of the DNA molecule in the mid 20th century was the culmination of a quest to understand the nature of heredity that had begun a little over a century before. In the early 19th century, biologists began asking two intertwined questions about organisms: the question of heredity, and the question of development. How did hereditary traits pass from one generation to the next? And what biological, chemical and physical processes were involved in the development of the organism from an embryo? The first question was often described as a question of 'ultimate causes', and was closely linked to the theory of evolution by natural selection. Charles Darwin's theory depended on inheritance, but he could only provide speculative accounts of the physical basis of heredity. Many 19th century cell biologists were more interested in what they saw as the nuts and bots of biology, and preferred to investigate the question of development. They believed that only 'proximal causes' could be tested in a lab, and perhaps even witnessed under a microscope. Evolutionary theory by contrast seemed more like philosophy.

The two sorts of question 19th century biologists were interested in find their counterpart in two broad spheres of genetics research: transmission genetics, which studies how hereditary traits pass from one generation to the next, and developmental genetics, which studies how genes participate in the physical processes by which traits become manifest in cells and in organisms. The concept of the genotype is useful when thinking about transmission genetics: the genotype is the sum total of the genetic makeup of an organism, and in a sense represents all the potential hereditary traits that can become manifest. Nowadays the word 'genome' is used in a closely related way. When thinking about developmental genetics, the concept of the phenotype is central: it is the sum total of an organism's observable traits, which are not just a product of the genetic makeup, but are also influenced by the environment, and by the developmental process itself. Transmission genetics studies how the inheritance, reassembly and mutation of genetic material lead to the formation of a genotype, whereas developmental genetics studies how the potential latent in the genotype is actualized to give rise to the phenotype.

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by Rafiq Kathwari

My friend Irfan and I drove a Gypsy with faulty brakes to Baba's shrine nestled in the Himalayan foothills. “You must go show your respect,” Mother had urged when I told her I was flying to Srinagar. “Say a prayer for your health and wealth.”

Her father, Sultan Bastal, a prosperous cashmere shawl merchant, who made Kashmir home after wheeling, dealing on the Silk Route, had married three times hoping for an heir, but his wives had proved barren. “Or, perhaps, it was him,” Mother said.

And so, Sultan Sahib, invoked his faith in Sufism, went on a haj to Baba's shrine. He wore a white turban, customary in his era; rode shot gun as his tonga-wallah drove their one horse buggy on a dirt road fringed by miles of poplars all the way from Srinagar to Tangmarg,

where the dirt road ended and a foot trail started, a journey in those days, Mother said, of at least three days in late summer when past winter's snow melts. Sultan Sahib and tonga-wallah rested often to give their horse a break from his uphill task. Glacial streams laughed

by the road. Sultan Sahib flung his arms wide in wonder at a view of a virgin valley diffused in light. Clouds flirted naked peaks on the horizon. He trekked a pine-scented forest to the thatched-roof shrine, where he tied a thread to carved wooden roses, and wept as he

prayed for a son, “O, Baba, beloved saint, make me a model of your mercy.” And 90 years later here we were, Irfan and I, parking our rusty jeep in an ersatz bus stop littered with rubbish. Baba Reshi, resting for five centuries under alabaster, preached Divinity lives in the

garden within and in the wasteland without. The first thing I saw was a bunker, an example of many bunkers in the Kashmir valley: bold white capitals on blue tarpaulin:
RESPECT ALL SUSPECT ALL.

A fascist credo packed with sad irony, baring a strategy of the world's most populous democracy —a lie I'm tired of hearing—to subvert teachings of saints who brought Sufism to Kashmir, Kashmir to Sufism. I strolled around the barbed wire, a tote slung over my

shoulder, grinned at a para-military, an Uzi slung over his shoulder, his belly prosperous.
“Namaste,” I said joining my hands. “Where from?” he asked. “Mumbai,” I lied. “And you?” I asked. “Allahabad,” he said. “O,” I said, “Where Ganges and Yamuna merge.” He nodded,

waved me through without rifling my tote, but asked, “Where friend from?” “A local,” I said, realizing at once I had pushed Irfan under the clichéd bus. O, Fuck. “Open
bag,” para-military barked. Irfan did as told. “Who you? Why here? Where going?”

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by Mara Jebsen

I cross the country.

Beneath me
Towns crackle, bullet holes bleeding light.
Yellow, hard, a bright-mustard honey.
There are bees and bees in the skull in the sky.
Amnesia, I think, is the white air inside
an airplane. And fears, I expect, are bizarre
infant-plants that grow without sun
in the very wee hours. To share
these wee hours with suited up-bodies,
— odd, erect, banal—
is a warm thing. I can’t find my worry.
My mother’s ______, my brother’s
______, No. These
Are in the ground, steaming up, up, up.
We go fast, some empty-headed angels.

by Carl Pierer

Introduction

The standard case of epistemic peer disagreement has two people going regularly to a café, where they regularly drink and eat. Sometimes A has to pay more, sometimes B. Often, they disagree about who has to pay how much – sometimes A gets it right, sometimes B. This time, A calculates that she has to pay £14, while B thinks A has to pay £12. Both are equally smart, they have access to the same information and because of the stipulated regularity, neither of them is particularly likely to get it right on this occasion. They are so called epistemic peers on this question. What should A do now, in light of the further information that B disagrees with her sum of £14?

Suggestions for what ought to be done when disagreement arises between epistemic peers (EPs) fall either under conformism (backing off the initial confidence) or non-conformism (remaining unmoved). I am not aware that anybody suggested opportunism (losing confidence altogether and taking the opponent's view). All three positions work with the following definition:

Epistemic Peers: A&B are EPs iff:

(i) A&B are cognitive equals (equally smart, diligent, thorough, etc.)

(ii) A&B have access to the same evidence. Whether or not this just means same amount of evidence or exactly the same evidence is disputed, but irrelevant for the present discussion.

(iii) There is no reason to suppose that one of them is particularly apt to figure out the right response in D.

Call such a disagreement between EPs an epistemic-peer disagreement (EPD).

In this essay I will argue that, without a telos in relation to which we hold and modify our views, opportunism cannot be ruled out. First, I outline the arguments for conformism and suggest these cannot exclude opportunism. Second, I present the non-conformist argument, thereby illustrating that an analogous argument supports opportunism. Third, I suggest that only with an agreed telos for our views can opportunism be rejected.

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by Michael Lopresto

Moral realism is the view that there are moral truths irrespective of what anyone thinks about those truths. In other words, moral truths are mind-independent—a condition that is often taken to characterise any form of realism, be it scientific realism, mathematical realism or even aesthetic realism. So according to the moral realist, the Holocaust still be objectively morally wrong even if we were all brainwashed into believing it was morally right. Equally for scientific realism, if a true scientific theory posited the existence of quarks, quarks would still exist even if we all believed that quarks did not exist. And so on for every other form of realism.

Moral realism is sometimes challenged on scientific grounds, namely that we can't fit value into a scientific world view. I've addressed this concern before, as part of a distinctively philosophical project often described as reconciling the manifest image with the scientific image. However, moral realism has recently come under a new sort of attack on scientific grounds, put most forcefully and ingeniously by Sharon Street. The argument begins from the empirical premise that evolutionary forces have influenced our moral beliefs, something that is plainly true, to a sceptical conclusion that our moral beliefs are unjustified. So the argument is essentially that since moral beliefs were not caused by moral facts, we have no reason to think that our moral beliefs could be true.

Firstly, some clarifications are in order. What distinguishes the evolutionary debunker from other anti-realists is that she is not trying to show that there are no moral facts, but rather that there is no moral knowledge. Furthermore, what distinguishes the evolutionary debunker is that her premises are empirical, and that such empirical premises entail that our moral beliefs have a highly suspect origin. So this is an epistemological argument for moral scepticism. However, this may also be taken as a reductio of moral realism, since moral realism would be rather useless indeed if no moral facts could ever be known.

So let's examine the premise that the origins of a belief could undermine its justification. In good cases of belief formation, our beliefs are often caused by the things that they are about. For example, I currently believe that there are about three dozen books in front of me. This belief is caused by my perception of the books themselves, and as far as I know, my perceptual faculties are working pretty well. But consider a case where I take a hallucinogenic drug and start hallucinating books in front of me without even knowing it. I would have the exact same belief, that there about three dozen books in front of me, but rather than being caused by the books themselves, the belief is caused by the drug. Therefore, the belief is not justified because it's not caused in the right way, even if the belief is true just by chance.

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by Mathangi Krishnamurthy

Anthropologists are supposed to be masters of the art of the rooting and uprooting. I learned very early on in my graduate school career the art of attaching, but never too much. Never owning a place, always on the move, and becoming excellent at thrift store shopping for furniture were some of the skills I carried with me into adulthood. These things I only realized recently when I experienced intense panic as I stood in my adult living room looking around at all the “good” furniture I owned, things that were too solid to find takers on Craigslist.

Nevertheless, some of my most striking memories of “im”permanence are of the housed I inhabited, especially during the time I conducted fieldwork in the city of Pune. Over the course of a year and a half, I moved three times across four houses. For the first three months, I was a paying guest at the house of a friend. She had a beautiful home on the outskirts of the city. While the location was hardly convenient, the pleasure of her company and the promise of good food kept me rooted to the place. I had a lovely first floor room with its own bathroom, a bed, and a carved wooden desk. Her two dogs were an added joy. She had glass baubles in the windows, classical music wafting out of her room in the mornings, and a kitchen stuffed with interesting chutneys and condiments. Eclectic crystal and glassware dotted the cupboard in her dining room, and we spent many evenings conjuring cocktails and sipping wine.

The house was my respite from the frustrations of fieldwork, and its objects were sources of contemplation when the city offered none. Even the light filtering through its corner windows seemed imbued with its own enchantments and possibilities. It smelled of a delightful comfort.

It was, of course, too good to last.

After three months, I commenced nighttime work at a place far away from her home and it was time for me to find a new place. She came to my rescue however, and suggested that I meet her sister who lived in another part of the city and had a studio apartment to rent. The catch was that I would have to fend for myself for two months before the current tenants were ready to leave.

The two houses I inhabited for the two months that I was ungrounded were remarkable in the ways that they evoked emotions that can only be said to be in opposite quadrants of the affective pantheon.

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by Charlie Huenemann

The Fermi Paradox

The story is that sometime in the early 1950s, four physicists were walking to lunch and discussing flying saucers. The place was Los Alamos, and the lunch group included Enrico Fermi, Edward Teller, Emil Konopinski, and Herbert York. None of them believed in flying saucers, of course, but – and this is just the way such conversations go – the discussion turned to the possibility of faster-than-light space travel and the probability of life cropping up elsewhere in the galaxy. Fermi had a hunch that life shouldn’t be all that rare – it should be common, really – and that there was at least a ten percent “miracle chance” that supraluminal travel should prove possible. This led him to raise an exasperated question that drew laughter from the others: “Where is everybody?”

Thus the Fermi paradox: in all this space, and all this time, there should be plenty of advanced alien civilizations – but we haven’t heard from any of them. How come?

The most conservative resolution of the paradox is to claim that the universe is in fact SO very big and SO very old that not only has intelligent life evolved all over the place, but the spaces and times separating them from one another are SO very vast that they can never be crossed. It would be like two children in Cuba and China releasing their balloons at the same time and expecting them to bump into each other.

But there are other possible and more tantalizing resolutions to the paradox. Maybe the aliens have checked us out already and decided to put us in galactic time-out; maybe they already walk among us; maybe tomorrow we will indeed make contact; maybe alien governments always decide to cut funding for alien NASA programs; maybe in fact we live in an alien-created virtual reality – and so on, down the long line of fantastic sci-fi literature. But I would like to focus on one resolution that, whether likely or not, raises in my mind some interesting philosophical questions. Maybe, by the time any civilization reaches the point at which they can reach out to other planets, they also have developed super-intelligent machines, and that is when all hell breaks lose.

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by Tasneem Zehra Husain

Some myths seep so deep into popular culture, that even those who are not aware of the origins of a legend, know the story. Few of us have read Ovid's original account of the Cypriot sculptor, Pygmalion, who carved a beautiful woman out of ivory, and proceeded to fall so deeply in love with Galatea, as he called her, that the goddess Aphrodite took pity on him and breathed life into the statue. But, even in our ignorance of Greek classics, the basic motifs of this story are familiar from countless retellings through the ages. Whether it is a fairy tale like Pinnochio, or – in a more contemporary twist – a play by George Bernard Shaw, the theme remains the same: can you fall so completely in love with your own creation, that you blur the boundaries of reality? Can you make something come alive, just by wanting it badly enough?

After a two year pause, the LHC is turning on again. Once more, beams of protons will run circles around the giant ring, miles under Geneva, speeding up with each lap, until they are made to collide head-on, unleashing energies to rival those that prevailed seconds after the Big Bang. In the earlier run, when the Higgs boson was discovered, the LHC attained collision energies in the 7 – 8 TeV range. This time, the goal is to reach the 13 – 14 TeV range, and explore realms that have never before been accessible. Couched within the excitement of probing the unknown, are our desires for what we want to see emerge from the data. There are several theories we would like to see proved, but if I had to choose a single contender, I'd vote for supersymmetry (SUSY; pronounced Susie) – as would many others. There are, of course some dissenting voices in the crowd; those who say we have already hung on to the hope of supersymmetry for too long, that some experimental evidence of it should have turned up by now, if the theory was correct. These critics level the allegation that supersymmetry is in fact just a theoretical construction, but that some of us are so enamored of its beauty, and so keen to see this mathematical model ‘come to life', that we have lost touch with reality.

The fact that most physicists do tend to wax lyrical about this theory, is indisputable. “I love supersymmetry. It is a very canonical theory”, says Fabiola Gianotti, the soon to be Director General of CERN. Peter Higgs, after whom the famous boson was named, has declared himself “a fan” and Stephen Hawking, one of the most recognizable icons of our time, says we might see traces of supersymmetry at the LHC, if we're lucky, and that “the discovery of supersymmetric partners for the known particles revolutionize our understanding of the universe.” In short, so many physicists want so desperately to see this theory realized, that one could perhaps be excused for wondering if we are contemporary Pygmalions, and SUSY our Galatea. Are we trying to bring it into being by sheer force of will?

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by Rishidev Chaudhuri

I

As I grow older and worldlier, and as the world itself grows more worldly, an increasingly wide range of ingredients and techniques and flavors take up residence in my kitchen. The flavors of my childhood were primarily those of the subcontinent, dominated by the Indian Ocean cities of Calcutta, Colombo and Bombay, and by European food mediated through England, Calcutta and the colonial mixing. And it is sobering to contemplate that there was a point when soy sauce didn’t consistently inhabit my kitchen (a few years in a vegetarian co-op in Massachusetts and a semester in Japan changed that), or to remember that fish sauce and various vinegars didn’t always occupy prominent roles in my culinary imagination. I’ve always known about chilies, of course; I imagine that growing up in another culinary tradition and discovering chilies must be like discovering some fundamental metaphysical truth about the world, perhaps one that you’d always known must exist, perhaps one that must exist in all possible worlds.

Some will lament the loss of local particularity that goes with such increasing cosmopolitanism, and that is indeed worth a mournful moment of silence. But, inevitably, these world-traveling ingredients strike up conversations and more in the pantry (I discovered the herring passionately intertwined with the curry leaves one long lazy afternoon), and spark improbable but delightful culinary revelations.

The combination of fermented soy beans and butter is a revelation. It is not traditional and, depending on the vividness of your imagination, might seem transgressive. At the least, the cultures that love them are separate, with soy sauce, miso and the fermented bean pastes concentrated in East Asia, and butter spread through the rest of the world with a special concentration in parts of Europe and India[1]. They are also distinctive and easily identifiable as foundational elements of their associated cuisines: “butter” and “soy” are almost caricatures of how one might describe, say, the opposition between French and Chinese food.

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by Leanne Ogasawara

An elderly couple embark on a quest. Wandering the countryside in which a mysterious mist has robbed everyone of their memories, the two are unable to recall exactly what they are doing at any given moment. This makes for a challenge since they know they are on a quest– but it is never completely clear where they are going and what exactly happened in the first place.

And what is made even worse than being on a quest where you can't keep the facts straight is that each wonders whether their loss of memory will not mark the end of their marriage–for without shared memories, what will be left to bind them together? The elderly wife wonders. But at the same time, she also cannot help but worry whether in reality they are not better off not remembering?

In the early pages of Ishiguro's The Buried Giant, I assumed it would be a very different story. Like this reviewer here, at first I was sure the book would be about the sadness of a life ending in memory loss; about dementia in the elderly and love falling apart. But then (also just like the reviewer) I wondered if the novel wasn't actually some kind of exploration about the myth-making we do collectively –for indeed, it is not just the elderly couple but all the characters in the book who are suffering from memory loss as they struggle to recall what it means, for example, to be a Christian Briton or pagan Saxon, in the wake of the Roman withdrawal.

Is it glorious King Arthur or Arthur the mass murderer?

It all depends on how you remember things, right?

A coincidence (or maybe he is reading the same book) but a friend on Facebook (deliciously literary Mikhail Iossel) today wrote this:

We all know, or at least suspect, that many of the memories dearest to our hearts have never happened. To a considerable degree, our lives are the products of our own imagination — for that's what memory is, by and large: an introspective, inward-bound imagination.

It's true, but then what to do in the face of trauma? Ishiguro in several interviews wrote of wanting to write about Rwanda or Yugoslavia. He wondered how it was possible that groups of people, who up till then had been living in relative harmony, turn so savagely upon each other? What kinds of repressed hatred had to be cultivated over the years (or generations) within them, he asks. And likewise, what of our personal traumas?

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by Bill Benzon

Call it “animism” if you wish, but it will no longer be enough to brand it with the mark of infamy. This is indeed why we feel so close to the sixteenth century, as if we were back before the “epistemological break,” before the odd invention of matter.

—Bruno Latour, An Attempt at a “Compositionist Manifesto”

This essay starts with an experience I had some years ago in a basement in Troy, New York, while rehearsing with three colleagues: Ade (who had toured with Gil Scott-Heron in his youth), Druis, and Fonda. We were each of us playing bells when at some point we heard high-pitched twittering sounds that none of us were playing. Where did they come from? What were they?

I can easily imagine how someone might think they were hearing a spirit or spirits. The Western scientific impulse is quite different. We know that spirits do not exist and therefore there must be some other, some physically plausible, account of those twittering sounds. My purpose here is not to reject the physical account. On the contrary, I believe it to be foundational. But I also believe that, carefully considered, it points to a way of making sense of the idea of spirit.

Instrument and Player

It is well known that B.B. King’s guitar is named Lucille. Why is it named at all? Perhaps it’s a gesture of affection. The guitar, after all, is very close to him. It is one of his voices; it is, in some sense, part of him.

It may be more than that. The name may well reflect the subtle intricacy of King’s relationship to his guitar, his instrument. To play an instrument well, one must learn to yield to its physicality, to blend with it. You cannot dominate it. Well, you can try, and you CAN succeed. But you pay a cost. Your musicianship suffers.

As I’m not a guitar player, however, I can’t tell you what it means to yield to a guitar. I suppose I could talk about the trumpet—I’ve been playing one for half a century—but that’s just a little complex. And my point really isn’t about complexity. It’s about subtlety.

Let us begin by talking about playing a very simple instrument, the claves.

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by Matt McKenna

Nobody walks into Get Hard expecting to see a good movie. Likewise, nobody turns to Indiana expecting to find examples of progressive legislation. Still, it's disappointing that Get Hard manages to be so bereft of humor, and it is disappointing that Indiana Governor Mike Pence would sign a bill so bereft of sense as the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. The similarities between Get Hard and Pence's signing of Indiana's RFRA don't simply end with their being sad wastes of time, however. The plot of Get Hard, as thin as it is, mirrors the buffoonery that has marked Pence's time in office during the run-up to the 2016 election, and the weakness of Get Hard's comedy mirrors the weakness in Pence's political positions.

Get Hard stars Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart in a movie of which producers thought so little, they named it after the film's worst joke: a cheap double entendre that refers to both becoming emotionally tough and forming an erection. One good litmus test for whether or not you'll like this film is if you think it might be amusing to watch Ferrell and Hart repeatedly say “get hard” as if they're unaware of the sexual half of the phrase's meaning. I did not find it amusing.

The film's plot is simple: Will Ferrell's character whose name I can't remember is a Wall Street genius and a moron. Lest you think there is social commentary implied here, rest assured that there is not. Ferrell is accused of embezzling money from his clients and is subsequently tried, convicted, and sentenced to prison, a place where multiple characters in the film promise he will be raped. Of course, Ferrell didn't commit the crime of which he's accused, but instead of trying to prove his innocence during the thirty days of freedom he's afforded to put his affairs in order, he enlists Kevin Hart's character whose name I also can't remember to train him to not get raped in jail. In a twist that has implications later in the film, it so happens that Hart's character has never been to jail, but since he's black, Ferrell's character assumes he has. Another good litmus test for whether or not you'll like the movie is if you think it might be fun to watch Ferrell say racist things as if he's unaware they're racist. I did not find it fun.

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