 Biology lessons How does a fertilized egg become a person? Or an oak tree, or a goldfish? It’s an astonishing feat of coordination: A single cell dividing, becoming trillions of cells of thousands of different types, building a detailed, precise structure of bones, muscle, organs. The traditional picture is that it is a bottom-up process, that cellular-level chemical processes, prescribed by your genes, build and dictate the function of your organs. But, argues the software engineer Kasra on Seeds of Science, recent work in biology suggests it may be cleverer than that. Planarian flatworms, when cut in two, reform as two whole worms. The new work, by Michael Levin at Tufts in the US, manipulates the worms’ development in ways that pass on to their offspring, without changing their genes. It suggests that the body’s cells “understand” their position in the body and are developing towards a specific goal, not blindly following instructions. It is a “revolution in biology,” Kasra says: If genes are the machine code of our bodies, these new discoveries may be more like a programming language, and may lead to vastly more sophisticated bioengineering. Marx out of 10 In the late 20th century, there was an effort in academia to revive Marxism. It was, notes the philosopher Joseph Heath, “by far the most exciting thing going on in political philosophy,” and many of “the smartest and most important people” in the field were themselves Marxists. “Analytical Marxism,” informally known as “no-bullshit Marxism,” attempted to update Marx’s analysis of capitalism with modern thinking. But, says Heath, every single one of its major proponents ended up abandoning Marxism and embracing something like Rawlsian liberalism. One piece of “bullshit” the thinkers tried to purge was the idea that Marxism was not criticizing capitalism morally but simply predicting its downfall. The group set about creating such a moral critique. But they realized that the critique — that workers should have the fruits of their labor — was anti-egalitarian: Economic inequalities flow from individual differences in talent or application. John Rawls’ A Theory of Justice created a defensible form of egalitarian philosophy, so they flocked to it. It would be overstating the case, Heath says, to claim that “Marxists, after having removed all of the bullshit from Marxism, discovered that there was nothing left but liberalism,” but it is true to say that A Theory of Justice “is the book that killed Western Marxism.” So you’ve been publicly Substacked The British journalist Jon Ronson has made some of the most interesting long-form nonfiction of recent years. His book The Men Who Stare at Goats, about the US military’s effort to use psychic powers in war, was made into a film starring George Clooney. He has now begun a Substack on the nonfiction storytelling process. Most nonfiction books “are filled with research from social scientists,” he says, “and we want to be better and more original than that.” (Flagship’s Tom feels somewhat attacked.) The writing “should feel like a movie or a novel, with scenes, characters, adventures, movement.” In order to find the stories, you should talk to a lot of people, and read “a hell of a lot of boring academic papers and listen to often very boring nonfiction audiobooks and podcasts.” There are often dead ends and it can be very dispiriting: “If I’m sitting on a bench listening to an audiobook for work and I can’t find anything interesting, sometimes I’ll suddenly think with horror, ‘I’m just a man sitting on a bench.’” |
