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The Genetic Book of the Dead

Dawkins is of course the author who kicked off my adult nonfiction reading habit, and I’ll always read his new book when it comes out. I don’t know how many more times that will happen, if any. But I found “a sense of wonder” in his explication of how the immortal gene works, stumbling into the invention of such a vast and strange array of organisms along the way.

Sir D’Arcy Thompson (1860–1948), that immensely learned zoologist, classicist, and mathematician, made a remark that seems trite, even tautological, but it actually provokes thought. ‘Everything is the way it is because it got that way.’

The primatologist Richard Wrangham has promoted the intriguing hypothesis that the invention of cooking was the key to human uniqueness and human success. He makes a persuasive case that our reduced jaws, teeth, and guts are ill-suited to either a carnivorous or a herbivorous diet unless a substantial proportion of our food is cooked. Cooking enables us to get energy from foods more quickly and efficiently. For Wrangham it was cooking that led to the dramatic evolutionary enlargement of the human brain, the brain being by far the most energy-hungry of our organs. If he’s right, it’s a nice example of how a cultural change (the taming of fire) can have evolutionary consequences (the shrinking of jaws and teeth).

Successful genes, then, survive in bodies down the generations, and they cause (in a statistical sense) their own survival by their ‘phenotypic’ effects on the bodies that they inhabit.

Is there an equilibrium needed to make these vehicles tho? DNA for ribosomes can’t do anything without many other genes in the right proportions

But even song loudness is not the end of the causal chain. As far as natural selection is concerned, song loudness only matters insofar as it attracts females (and deters males, but let’s not complicate the argument). The causal chain extends to a radius where it exerts an influence on a female cricket. This has to mean that a change in female behaviour is part of the extended phenotype of genes in a male cricket. Therefore, the extended phenotype of a gene can reside in another individual.

Surely gene replication is the end of the causal chain

The male gathers decorative objects – coloured berries, flowers, even bottle tops. Movies of male bower birds at work irresistibly remind me of an artist putting the finishing touches to a canvas, standing back, head cocked judgmentally, then darting forward to make a delicate adjustment, standing back again and surveying the effect with head on one side before darting forward again. That is what emboldened me to use a word like ‘tastefully’. It is hard to resist the impression that the bird is exercising his aesthetic judgement in perfecting a work of art. Even if the decorated bower is not to every human’s taste, or even every female bower bird’s, the ‘touching up’ behaviour of the male almost forces the conclusion that the male has taste of his own, and he is adjusting his bower to meet it.

Something eerie and Eternal about animal constructions

I do not know whether exposure to a more than usually magnificent bower stimulates a hormone surge in the blood of a female,

Every time you mention something unknown, I want to become a scientist

The gene’s-eye view of evolution necessarily incorporates the idea of the extended phenotype

Cf. deltas between Level III universes. Alleles create real alternate worlds!?

In 2002, Kim Sterelny, editor of the journal Biology and Philosophy, marked the twentieth anniversary of the publication of The Extended Phenotype by commissioning three critical appraisals, plus a reply from me.

I concluded my piece with a humorously grandiose fantasy about the building of a future Extended Phenotypics Institute. This pipedream edifice was to have three wings, the Zoological Artifacts Museum (ZAM), the laboratory of Parasite Extended Genetics (PEG), and the Centre for Action at a Distance (CAD).

My main authority – indeed today’s world authority – is Professor Nick Davies of Cambridge University. His book Cuckoo is a delightful amalgam of natural history and memoir of his field research on Wicken Fen, near Cambridge. Described by David Attenborough as one of the country’s greatest field naturalists, he achieves heights of lyrical word-painting unsurpassed in the literature of modern natural history: North towards the horizon is the eleventh-century cathedral of Ely, which sits on the raised land of the Isle of Ely, from where Hereward led his raids against the Normans. In the early mornings, when the mist lies low, the cathedral appears as a great ship, sailing across the fens.

If it finds itself sharing the nest with either eggs or chicks of the foster species, the hatchling cuckoo fits them neatly into the hollow in its back. It then wriggles backwards up the side of the nest and tosses the competing egg or chick out. There is, of course, no suggestion that it knows what it’s doing, or why it is doing it, no feelings of guilt or remorse (or triumph) in the act. The behavioural routine simply runs like clockwork. Natural selection in ancestral generations favoured genes that shaped nervous systems in such a way as to play out this instinctive act of (foster) fratricide. That is all we can say.

I want to watch this evolution happen

Swann’s Way

I’d been curious about reading Proust for about a decade: I gave him the tentative research treatment in bookstores where I examined the editions they had, practiced on CDs in the 1990s when you couldn’t know much about an album except what you could glean from the packaging. I read De Botton’s How Proust Can Change Your Life and then didn’t read Proust for eight years thereafter. I read the Atlantic article about reading Proust on one’s phone. I stood in a Brooklyn bookstore on a work trip and seriously considered picking up the shiny red Swann’s Way there, but had to admit I couldn’t be sure I’d really read through it, let alone the rest of the volumes.

Upon moving to Tokyo, the Katsushika Central Library became one of my favorite places. We visited nearly every day in the course of bringing the kids to Kumon, Shichidashiki, or other activities. On the shelf in the quite decent English section I found two volumes of the Penguin Proust, translated by seven different people, and learned that two more were in the stacks. All of my prior research and concern about getting just the right translation and the right format were replaced by the notion of how meaningful it would be to start reading Swann’s Way any time I was in the library, and only when I was in the library. It could be something to look forward to, something to add beyond my regular reading pile, and something to progress slowly without worrying about how long it took to finish.

I lasted for a few weeks of only reading it when physically present in the library building, but eventually had to admit that I was captivated enough to want to borrow it for an overnight stay at my in-laws’. Not long after, I also got ahold of the ebook edition so that I could continue reading at any time.

I developed a habit of capturing passages that hit me like a gust of wind, or tingled my nervous system, or rooted my feet to the ancient ground, or otherwise made me stop and boggle at its gravity. I’d photograph the page in the iPhone’s text recognition mode, copy the text, and paste it both to my commonplace-book in Ulysses and to my friend Sben, who I’d decided was the person I wanted to talk about Proust with. I also sent some to my cousin Stephen, who’d shown interest in reading Proust himself, but stopped when he committed to starting to read it.

There must have been a good deal of reality in those Virtues and Vices of Padua, since they seemed to me as alive as the pregnant servant, and since she herself did not appear to me much less allegorical. And perhaps this (at least apparent) nonparticipation of a person’s soul in the virtue that is acting through her has also, beyond its aesthetic value, a reality that is, if not psychological, at least, as they say, physiognomical. When, later, I had occasion to meet, in the course of my life, in convents for instance, truly saintly embodiments of practical charity, they generally had the cheerful, positive, indifferent, and brusque air of a busy surgeon, the sort of face in which one can read no commiseration, no pity in the presence of human suffering, no fear of offending it, the sort which is the ungentle face, the antipathetic and sublime face of true goodness.

And so — while some artist who reads the memoirs of the seventeenth century and wants to be like the great King, and thinks he will be making progress in that direction if he fabricates a genealogy for himself that traces his own descent from a historic family or if he carries on a correspondence with one of the current sovereigns of Europe, is actually turning his back on what he mistakenly sought in forms that were identical and consequently dead — an old lady from the provinces who was simply yielding to irresistible manias and to a malice born of idleness, saw, without ever thinking of Louis XIV, the most insignificant occupations of her day, those concerned with her rising, her lunch, her afternoon rest, acquire, because of their despotic singularity, some of the interest of what Saint-Simon called the “mechanics” of life at Versailles, and could also believe that her silences, a nuance of good humor or disdain in her features, were for Françoise the object of a commentary as passionate, as fearful as were the silence, the good humor, the disdain of the King when a courtier, or even his greatest lords, handed him a petition at a bend of an avenue at Versailles.

This bit o’ doggerel:

Love a dog’s arse, and to thy nose ’Twill smell like a rose

Was originally:

Qui du cul d’un chien s’amourose Il lui parait une rose.

But! The orienting snippet for the footnote quotes a different version, presumably from an earlier draft of the translation. That one apparently ended in “plum”, suggesting that it employed a stretch to rhyme with “bum”, until Davis found a way to rhyme with the literal “rose”. I wonder what the Moncrieff had it as? … Holy crap, he embellished it like so:

Snaps and snails and puppy-dogs' tails, And dirty sluts in plenty, Smell sweeter than roses in young men’s noses When the heart is one-and-twenty.

Then this; Proust must have known this stuff is hilarious, right?

He passed close to us, did not break off his conversation with his neighbor, and from the corner of his blue eye gave us a little sign that was in some way interior to his eyelid and which, not involving the muscles of his face, could go perfectly unnoticed by the lady he was talking to; but seeking to compensate by intensity of feeling for the somewhat narrow field in which he had circumscribed its expression, in the azure corner assigned to us he set sparkling all the liveliness of a grace that exceeded playfulness, bordered on mischievousness; he overrefined the subtleties of amiability into winks of connivance, insinuations, innuendos, the mysteries of complicity; and finally exalted his assurances of friendship into protestations of affection, into a declaration of love, illuminating for us alone, at that moment, with a secret languor invisible to the lady, a love-smitten eye in a face of ice.

The whole episode of trying to get Legrandin to admit his sister lives near Balbec is perfect comedy

Sometimes in the afternoon sky the moon would pass white as a cloud, furtive, lusterless, like an actress who does not have to perform yet and who, from the audience, in street clothes, watches the other actors for a moment, making herself inconspicuous, not wanting anyone to pay attention to her. I liked finding its image again in paintings and books, but these works of art were quite different — at least during the early years, before Bloch accustomed my eyes and my mind to subtler harmonies — from those in which the moon would seem beautiful to me today and in which I would not have recognized it then. It might be, for example, some novel by Saintine, some landscape by Gleyre in which it stands out distinctly against the sky in the form of a silver sickle, one of those works which were naively incomplete, like my own impressions, and which it angered my grandmother’s sisters to see me enjoy. They thought that one ought to present to children, and that children showed good taste in enjoying right from the start, those works of art which, once one has reached maturity, one will admire forever after. The fact is that they probably regarded aesthetic merits as material objects which an open eye could not help perceiving, without one’s needing to ripen equivalents of them slowly in one’s own heart.

How French that church was! Above the door, the saints, the knight-kings with fleurs-de-lis in their hands, wedding and funeral scenes, were depicted as they might have been in Françoise’s soul. The sculptor had also narrated certain anecdotes involving Aristotle and Virgil just as Françoise in her kitchen was apt to talk about Saint Louis as if she had known him personally, usually in order to put my grandparents to shame by comparison since they were less “fair-minded.” One felt that the notions which the medieval artist and the medieval countrywoman (living on into the nineteenth century) had acquired of ancient or Christian history, and which were distinguished by containing as much inaccuracy as simple good-heartedness, were derived not from books, but from a tradition that was at once very old and very direct, uninterrupted, oral, deformed, hardly recognizable, and alive.

It was right here that I started hearing Tim Rogers’s voice

No; just as what I needed so that I could go to sleep happy, with that untroubled peace which no mistress has been able to give me since that time because one doubts them even at the moment one believes in them, and can never possess their hearts as I received in a kiss my mother’s heart, complete, without the reservation of an afterthought, without the residue of an intention that was not for me-was that it should be her, that she should incline over me that face marked below the eye by something which was, it seems, a blemish, and which I loved as much as the rest, so what I want to see again is the Guermantes way that I knew, with the farm that is not very far from the two that come after pressed so close together, at the entrance to the avenue of oaks; those meadows on which, when the sun turns them reflective as a pond, the leaves of the apple trees are sketched, that landscape whose individuality sometimes, at night in my dreams, clasps me with an almost uncanny power and which I can no longer recover when I wake up. No doubt, by virtue of having forever indissolubly united in me different impressions merely because they had made me experience them at the same time, the Méséglise way and the Guermantes way exposed me, for the future, to many disappointments and even to many mistakes. For often I have wanted to see a person again without discerning that it was simply because she reminded me of a hedge of hawthorns, and I have been led to believe, to make someone else believe, in a revival of affection, by what was simply a desire to travel. But because of that very fact, too, and by persisting in those of my impressions of today to which they may be connected, they give them foundations, depth, a dimension lacking from the others. They add to them, too, a charm, a meaning that is for me alone. When on summer evenings the melodious sky growls like a wild animal and everyone grumbles at the storm, it is because of the Méséglise way that I am the only one in ecstasy inhaling, through the noise of the falling rain, the smell of invisible, enduring lilacs.

But in this strange phase of love, an individual person assumes something so profound that the curiosity he now felt awakening in him concerning the smallest occupations of this woman, was the same curiosity he had once had about History. And all these things that would have shamed him up to now, such as spying, tonight, outside a window, tomorrow perhaps, for all he knew, cleverly inducing neutral people to speak, bribing servants, listening at doors, now seemed to him to be, fully as much as were the deciphering of texts, the weighing of evi-dence, and the interpretation of old monuments, merely methods of scientific investigation with a real intellectual value and appropriate to a search for the truth.

On taste vs. online sludge

What we must find out is whether you are really that creature which ranks lowest in mentality, and even in charm, the contemptible creature who is incapable of giving up a pleasant thing. Now, if this is what you are, how could anyone love you, for you’re not even a person, a clearly defined entity, imperfect, but at least perfectible? You’re only a formless stream of water running down whatever slope one offers it, a fish without memory or reflection which, as long as it lives in its aquarium, continuing to mistake the glass for water, will bump against it a hundred times a day. The image of a weak mind as simply a stream running downhill without manifesting any will, exhibited by what it chooses to consume…

Oh goodness:

When his eyes fell upon Odette’s photograph on the table, or when she came to see him, he had trouble identifying the figure of flesh or cardboard with the painful and constant disturbance that inhabited him. He would say to himself almost with surprise: “It’s she!” as if suddenly someone were to show us in a separate, external form one of our own diseases and we found that it did not resemble what we were suffering. “She”— he tried to ask himself what that was; for one thing love and death have in common, more than those vague resemblances people are always talking about, is that they make us question more deeply, for fear that its reality will slip away from us, the mystery of personality. And this disease which was Swann’s love had so proliferated, was so closely entangled with all his habits, with all his actions, with his thoughts, his health, his sleep, his life, even with what he wanted after his death, it was now so much a part of him, that it could not have been torn from him without destroying him almost entirely: as they say in surgery, his love was no longer operable.

A Month in the Country

There are some mysterious items on my OmniFocus project “Books to Read v9”. Usually I try to capture where I got a recommendation and why it stuck enough for me to record it. This one was just there, and when I looked at it I got a vague sense that whoever had recommended it had made it sound meditative and nourishing.

On a rare visit to California for work, I discovered the utopian Kepler’s Books, which felt like it belonged in a hip urban center, not a dismal walk down the unwalkable American street from my suburban hotel. There I spent an agonizing amount of time wandering from section to section, squinting at every recommendation card, trying to look like I needed a staff member to ask, “Is there anything I can help you find?” But I was too exhausted from travel and emotionally raw to approach someone myself, and unsure what question I would even ask. In the end I picked out this book and Thiese’s Notes on Complexity, all on my own.

I made some of my most vivid and satisfying reading memories carrying this around under my arm, sneaking pages whenever I could. On a trip to the publicly-owned lodging in Nikkou, maintained for residents of Tokyo’s Katsushika ward. At a tsukemen joint around the corner. At my in-laws’ creaky four-story house, about as old as me.

“Look, how many times have I to tell you I’m not an artist. I’m the laborer who cleans up after artists. And my coat doesn’t signify a thing: I wear it because I feel the cold round my ankles like other people feel it round their ears.”

From their accounts and from judicious pumping, their mother worked out how it was with me and usually sent a bit of whatever was being manufactured in her kitchen—rabbit pie, a couple of currant teacakes, two or three curd tarts. So, over the weeks, a splendid repertory of North Riding dishes was performed amanti bravura to an applauding Londoner, dishes Mrs. Ellerbeck had helped her mother bake, who had helped her mother bake who … Sometimes I’d share this bounty with Moon and it was he who suggested that we were eating disposable archaeology.

His hands talk like monks’ hands must have talked in the long silences

You can only have this piece of cake once; you can’t keep on munching away at it. Sad, but there it is! You’ll find that, once you’ve dragged yourself off round the corner, there’ll be another view; it may even be a better one.”

You can only have this piece of cake once; you can’t keep on munching away at it. Sad, but there it is! You’ll find that, once you’ve dragged yourself off round the corner, there’ll be another view; it may even be a better one.”

スピリット　サークル 2

This volume deepens the sense of what it might really be like to become aware of one’s past lives, if such a thing were true. It successfully made me feel the gravity of waking up having witnessed your own entire lifespan in a medieval Europe or an ancient Egypt.

スピリット　サークル 1

I’d worked my way through a couple of volumes of 惑星のさみだれ from the big Mizukami pile that my brother-in-law lent me, but set it aside for its unremitting shounenness. This series, he assured me, is more “spiritual”. So far I’m quite enjoying the admixture of the everyday modern Japanese setting and historically-inspired past societies.

ファイブスター物語 14

Four years trying to get through this; the hardest volume for me, on account of how much of it is just military operations conveyed by close-ups of characters talking from inside GTM cockpits or vague “outside” locations, with minimal detail in the way of environments, objects, culture, or general sense of flavor. Every now and then you get to look at a GTM from the outside.

But even Nagano advises that folks skip ahead whenever they find they’re not enjoying an FSS story, and in the spirit of tadoku I finally took him up on it. I dashed through to the end and into Volume XV, already bringing me back to what I love about this series.

Off Book 340: The Center of the Bullseye

All-time favorite Off Book song: “Keeping it Plain”. I’d like to analyze this one line by line, rhyme by rhyme.

Off Book 340: Spark of Salvador Dali

It may be my favorite Jessica McKenna fact that she of course always built Lego sets exactly according to the instructions and then left them in that perfectly constructed state. The childhood version of me who did that, displaying them all on a shelf, appreciates her for that. (It also seems significant that I later dumped all the Legos in a huge bin and invited the neighborhood over to create their own domains all across my room for a summer.)

Off Book 339: A Club for You

Favorites:

• “A Bunch of Little Guys Pretending to Be a Bigger Guy” (38:00)
• “A Bunch of Little Guys Pretending to Be a Bigger Guy (Reprise)”

A Story

KSR on Wolfe, including a detour through Proust!

What I mean is that after Wolfe read Proust, he understood he was free, free to become himself in any way he wanted, to become, like Proust, one of the great Modernist writers, all of whom make their own tradition, style, subject matter, and reality. After you’ve read a novel that contains a 240-page garden party, why should you fear anything? You can’t. Anything is possible.

A genius in Wolfe: and if there are any fellow postmodern materialists reading this and groaning at the idea of there being anything unusual inside an artist or anyone else, anything beyond the workings of the brain, I will agree immediately, but point out that the latest news from brain science makes it clearer and clearer that saying “only the brain” is not much of a delimiting statement. The brain is not a clockwork, nor a steam engine, nor a binary or digital computer, nor any of the machines we conceptualize it to be with our simple metaphors based on our own feeble handiwork, as if the brain could only be as complex as something we ourselves could make. Very much not the case. The brain is a kind of pocket universe. The mind is huge, and consciousness a small part of it. The unconscious may well be inhabited by “subroutines,” as the computer people would have it, processes that may actually be more like characters. Maybe they are like Jungian archetypes—a shadow seems likely, perhaps an anima or animus—but who knows. Very probably the brain consists of organizations even stranger and more various than that. It may be a kind of library of stories all telling themselves at once. And by way of stories written down, one unconscious mind communicates with other unconscious minds.

His stories usually are not allegories but events in themselves, something like dreams or vases.

Off Book 338: Mistake on a Plate

Favorites:

• “All Are Welcome As Long As You Come Correct”
• Blake Sparkles' short jingle about the lemon drops

Notable for being Zroundbls’s early favorite during their induction into fandom. Feels like part of a little golden age for Off Book, along with “The Center of the Bullseye”, “The Names of Our Family”, etc.

A Canticle for Leibowitz

Late in high school I was sitting in the lobby of the administrative wing of my boys’ Catholic school. I cannot for the life of me remember what I was there for, but it has an equal chance of being because I was in big trouble for something, or because I was doing some sort of collaboration or meeting with someone important at the school. I was doing a reread of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, perhaps in the big Bible-looking edition I was proud to have. Someone’s mom was coming out from the school office and she stopped in her tracks, striking up a conversation with me about books. She was impressed to see a student her son’s age reading one of her favorites. I have no idea whose mom she was. We connected easily and she made several recommendations, including A Canticle for Leibowitz and the work of Tom Robbins. I ended up reading several Robbins books soon after, but never got around to Canticle. (At some point I think I started confuse it with Flowers for Algernon.)

There’s apparently a copyright issue keeping the book off of the US Kindle store, but I found a SF Masterworks edition on the JP store and stripped the DRM.

ChatGPT looked at my reading list and, based on what it knows about me, acted surprised that I hadn’t read it yet.

A warning of the fragility of humanity’s extraordinarily low-entropy state: all the intricate interconnections between systems of political order, prosocial culture, objective understanding of the world, and the transmission of that understanding. We take it for granted how far we’ve come since the dawn of the Enlightenment, but rather than taking us back to a time before we had it, this book takes us ahead to a future where we’ve destroyed it and rejected attempts to salvage it.

A portrait of the devotion of individuals to give their entire striving lifetime just to get one iota closer to a promise of a distant and unknown better state; or at least to minimize our backsliding away from it. The parallels between religious faith and the faith that we can make sense of the world and meaningfully better our state in it. The portrait of centuries of longing toward a world that’s actually meaningfully different and even better. The absurdity and the poignancy of individual fallible humans trying to assemble themselves together into less-fallible, anti-fragile, progress-making super-humans. The necessity of reverence (ever more vanishing since Miller’s time) for the success of such projects.

Hello from the Sikaku, where I’m glimpsing the Eternal in A Canticle for Leibowitz’s third part: Fiat Voluntas Tua. What’s grabbing me about this text is the explicit connection of religion, particularly the long and “unbroken” heritage of Catholicism as an organizing principle for reverence and devotion; the project of science as an effort to understand and make sense of truths about our physical universe; and the fate of humanity as an instantiation of self-aware consciousness and civilization. All of these are founded on the same longing to behold the Eternal.