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30 Essays to Make You Love Biology Day 1. "I should have loved biology" by James Somers. "It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, that I came to understand cells as recursively self-modifying programs." https://t.co/XeLSHx4CSm

"en el mundo desarrollado la duración de la vida humana se duplicó en cuestión de sólo cuatro o cinco generaciones. La revolución fundamental fue el desciframiento del código genético en la década de 1950, lo que marca el nacimiento de la biología moderna." (V. S. Ramachandran and Joan Soler Chic, Lo Que El Cerebro Nos Dice)

Intelligence is not central to the success of most life on Earth. Consider the grasses: they’ve flourished across incredibly diverse global environments, without planning or debating a single step. Planarian worms regrow any part of their body and are functionally immortal, a trick we can manage only in science fiction. And a microscopic virus... See more

The neo-Darwinian perspective, which still dominates the popular understanding of biology, isolates individual organisms or genes from the context of the living matrix that sustains them. Scarcity, competition and individual success are seen as the main drivers of evolution. This is an outdated perspective, based on outdated metaphors like Richard

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Biotech is going to have its ChatGPT moment sometime in the next 5 years. Figuring out the human body is quickly being turned into a compute problem AND the expense of that compute is falling faster than Moore's law (chart and text snippet from @Noahpinion article yesterday - link in subtweet). "Three fundamental shifts... See more