phenotype

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The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene by Richard Dawkins

Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, epigenetics, Gödel, Escher, Bach, impulse control, Menlo Park, Necker cube, p-value, Peter Pan Syndrome, phenotype, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, stem cell, Tragedy of the Commons

This is more subtle and more useful than to say that ‘we call the resultant object a body’. Of course genes are not directly visible to selection. Obviously they are selected by virtue of their phenotypic effects, and certainly they can only be said to have phenotypic effects in concert with hundreds of other genes. But it is the thesis of this book that we should not be trapped into assuming that those phenotypic effects are best regarded as being neatly wrapped up in discrete bodies (or other discrete vehicles). The doctrine of the extended phenotype is that the phenotypic effect of a gene (genetic replicator) is best seen as an effect upon the world at large, and only incidentally upon the individual organism—or any other vehicle—in which it happens to sit. 7 Selfish Wasp or Selfish Strategy?

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Genes that achieve sexually attractive phenotypic effects when compared with their alleles are favoured, and it is trivial whether those phenotypic effects are ‘conventional’ or ‘extended’. This is underlined by the interesting observation that bower bird species with especially splendid bowers tend to have relatively drab plumage, while those species with relatively bright plumage tend to build less elaborate and spectacular bowers (Gilliard 1963). It is as though some species have shifted part of the burden of adaptation from bodily phenotype to extended phenotype. So far the phenotypic effects we have been considering have extended only a few yards away from the initiating genes, but in principle there is no reason why the phenotypic levers of gene power should not reach out for miles.

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A mutant gene arose which, when present in the body of a male mouse, had phenotypic expression in the bodies of female mice with whom he came in contact. The route of action of the gene on its final phenotype was long and complex, but not noticeably more so than routes of genetic action within bodies customarily are. In conventional within-body genetics, the chain of causation leading from gene to observed phenotype may have many links. The first link is always RNA, the second is protein. A biochemist may detect the phenotype that interests him at this second link stage. Physiologists or anatomists will not pick up the phenotype that interests them until more stages have been passed.

The Barbell Prescription: Strength Training for Life After 40 by Jonathon Sullivan, Andy Baker

An Inconvenient Truth, complexity theory, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gary Taubes, indoor plumbing, junk bonds, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, phenotype, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), the scientific method, Y Combinator

Three years from now, this lesion will clamp off the blood flow to Phil’s left ventricle in the middle of a Die Hard movie marathon. He’ll breathe his last in the cardiac ICU 6 weeks later, age 58. Same genotype. Very different phenotypes. More specifically, Will and Phil have different aging phenotypes and different death phenotypes. Phil’s aging phenotype is an unsightly and miserable catastrophe, while his brother’s is an exemplar of healthy aging. Will’s death phenotype is be envied: he’s healthy, vigorous, active and happy until the minute a tired, tiny vessel in his brainstem switches him off in the middle of a great final adventure at the end of his ninth decade, many years from now.

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In other words, during development, childhood, and adolescence, Will and Phil demonstrate astonishingly similar phenotypes. Because their phenotypes are heavily influenced by their genotypes, this is not surprising. It is the genes, after all, that provide the source code for our biological development and overall constitution. Let’s fast-forward about 55 years. What has happened to the genotypes of Will of Phil? Nothing. They still share exactly the same genotype (a few cosmic rays, transposons and viral infections notwithstanding). But when we step out of our time machine, we find that their phenotypes are vastly different. Will has the more uncommon phenotype. He’s an avid sportsman.

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Instead, the distribution is skewing away from Will and toward Phil.7 The “average” human genotype has not changed substantially in many thousands of years, but in the postmodern era, the human phenotype of industrialized nations has undergone a staggering and destructive transformation.8 Will’s Healthy Aging Phenotype is more achievable than at any time in human history. But Phil’s Sick Aging Phenotype, as defined below, is well on the way to becoming the norm. Because this is a phenotypic transformation, and not a genotypic one, most scientists and physicians have concluded that the blame for this slow-motion public health catastrophe falls squarely on environmental and behavioral variables.9 I believe this conclusion is correct in general, although there remains considerable controversy about the particulars, especially with regard to the role of cultural influences, medical interventions, and diet.10 It appears the modern aging phenotypes are profoundly sensitive to a number of external and behavioral variables.

Richard Dawkins: How a Scientist Changed the Way We Think by Alan Grafen; Mark Ridley

Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, bioinformatics, Charles Babbage, cognitive bias, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Dava Sobel, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Easter island, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, Haight Ashbury, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, loose coupling, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, phenotype, profit maximization, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The Surrey puma question can now be answered: the scratch marks (even allowing for media misrepresentation) were not themselves a puma or for that matter a dog. They were certainly the phenotypic expression of genes for scratching behaviour. Yet, in the absence of any evidence that they affect the survival of scratch-generating genes, they do not deserve the description of extended phenotype. For the 1999 edition of The Extended Phenotype, the subtitle was changed; it now reads The long reach of the gene. The case of the caddis is an example of this too, as it shows how genes sitting in the larva are responsible for producing a structure detached from it.

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But the definition of the gene as a protein-encoding stretch of DNA is more recent than its definition as that which is responsible for a phenotypic difference, and it is not surprising that the modern molecular definition has not fully supplanted the older operational definition. Experimental geneticists invoke genes to explain observed phenotypic differences. A pink-eyed fly differs from a red-eyed fly because the former possesses a gene for pink eyes inherited from both parents whereas the latter has inherited at least one gene for red eyes. In a similar way, evolutionary biologists often invoke genes to explain hypothetical phenotypic differences in an attempt to understand the nature of adaptation by natural selection.

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Communication acts appear closer to the concept of genotype (things transmitted) whereas the conscious and unconscious effects of these acts on our internal state appear closer to phenotype (effects that influence what is transmitted). In the history of genetics, the phenotype was apparent and the genotype hidden. But this relation seems to be reversed for memetics. Memes are observed, rather than inferred from their effects, whereas their effects are in large part hidden. The phenotype/genotype distinction works fairly well for genes, but there are many unresolved problems in its application to memes. For example, let’s suppose that there is a body of lore preserved and updated by the Medieval Guild of Propagandists about what techniques are effective in changing public opinion, and that this body of lore is passed from master to apprentice.

The Genetic Lottery: Why DNA Matters for Social Equality by Kathryn Paige Harden

23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, classic study, clean water, combinatorial explosion, coronavirus, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, desegregation, double helix, epigenetics, game design, George Floyd, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, income inequality, Jeff Bezos, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meritocracy, meta-analysis, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Scientific racism, stochastic process, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, twin studies, War on Poverty, zero-sum game

Estimates of heritability do provide information on whether genes cause a phenotype. But these designs don’t provide information about what mechanisms connect genotypes and phenotypes, and the relevant mechanisms might not be intuitively “biological” processes. Jencks’s thought experiment about red-headed children has become a meme in discussions about genetics. It’s an enduring idea, I think, because it intuitively captures three ideas that are worth unpacking in more detail—(1) causal chains, (2) levels of analysis, and (3) alternative possible worlds. First, the red-headed child example makes clear that genes can be connected to phenotypes via long causal chains.2 In this example, a variant of the MC1R gene codes for pheomelanin, which makes one’s hair visibly red.

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The number of copies of each SNP is multiplied by the strength of its relationship to educational attainment, and then everything is added up across all the SNPs that have been measured in your genome (figure 3.1). This composite is a polygenic index. FIGURE 3.1.  Creating a polygenic index. Figure reproduced from Daniel W. Belsky and K. Paige Harden, “Phenotypic Annotation: Using Polygenic Scores to Translate Discoveries from Genome-Wide Association Studies from the Top Down,” Current Directions in Psychological Science 28, no. 1 (February 2019): 82–90, https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721418807729. Correlations between individual SNPs and a phenotype are estimated in a “Discovery GWAS” with a large sample size. Many GWAS have samples that exceed millions of people. Then, a new person’s DNA is measured.

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What you discover in one group isn’t expected to apply to another group, and if you study a different group, you might discover different genes. This expectation is clearly borne out by the data. Looking across a diverse set of phenotypes ranging from HDL cholesterol to schizophrenia, polygenic indices based on analyses of European ancestry populations are less strongly related to phenotypes measured in other populations, particularly African ancestry groups.24 When researchers have used an educational attainment GWAS to construct a polygenic index in White-identified, European-ancestry samples from the UK or Wisconsin or New Zealand, then the score “worked”—it captured more than 10 percent of the variance in educational attainment in those samples.

Epigenetics Revolution: How Modern Biology Is Rewriting Our Understanding of Genetics, Disease and Inheritance by Nessa Carey

Albert Einstein, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, conceptual framework, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, life extension, mouse model, phenotype, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, stochastic process, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies

Of mice and men (and women) These data are consistent with a model where epigenetic changes could account for at least some of the reasons why MZ twins aren’t phenotypically identical, but there’s still a lot of supposition involved. That’s because for many purposes humans are a quite hopeless experimental system. If we want to be able to assess the role of epigenetics in the problem of why genetically identical individuals are phenotypically different from one another, we would like to be able to do the following: Analyse hundreds of identical individuals, not just pairs of them; Manipulate their environments, in completely controlled ways; Transfer embryos or babies from one mother to another, to investigate the effects of early nurture; Take all sorts of samples from the different tissues of the body, at lots of different time points; Control who mates with whom; Carry out studies on four or five generations of genetically identical individuals.

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Taken together, the most straightforward interpretation of these data is that epigenetic inheritance has taken place. In other words, an epigenetic modification (probably DNA methylation) was transferred along with the genetic code. This transfer of the phenotype from one generation to the next wasn’t perfect – not all the offspring looked exactly the same as their mother. This implies that the DNA methylation that controls the expression of the agouti phenotype wasn’t entirely stable down the generations. This is quite analogous to the effects we see in suspected cases of human transgenerational inheritance, such as the Dutch Hunger Winter. If we look at a large enough number of people in our study group we can detect differences in birth weight between various groups, but we can’t make absolute predictions about a single individual.

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It’s far more likely that there is the transmission of an epigenetic modification at the AxinFu gene from either parent to offspring. These model systems have been really useful in demonstrating that transgenerational inheritance of a non-genetic phenotype does actually occur, and that this takes place via epigenetic modifications. This is truly revolutionary. It confirms that for some very specific situations Lamarckian inheritance is taking place, and we have a handle on the molecular mechanism behind it. But the agouti and kinked tail phenotypes in mice both rely on the presence of specific retrotransposons in the genome. Are these special cases, or is there a more general effect in play? Once again, we return to something that has a bit more immediate relevance for us all.

Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class by Charles Murray

23andMe, affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, bioinformatics, Cass Sunstein, correlation coefficient, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark triade / dark tetrad, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, emotional labour, epigenetics, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, meritocracy, meta-analysis, nudge theory, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, public intellectual, publication bias, quantitative hedge fund, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, school vouchers, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, universal basic income, working-age population

Along with prior work on how FT influences behavior, this work highlights FT as an important developmental mechanism contributing to sex differences in neuroanatomy.”107 There’s more on this topic that I will not try to cover (the note has some more sources for the curious), nor will I try to cover the continuing debate about the details.108 My limited point is that the debate is being conducted within a consensus among neuroscientists that the male brain is more lateralized than the female brain. The differences are consistent with observed phenotypic sex differences in visuospatial and verbal skills. Sex Differences in Emotional Cognition and Memory I promised that I would give you a glimpse of the progress that is being made in directly linking sex differences in the brain to sex differences in the phenotype. I chose progress in understanding sex differences in emotional response because an extensive technical literature has been accumulating and because of the intriguing links between the female phenotypic advantage in certain kinds of memory and the greater female vulnerability to depression.[109] The story that is emerging has not reached the level of settled science, but progress has been remarkable.

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The greater lateralization of the male brain has been documented by a variety of evidence about sex differences in structural connectivity and functional connectivity. These findings bear on phenotypic sex differences in visuospatial and verbal skills. Differences in the functioning of the amygdala, hypothalamus, and other regions of the limbic system appear to have links with phenotypic sex differences in memory and vulnerability to depression. These topics barely scratch the surface. For example, I described sex differences in memory as they are related to the amygdala. Researchers are now integrating the findings on the phenotypic sex differences in memory, spatial abilities, and perceptual processing (the temporal order in which a scene and its individual features are recognized) into an explanation that invokes sex differences in the amygdala, hippocampus, and lateralization, all mediated by the locus coeruleus in the brain stem and the adrenal glands (more precisely, the catecholamine system).135 For those of you who want to get a broader sense of how much has been done and is under way in research on sex differences in the brain and are prepared to cope with some densely technical material, I recommend a 2019 review article, “Sex Differences in the Developing Brain.”136 Probably the takeaway with the most long-term importance is that it’s still early days.

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A Personal Interpretation of the Material in Part I I reserve an entire chapter at the end of the book for my own interpretation of larger issues, but I also end Parts I, II, and III with personal statements of my reading of the material. Males and females are different. A lot different. The distinctions that show up in the phenotypic evidence on personality, abilities, educational choices, vocational choices, and career paths are interconnected both conceptually and empirically. The links between these phenotypic differences and the sex differences in the brain are still only partly understood, but what we have learned so far also hangs together. I expect that the more we learn, the more closely phenotypic differences will match up with genetic differences. I will also assert without trying to demonstrate it that this coherent picture fits seamlessly within the context of evolutionary pressures over millions of years that shaped Homo sapiens.

The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins

double helix, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, information retrieval, lateral thinking, Necker cube, pattern recognition, phenotype, prisoner's dilemma, zero-sum game

Beneficial means that they make the embryo likely to develop into a successful adult, an adult likely to reproduce and pass those very same genes on to future generations. The technical word Phenotype is used for the bodily manifestation of a gene, the effect that a gene, in comparison with its alleles, has on the body, via development. The phenotypic effect of some particular gene might be, say, green eye colour. In practice most genes have more than one phenotypic effect, say green eye colour and curly hair. Natural selection favours some genes rather than others not because of the nature of the genes themselves, but because of their consequences-their phenotypic effects. Darwinians have usually chosen to discuss genes whose phenotypic effects benefit, or penalize, the survival and reproduction of whole bodies.

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To solve our problem, we have to begin by purging our minds of old attitudes that covertly take the individual organism for granted; otherwise we shall be begging the question. The instrument with which we shall purge our minds is the idea that I call the extended phenotype. It is to this, and what it means, that I now turn. The phenotypic effects of a gene are normally seen as all the effects that it has on the body in which it sits. This is the conventional definition. But we shall now see that the phenotypic effects of a gene need to be thought of as all the effects that it has on the world. It may be that a gene's effects, as a matter of fact, turn out to be confined to the succession of bodies in which the gene sits.

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More, an orthodox chromosomal gene and a virus that is transmitted inside the host's egg would agree in wanting the host to succeed not just in its courtship but in every detailed aspect of its life, down to being a loyal, doting parent and even grandparent. The caddis lives inside its house, and the parasites that I have so far discussed have lived inside their hosts. The genes, then, are physically close to their extended phenotypic effects, as close as genes ordinarily are to their conventional phenotypes. But genes can act at a distance; extended phenotypes can extend a long way. One of the longest that I can think of spans a lake. Like a spider web or a caddis house, a beaver dam is among the true wonders of the world. It is not entirely clear what its Darwinian purpose is, but it certainly must have one, for the beavers expend so much time and energy to build it.

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society by Nicholas A. Christakis

Abraham Maslow, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, classic study, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, data science, David Attenborough, deep learning, different worldview, disruptive innovation, domesticated silver fox, double helix, driverless car, Easter island, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Garrett Hardin, intentional community, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of writing, iterative process, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, joint-stock company, land tenure, language acquisition, Laplace demon, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, means of production, mental accounting, meta-analysis, microbiome, out of africa, overview effect, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Pierre-Simon Laplace, placebo effect, race to the bottom, Ralph Waldo Emerson, replication crisis, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, ultimatum game, zero-sum game

The effects of genes are thus hard to discern—because there are many ways genes can influence phenotypes, especially in the case of behaviors. To complicate matters, just as many genes can affect a single phenotype (making that trait polygenic), a single gene can affect many phenotypes—for example, a gene that affects obesity might also affect the ability to process cholesterol. This is known as pleiotropy. Given all this complexity, it is important to understand a bit of shorthand when speaking about genes. When scientists say that there is a gene or genes “for” a trait, it means that variations in a genotype correspond to variations in a phenotype, not necessarily that a specific gene is solely responsible for a specific phenotype.

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The study of genetics and heredity began with how genotypes (genes and their variants) shape phenotypes (an organism’s physical appearance and function). But phenotypes eventually came to be seen as any manifestations of genes, moving beyond physical appearance to include the way the brain works and, ultimately, human personalities and behaviors. Using a variety of techniques, such as studying twins and analyzing tiny variations in DNA, behavior geneticists have explored whether the genome as a whole and also certain genes in particular help to explain complex phenotypes like neuroticism, decision-making, and friendliness. So broad and powerful is the impact of genes on behavior that, in 2000, psychologist Eric Turkheimer formulated this “first law” of behavior genetics: “All human behavioral traits are heritable.”26 One extraordinary study combined data from 2,748 publications involving over fourteen million twin pairs and 17,804 human traits.

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The environment inside the body can affect the availability of substances to interact with those molecules. And even the environment outside the body—both physical (like rain or sunshine) and social (like being surrounded by friends or foes)—can modify how genes are expressed or activated. Still, although a gene may lead to one phenotype in one environment and a different phenotype in another, scientists generally first look at the gene and the phenotype to see if there is a relationship. If there is, then they can explore whether and how this relationship depends on measurable environmental factors.29 It’s increasingly clear that genes and the environment interact to shape our lives as individuals, not just our evolution as a species.

Evil Genes: Why Rome Fell, Hitler Rose, Enron Failed, and My Sister Stole My Mother's Boyfriend by Barbara Oakley Phd

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Barry Marshall: ulcers, cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, corporate governance, dark triade / dark tetrad, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, double helix, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, impulse control, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Mustafa Suleyman, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, prisoner's dilemma, Richard Feynman, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, Steven Pinker, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, twin studies, union organizing, Y2K

Depending on the stress and our genetic predisposition, we can be pushed toward depression, eating disorders, drug abuse, or cancer.8 If a person already has a mild form of a personality disorder, he or she can be pushed into a full-blown version. Intermediate Phenotype Intermediate phenotype is a concept used by researchers who are wrestling with the relationship between genes and phenotype. To understand “intermediate phenotype,” it's helpful to remember that there is often an intermediate case between a full-blown manifestation of a disease and a less harmful variant. In personality disorders, intermediate phenotypes, sometimes called endophenotypes, are used to describe people with subclinical symptoms of diseases like schizophrenia or borderline personality disorder. The stipulation for an intermediate phenotype is that it be found in mildly ill but not “certifiable” siblings and other relatives, and that it even be found in some psychiatrically well relatives.

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A medical imaging technique that involves figuring out the size, shape, and function of organs such as the amygdala and cingulate cortex and then evaluating the same person's genes to see how they compare. intermediate phenotype. Phenotype generally refers to a trait you can see on the outside of a body, such as red hair. Intermediate phenotype is related to a trait or part on the inside of the body, such as the liver or the amygdala. Many times it's easier to see if a gene has an effect on the intermediate phenotype inside the body than on the phenotype visible outside the body. junk DNA. Molecules of DNA that seem to serve no useful purpose and lie around generally being bored. Occasionally, however, they turn out to control important activities in the cell.

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Egan's study was one of the first times that a correlation of an intermediate phenotype with a gene was shown to clarify how a gene related to a complex clinical diagnosis.9 “What's so surprising,” marvels Daniel Weinberger, Egan's colleague at the National Institute of Mental Health, “is that it works.”10 It appears that the next step beyond imaging genetics may relate to the synergistic use of genotyping, neuroimaging, and intermediate phenotypes. It will be exciting to see what future studies reveal when these techniques are applied to antisocial personality disorder, other related syndromes, and their subclinical “intermediate phenotypes.” Faced with the overwhelming variety of phenotypes that can arise from this mixture of genes and environment, it's hard to know where to even begin looking at a person's genome to determine which alleles might be key in motivating behavioral traits.

The Gene: An Intimate History by Siddhartha Mukherjee

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, All science is either physics or stamp collecting, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, Benoit Mandelbrot, butterfly effect, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, longitudinal study, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, mouse model, New Journalism, out of africa, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, seminal paper, stem cell, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

Penetrance: The proportion of organisms that carry a particular variant of a gene that also expresses the associated trait or phenotype. In medical genetics, penetrance refers to the proportion of individuals carrying a genotype that manifest the symptoms of an illness. Phenotype: The set of an individual’s biological, physical, and intellectual traits, such as skin color or eye color. Phenotypes can also include complex traits, such as temperament or personality. Phenotypes are determined by genes, epigenetic alterations, environments, and random chance. Protein: A chemical comprised, at its core, of a chain of amino acids that is created when a gene is translated.

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To explain the intersection of genetics, natural selection, and evolution in formal terms, Dobzhansky resurrected two important words—genotype and phenotype. A genotype is an organism’s genetic composition. It can refer to one gene, a configuration of genes, or even an entire genome. A phenotype, in contrast, refers to an organism’s physical or biological attributes and characteristics—the color of an eye, the shape of a wing, or resistance to hot or cold temperatures. Dobzhansky could now restate the essential truth of Mendel’s discovery—a gene determines a physical feature—by generalizing that idea across multiple genes and multiple features: a genotype determines a phenotype But two important modifications to this rule were necessary to complete the scheme.

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First, Dobzhansky noted, genotypes were not the sole determinants of phenotypes. Obviously, the environment or the milieu that surrounds an organism contributes to its physical attributes. The shape of a boxer’s nose is not just the consequence of his genetic heritage; it is determined by the nature of his chosen profession, and the number of physical assaults on its cartilage. If Dobzhansky had capriciously trimmed the wings of all the flies in one box, he would have affected their phenotypes—the shape of their wings—without ever touching their genes. In other words: genotype + environment = phenotype And second, some genes are activated by external triggers or by random chance.

Epigenetics: How Environment Shapes Our Genes by Richard C. Francis

agricultural Revolution, autism spectrum disorder, cellular automata, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, Drosophila, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, longitudinal study, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, meta-analysis, phenotype, stem cell, twin studies

James Barker proposed that when the fetus receives insufficient nutrition through the placenta, it becomes programmed in the womb for a thrifty phenotype.9 As was proposed for the thrifty-genes hypothesis, those with a thrifty phenotype have a more efficient metabolism than babies born at a normal birth weight. But the thrifty phenotype can result from diverse genetic backgrounds and without the aid of specific obesity genes. It is, rather, simply a function of the intrauterine environment. The thrifty phenotype works out well in traditional non-Western cultures where the postnatal environment is often one of scarcity. In those cases, the prenatal environment predicts the postnatal environment in an adaptive way.

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Problems arise, however, if the postnatal environment is enriched food-wise relative to the prenatal environment. When this mismatch occurs, thrifty phenotypes result in obesity and its consequences. The Barker hypothesis nicely accounts for the correlation between low birth weight and adult obesity and has been bolstered by much, though certainly not all, subsequent research.10 But what is the nature of this so-called programming? Barker himself has little interest in the mechanism through which this effect of the uterine environment occurs. Others, though, have pursued mechanistic investigations of thrifty phenotypes, and, as is usually the case, the initial studies have been conducted on nonhuman mammals—especially mice, rats, and sheep.

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Roux, Wilhelm sainthood, criteria for schizophrenia: in Dutch famine cohort gene mutation and stress biasing and Scruggs, Jan sea urchins self-esteem, maternal style and self-nonself distinction, in immune system self-organization, of developmental processes September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks sex-linked traits see also X chromosome sexual development: genomic imprinting and Kallmann syndrome and Silver-Russell syndrome small interfering RNAs (siRNAs) Smith, Clement social inheritance social interactions: gene regulation and in gorillas infant-parent relationship in somatic mutation theory (SMT) of cancer somatic stem cells cancer and, see somatic mutation theory (SMT) of cancer spatial cognition sperm cells: in egg fertilization epigenetic attachments removed in production of sperm development spina bifida stamping, genetic stature, genomic imprinting and stem cells blood induced pluripotent neural see also embryonic stem cells; somatic stem cells stress, maternal stress axis hyperresponsiveness in, see stress biasing stress biasing epigenetic gene regulation and maternal style and in mice and rat studies in primates stress response to chronic stressors fight or flight hyperactivity of, see stress biasing in monozygotic twins substance abuse maternal style and Suomi, Steven tactile stimulation Tanganyika, Lake Tasmanian devils cancer in, see devil facial tumor disease (DFTD) healing capacity of immune response in Tatum, Edward teratocarcinoma cells testes endocrine disruptors and steroid abuse and shrinkage of testosterone competitive interactions and Thailand, diet and obesity in “thrifty genes” hypothesis thrifty phenotype thymine tigons tissue-based theory of cancer Toguchi, Audrey Toronto zoo totipotent cells traits: genes as linked to sex-linked transcription transcription factors transdifferentiation transgenerational epigenetic processes translation translocation tumor suppressor genes Turner neurocognitive phenotype Turner syndrome unipotent cells viable yellow (Avy) agouti allele Vietnam Veterans Memorial Vietnam War vinclozolin Vindicated (Canseco) violence, steroid use and vision, color, see color vision vitalism vitamin B12 Waddington, Conrad war, epigenetic changes induced by Washington, George Watson, James Wayne, John weed killers Weismann, August Western lifestyle: obesity and stress in Wilhelmina Gasthuis Hospital Wilms’ tumor Wolf, Caspar Friedrich womb, see fetal environment World Trade Center, 9/11 attack on World War I, shell shock in World War II: battle fatigue in Dutch famine in, see Dutch famine Wright, Sewall X chromosome opsins on see also sex-linked traits X inactivation epigenetic processes in histones in in marsupials methylation in randomness in X-inactivation center (Xic) X-inactive-specific transcript (Xist) XO females “X-women,” Y chromosome zebras zinc zorse zygote epigenesis theory of in preformationist theory in stem cell controversy as totipotent Copyright © 2011 by Richard C.

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Boeing 747, book value, Boris Johnson, David Attenborough, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, lone genius, Mahatma Gandhi, mental accounting, Necker cube, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, out of africa, p-value, phenotype, place-making, placebo effect, precautionary principle, public intellectual, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the long tail, the scientific method, twin studies, value engineering

Deeper consideration, however, shows that the truth is almost the exact opposite. It is central and essential to Darwinian (as opposed to Lamarckian) evolution that there shall be causal arrows flowing from genotype to phenotype, but not in the reverse direction. Changes in gene frequencies are not passive book-keeping records of phenotypic changes: it is precisely because (and to the extent that) they actively cause phenotypic changes that evolution of the phenotype can occur. Serious errors flow, both from a failure to understand the importance of this one-way flow,*18 and from an over-interpretation of it as inflexible and undeviating ‘genetic determinism’.

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Direction (order) imposed on random variation by natural selection Darwinism – the non-random selection of randomly varying replication entities by reason of their ‘phenotypic’ effects – is the only force I know that can, in principle, guide evolution in the direction of adaptive complexity. It works on this planet. It doesn’t suffer from any of the drawbacks that beset the other five classes of theory, and there is no reason to doubt its efficacy throughout the universe. The ingredients in a general recipe for Darwinian evolution are replicating entities of some kind, exerting phenotypic ‘power’ of some kind over their replication success. In The Extended Phenotype I referred to these necessary entities as ‘active germ-line replicators’ or ‘optimons’.

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In The Extended Phenotype I referred to these necessary entities as ‘active germ-line replicators’ or ‘optimons’. It is important to keep their replication conceptually separate from their phenotypic effects, even though, on some planets, there may be a blurring in practice. Phenotypic adaptations can be seen as tools of replicator propagation. Gould disparages the replicator’s-eye view of evolution as preoccupied with ‘book-keeping’. The metaphor is a superficially happy one: it is easy to see the genetic changes that accompany evolution as book-keeping entries, mere accountant’s records of the really interesting phenotypic events going on in the outside world. Deeper consideration, however, shows that the truth is almost the exact opposite.

Longevity: To the Limits and Beyond (Research and Perspectives in Longevity) by Jean-Marie Robine, James W. Vaupel, Bernard Jeune, Michel Allard

caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, computer age, conceptual framework, confounding variable, demographic transition, Drosophila, epigenetics, life extension, longitudinal study, phenotype, stem cell, stochastic process

Indeed, when compensatory adaptation takes place in a "fit" organism, it is most likely to bring it downhill. Natural Selection and Aging Let us come back to the phase space of an organism, adding the time dimension, and let us consider the complete phenotype in one block, unfolded in space and time. The pre-reproductive section of the phenotype has been perfected by natural selection, whereas the post-reproductive part of the phenotype has been neglected. A hallmark of natural selection optimization is a good homeostatic capacity, an adequate response to challenges, giving the impression that every situation has been predicted, that all the components of the organism are useful, well coordinated and under control.

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The genetic approach is especially valuable in the analysis of aging because genetic manipulations leading to a stable alteration of genotype also lead to a stable alteration of phenotype in the organism. This phenotypic alteration can now be studied at many levels from the in vivo effects on life expectancy, to altered biochemical and physi010gical processes and even to studies at the level of the molecule. Also the genetic approach is unbiased by the interests and prior expectations or hypotheses of the investigator in that virtually any gene in the organism that leads to the desired phenotypic change can be identified and studies as a causal determinant oflongevity extension. Genetic approaches lead to more than a finding; they lead to an altered strain or stock that can be shared with other laboratories.

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QTLs for life expectancy were identified on linkage groups (LGs) II (near the stP101 molecular marker), IV (near stP5) and X (near stP61), and QTLs for fertility were identified on LGs II (near maP1), III (near stP19) and IV (near stP51). The QTLs for life expectancy accounted for almost all of the genetic variance (only 23 % of the phenotypic variance). The QTLs for mean fertility accounted for 85 % of the genetic variance and 45 % of the phenotypic variance. Additional QTLs for other life history traits were also mapped in these crosses. There was no evidence for epistatic effects between QTLs but several loci were observed to have effects on the QTLs identified. No QTLs were pleiotropic (having effects on different life history traits) with the exception of negatively correlated, pleiotropic effects between life expectancy and internal hatching associated with a QTL near the stP5 marker.

Autism: A Very Short Introduction by Uta Frith

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, epigenetics, mirror neurons, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, phenotype, theory of mind

Even if autism is extremely variable as far as its causes and as far as the resulting behaviour patterns are concerned, there is some common denominator. This is a cognitive phenotype. Perhaps there are more than one common pathway and more than one cognitive phenotype. This would be the case if distinct subgroups on the autism spectrum could be identified. What if each of the five big ideas defined a cognitive phenotype? Basically you can think of a cognitive phenotype as encapsulating one of the big ideas. Perhaps this division would make the search for the causes of autism simpler. Could there be five types of autism?

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Let’s take another example. Do David, Gary, and Edward show a cognitive phenotype of weak central coherence? This phenotype represents individuals who by preference will focus attention on details and cannot easily be distracted away. A battery of tests is again needed—tests of the right difficulty level, reliability, and validity. These would probably include tests of attention and tests of intelligence. One of the aims of the weak central coherence idea is after all to explain an uneven pattern of intelligence. We might suspect that Gary would not have this phenotype—he did not have outstanding abilities or narrow interests—but David probably would.

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Sometimes quite strong and sometimes very watered down symptoms can be seen in the relatives. The observation of very mild autistic features in relatives is greater than might be expected by chance. This has given rise to the idea that there is indeed a broader phenotype of autistic disorders. This means that the genes that are responsible for this phenotype might exist in quite a large number of people, hardly any of whom are autistic themselves. Perhaps these genes predispose them to have children with ASD. This idea is plausible, but as yet speculative. Are we all—or at least all men—a little bit autistic?

Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life by Daniel C. Dennett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anthropic principle, assortative mating, buy low sell high, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, classic study, combinatorial explosion, complexity theory, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, Danny Hillis, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Drosophila, finite state, Garrett Hardin, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, heat death of the universe, In Cold Blood by Truman Capote, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, John von Neumann, junk bonds, language acquisition, Murray Gell-Mann, New Journalism, non-fiction novel, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, price mechanism, prisoner's dilemma, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, Schrödinger's Cat, selection bias, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test

But now we introduce just one "minor" change: suppose that although the individual organisms start out with different wirings (whichever wiring was ordered by their particular genotype or genetic recipe) — as shown by their scatter on the fitness landscape — they have some capacity to adjust or revise their wiring, depending on what they encounter during their lifetimes. (In the language of evolutionary theory, there is some "plasticity" in their phenotypes. The phenotype is the eventual body design created by the genotype in interaction with environment. Identical twins raised in different environments would share a genotype but might be dramatically different in phenotype.) Suppose, then, that these organisms can end up, after exploration, with a design different from the one they were born with. We may suppose their explorations are random, but they have an innate capacity to recognize (and stay with) a Good Trick when they stumble upon it.

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Remember Orgel's Second Rule! In his account of Biomorph Land, Dawkins stresses that a tiny — indeed minimal — change in the genotype (the recipe) can produce a strikingly large change in the phenotype (the resulting individual organism), but he tends to slight one of the major implications of this: if a single step in the genotype can produce a giant step in the phenotype, intermediate steps for the phenotype may be simply unavailable, given the mapping rules. To take a deliberately extreme and fanciful example, you might think that if a beast could have twenty-centimeter tusks and forty-centimeter tusks, it would stand to reason that it could also have thirty-centimeter tusks, but the rules {118} for tusk-making in the recipe system may not allow for such a case.

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The trouble with the diagram is that it needs more dimensions, so we can compare the steps in genotype space (the typographical steps in the Library of Mendel) to the steps in phenotype space (the design innovations in Design Space) and then evaluate these differences on a fitness landscape. As we have seen, the relations between recipe and result are complex, and many possibilities might be illustrated. We saw in chapter 5 that a small typographical change in the genome could in principle have a large effect on the phenotype expressed. We also saw, in chapter 8, that some typographical changes in the genome can have no effect at all on the phenotype — there are over a hundred different ways of "spelling" lysozyme, for instance, and hence more than a hundred equivalent ways of spelling the order for lysozyme in DNA codons.

The Ancestor's Tale: A Pilgrimage to the Dawn of Evolution by Richard Dawkins

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, classic study, complexity theory, delayed gratification, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, invention of writing, lateral thinking, Louis Pasteur, mass immigration, nuclear winter, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, the High Line, the long tail, urban sprawl

But beaver genes have special phenotypes quite unlike those of tigers, camels or carrots. Beavers have lake phenotypes, caused by dam phenotypes. A lake is an extended phenotype. The extended phenotype is a special kind of phenotype, and it is the subject of the rest of this tale, which is a brief summary of my book of that title. It is interesting not only in its own right but because it helps us to understand how conventional phenotypes develop. It will turn out that there is no great difference of principle between an extended phenotype like a beaver lake, and a conventional phenotype like a flattened beaver tail.

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The allele makes the difference when its phenotype is compared with the corresponding phenotype, at the end of the correspondingly long chain of causation that proceeds from the alternative allele. Gene differences cause phenotypic differences. Gene changes cause phenotypic changes. In Darwinian evolution alleles are selected, vis-a-vis alternative alleles, by virtue of the differences in their effects on phenotypes. The beaver's point is that this comparison between phenotypes can happen anywhere along the chain of causation. All intermediate links along the chain are true phenotypes, and any one of them could constitute the phenotypic effect by which a gene is selected: it only has to be 'visible' to natural selection, nobody cares whether it is visible to us.

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Selection drives evolution only to the extent that the alternative types owe their differences to genes. If the differences are not inherited, differential survival has no impact on future generations. For a Darwinian, phenotypes are the manifestations by which genes are judged by selection. When we say that a beaver's tail is flattened to serve as a paddle, we mean that genes whose phenotypic expression included a flattening of the tail survived by virtue of that phenotype. Individual beavers with the fiat-tailed phenotype survived as a consequence of being better swimmers; the responsible genes survived inside them, and were passed on to new generations of flat-tailed beavers.

River Out of Eden: A Darwinian View of Life by Richard Dawkins

Boeing 747, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Ford Model T, job satisfaction, Louis Pasteur, Menlo Park, out of africa, phenotype

But now, after many generations of evolution, we move on to Threshold 2, the Phenotype Threshold. Replicators survive not by virtue of their own properties but by virtue of causal effects on something else, which we call the phenotype. On our planet, phenotypes are easily recognized as those parts of animal and plant bodies that genes can influence. That means pretty well all bits of bodies. Think of phenotypes as levers of power by which successful replicators manipulate their way into the next generation. More generally, phenotypes may be defined as consequences of replicators that influence the replicators' success but are not themselves replicated.

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More generally, a planet will come to contain replicators whose consequences (phenotypes) have beneficial effects, by whatever means, on the replicators' success at getting copied. Once the Phenotype Threshold is crossed, replicators survive by virtue of proxies, their consequences on the world. On our planet, these consequences are usually confined to the body in which the gene physically sits. But this is not necessarily so. The doctrine of the Extended Phenotype (to which I have devoted a whole book with that title) states that the phenotypic levers of power by which replicators engineer their long-term survival do not have to be limited to the replicators' "own" body.

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The DNA molecule itself is not right- or left-handed, but its phenotypic consequence is. Left-handed and right-handed shells may not be equally successful at the business of providing the outer protection for snail bodies. Because snail genes ride inside the shells whose shape they help to influence, genes that make successful shells will come to outnumber genes that make unsuccessful shells. Shells, being phenotypes, do not spawn daughter shells. Each shell is made by DNA, and it is DNA that spawns DNA. DNA sequences influence their phenotypes (like the direction of coiling of shells) via a more or less complicated chain of intermediate events, all subsumed under the general heading of "embryology."

Genesis: The Deep Origin of Societies by Edward O. Wilson

biofilm, out of africa, phenotype, social intelligence

It is phenotypic flexibility, the amount of change in a phenotype (the trait prescribed by a gene) through differences in the environment. The kind and amount of flexibility—since these are also genetic traits—can also evolve. At one extreme, the genes prescribing flexibility can be shaped by natural selection to allow only one trait out of many conceivable, such as one eye color inherited by a particular person. At the opposite extreme, flexibility can also evolve to generate multiple possible responses, each fitted to a particular challenge from the environment. In this case the phenotypic flexibility still prescribes a rigidly genetic rule, as in eat fresh food, avoid spoiled food (unless you are a blowfly or a vulture).

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., 72 evolutionary biology, 10–11 evolution by natural selection, 17–18 altruism and, see altruism composite (mosaic), 111, 113 dragon challenge of, 44, 48 of eusociality, 63–66, 68–70, 72, 73, 74–78, 82–83 genes and, 87 great transitions of, see great transitions of evolution groups and, see group selection heredity vs. environment in, 19–20 homosexuality and, 69 individuals and, 18, 26, 48, 87 kin selection and, 36, 99–100 multilevel, 18, 48 phenotypic flexibility and, 22–24, 26–27 rate of change in, 22 as scientific fact, 21 speed of change in, 44, 46 see also biological evolution experimentation, 21, 48, 78, 88–89, 91–92, 103 extinctions, 107 feeding groups, 52, 54–55, 56, 57 field observation, 21, 48, 78, 88–89, 103 fire, control of, 112, 113–14, 115, 123 fire ants (Solenopsis invicta), 89–90 Fire Ants, The (Tschinkel), 89 flexibility, phenotypic, 22–24, 26–27 French Guiana, 60 Gadagkar, Raghavendra, 93 Gat, Azar, 119 genes, 88 group selection and, 87 mutations of, see mutations natural selection and, 18, 87 genes, frequency of, in populations, 17 genome, eusociality as requiring basic change in, 83–86 genome mapping, 90 gods, 10, 11 great transitions of evolution, 31–40 altruism as necessary for, 45, 47–48 Gromphadorhina (hissing cockroaches), 98 groups: altruism and, see altruism competition between, 81, 112 cooperation in, see cooperation as defense against predators, 55, 56, 57, 58 individual vs. group benefit in, 87 kin selection and, 36 origin of, 18, 31, 35–38, 46 potential immortality of, 60 reciprocity and, 36, 38 see also eusociality; societies group selection, 26–27, 79–106 altruism and, 81–82, 86 competition and, 86–87, 88–89, 90 cooperation and, 86, 89–90 division of labor and, 85–86 genes and, 87 in human evolution, 116 individuals and, 18, 48 social evolution and, 90 social traits and, 88 warfare and, 118 grouse, 52 Haldane, J.

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., 101–2 nuclear membranes, 32, 34–35 Old World monkeys, investment strategies of, 59–60 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 24, 26, 81 organelles, 32, 34–35 organized religions, 10 human condition and, 10 monastic orders in, 69 tribalism and, 10 Paleogene Epoch, 70 paleontology, paleontologists, 10–11, 64 Paleozoic Era, 23, 66, 68, 71 Pan paniscus (bonobos), 109, 116 Pan troglodytes, see chimpanzees Pemphigus obesinymphae (aphid), 92–93 “personality” castes, 95–96, 97 phenotypes, 22 phenotypic flexibility, 22–24, 26–27 pheromones, 94 philosophy, 9 ultimate question of, 17 Plains Indians, berdache system of, 69 policing, in eusocial colonies, 90–91 Polypterus bichir (Nile bichir), 23–24, 25 population genetics, 87 populations, of species, 17, 18 preadaptation: eusociality and, 72, 74–75, 115–16 progressive care of young and, 72, 74–75 predators, cooperation as defense against, 55, 56, 57, 58 prepared learning, 23 primates, 108 evolution of, 107 Pristomyrmex punctatus (ant), 91–92 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, 101–2 prokaryotic cells, 32 Pruitt, Jonathan N., 95, 96 Psaronius (tree fern), 71 psychology, 10–11 queens, in eusocial colonies, 67, 68, 73, 78, 84–85 in fire ants, 89–90 genetic mutation in, 85 virgin, 52, 85 quorum sensing, 57–58 race, 20, 22 ravens, reciprocity among, 36, 38 reciprocity, 36, 38 “relicts,” 22 reproductive (royal) castes, 60, 84–85 see also queens, in eusocial colonies restraint, altruistic, 47–48 ribosomes, 32, 34–35 Rising Star Cave, South Africa, 111 Robinson, Gene M., 83–84 Ropalidia marginata (wasp), 93 Saturn, 34 savannas, human evolution and, 112, 113 science: experimentation in, 21, 48, 78, 88–90, 91–92, 103 field observation in, 21, 48, 78, 88–89, 103 human condition and, 9 scientific theory, testing of, 77 Scolytidae (bark beetles), 68 sexual reproduction: DNA exchange in, 31, 35 eusociality and, 63 invention of, 35 mating swarms in, 51 social behavior, 9 evolution of, 71–72, 73, 74–75 in insects, 71–72 origin of, 77 see also eusociality social evolution, 87, 90, 121 competition and, 112 group selection and, 90 social insects, 26, 64, 70 colonies of, see eusocial insect colonies competition in, 91–93 cooperation in, 93–94 evolution of larvae in, 84–85 policing and, 90–91 worker population size and, 89–90 social intelligence, 123 social interaction, 125 social mammals, cooperation among, 58–59 social spiders, 95 social wasps, 67, 93–94 societies: biological evolution of, 18 see also eusociality; groups societies, evolution of: in chironomid midges, 51 evidence for, 51–61 societies, origin of, 31, 32, 35–38 altruism and, 48 sociobiology, sociobiologists, 22, 64, 99, 103 solitary bees, as preadapted to eusociality, 75, 77–78 speciation, 110 see also evolution by natural selection species: definition of, 17, 18 populations of, 17, 18 sphecid (mud dauber) wasps, 69, 73, 74–75 Sphecomyrma, 111 Standen, Emily M., 24 starlings, 52, 54–55, 56, 57 stingless bees (tribe Meliponini), 70 storytelling, 122, 123–25 superorganisms, 18, 78 termites, 18, 24, 64, 67, 69, 70 cockroaches as ancestors of, 96, 98–99 eusocial colonies of, 35–38, 60 evolution of eusociality in, 96–97 Teseo, Serafino, 91 theory, scientific testing of, 77 Theridiidae (cobweb spiders), 95 thrips, 64, 69 Tianmen Mountain, 44 tribalism, 10 Tschinkel, Walter R., 89 Tsuji, Kazuki, 91 vervets, reciprocity among, 36 vespid wasps, 68, 73 warfare, 120 among chimpanzees, 116–18 group selection and, 118 among human societies, 118–19, 120–21, 121 wasps, see also specific species wasps, social, 64 evolution of eusociality in, 73 Wiessner, Polly W., 123–25 Wilson, David Sloan, 87 wolves, pack competition among, 89 worker castes, 24, 60, 67–68, 78, 84–85 Yanomamö, 119, 121 Yellowstone National Park, 89 young, progressive care of, 72, 74–75 ALSO BY EDWARD O.

A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, butterfly effect, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Desert Island Discs, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, Necker cube, out of africa, Peoples Temple, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method

Whereas genes are to be found in precise locations on chromosomes, memes presumably exist in brains, and we have even less chance of seeing one than of seeing a gene (though the neurobiologist Juan Delius has pictured his conjecture of what a meme might look like75). As with genes, we track memes through populations by their phenotypes. The ‘phenotype’ of the Chinese junk meme is made of paper. With the exception of ‘extended phenotypes’ such as beaver dams and caddis larva houses, the phenotypes of genes are normally parts of living bodies. Meme phenotypes seldom are. But it can happen. To return to my school again, a Martian geneticist, visiting the school during the morning cold bath ritual, would have unhesitatingly diagnosed an ‘obvious’ genetic polymorphism.

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Our Martian geneticist would have to work quite hard to discover that no genes are involved in the genesis of the roundhead phenotype. The Martian geneticist’s eyes would also pop out on stalks (assuming they weren’t on stalks to begin with) at the contemplation of certain styles of clothing and hairdressing, and their inheritance patterns. The black skullcapped phenotype shows a marked tendency towards longitudinal transmission from father to son (or it may be from maternal grandfather to grandson), and there is clear linkage to the rarer pigtail-plaited sideburn phenotype. Behavioural phenotypes such as genuflecting in front of crosses, and facing east to kneel five times per day, are inherited longitudinally too, and are in strong linkage disequilibrium with the previously mentioned phenotypes, as is the red-dot-on-forehead phenotype, and the saffron robes/shaven head linkage group.

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Inheritance in the drawing experiment is Lamarckian (Susan Blackmore calls it ‘copying the product’). In the origami experiment it is Weismannian (Blackmore’s ‘copying the instructions’). In the drawing experiment, the phenotype in every generation is also the genotype – it is what is passed on to the next generation. In the origami experiment, what passes to the next generation is not the paper phenotype but a set of instructions for making it. Imperfections in the execution of the instructions result in imperfect junks (phenotypes) but they are not passed on to future generations: they are non-memetic. Here are the first five instructions in the Weismannian meme-line of instructions for making a Chinese junk: 1.

Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health by H. Gilbert Welch, Lisa M. Schwartz, Steven Woloshin

23andMe, classic study, do well by doing good, double helix, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, life extension, longitudinal study, mandelbrot fractal, medical residency, meta-analysis, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, sugar pill, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

This leads to a key distinction that is relevant to genetic testing: the distinction between genotype and phenotype. The complete set of genetic instructions contained in your DNA is your genotype. The human that others can observe—your physical, biochemical, and behavioral characteristics—is your phenotype. You don’t experience your genotype; you experience your phenotype. And it is the combination of your genotype, your environment, and luck that determines your phenotype. Genetic testing attempts to predict your phenotype based solely on your genotype. While there’s really no reason to have a genetic test to predict an aspect of your phenotype you already know about—you wouldn’t, for example, do a genetic test to see if you had blue eyes—some genetic-testing companies are in fact promoting tests just like this.

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In fact, they recognized that the concept of penetrance itself was far more complicated. It was not clear whether penetrance should refer to the probability that the gene will lead to the symptomatic phenotype (disease) or to the probability that it will lead to the asymptomatic phenotype of iron overload. They considered both probabilities and determined that penetrance was incomplete both from genotype to asymptomatic phenotype and even more so from genotype to symptomatic phenotype. Less than half of those inheriting C282Y from both parents develop the biochemical abnormality of iron overload, and less than half of those with iron overload go on to develop the clinical disease.13 Figure 9.3 presents a more accurate picture of the disorder.

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But if you don’t like Brussels sprouts, do you really care whether this preference is mediated by your genes or your environment? And if you do like Brussels sprouts, would you stop eating them if you found out that you were missing the liking-Brussels-sprouts gene? Geneticists are the first to point out that phenotype trumps genotype.3 Abnormal gene does not equal disease The only compelling reason to test the genotypes in healthy individuals is to predict their future phenotypes, specifically, whether or not they will develop particular diseases (or pass them on to their children). But what is true for individual characteristics is also true for diseases. While some diseases are determined solely by the presence or absence of specific genes, most reflect the interaction among genetics, environment, and pure chance.

Practical Manual of Thyroid and Parathyroid Disease by Asit Arora, Neil Tolley, R. Michael Tuttle

Drosophila, epigenetics, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mouse model, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selection bias

Oncogenesis and molecular targeted therapy in thyroid cancer MEN2B 918 883 804+806 804+904 MEN2A 635 637 FMTC 609 611 618 620 634 790 791* V804L 891 532 533 630† 768 V804M 844 912 Fig. 9.3 Correlation of specific RET codon mutations with the phenotypic expression of hereditary MTC. *Development of pheochromocytoma has not been reported. †Distinction between MEN2A and FMTC cannot be made. Adapted from: Kouvaraki, MA, et al. RET proto-oncogene: a review and update of genotype-phenotype correlations in hereditary medullary thyroid cancer and associated endocrine tumors. Thyroid 2005;15:531–44. methionine to a threonine. This initiates tyrosine kinase activity, although a ligand is still required for full activation of the receptor.185 These different mechanisms of RET oncogene activation may account for the phenotypic variation between MEN2A and MEN2B.

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Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism cases inherit the abnormal gene from the father. They have the AHO phenotype but biochemistry is normal. Occasionally, only severe heterotopic ossification rather than the full AHO phenotype is seen. This is termed progressive osseous heteroplasia (POH) when it affects muscles, joints and connective tissue, or osteoma cutis when it only affects skin. Type II pseudohypoparathyroidism is very different. Although the basic biochemistry is similar, the renal cAMP response to PTH infusion is normal, other hormone systems are not involved, there is no family history and there is no AHO phenotype. Chronic vitamin D deficiency produces a similar picture.

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Parathyroid hormone resistance Pseudohypoparathyroidism is a rare autosomal dominant condition first recognized by Albright in 1942. Patients have biochemical features consistent with hypoparathyroidism (i.e. hypocalcaemia and hyperphosphataemia) but the PTH levels are elevated. This represents resistance to PTH action.86 There are two key elements to the diagnosis. The phenotypic features, termed the Albright hereditary osteodystrophy (AHO) phenotype, consist of: • somatic features: short stature, brachydactyly, rounded facies • developmental delay • heterotopic ossification. The biochemical features include: • hypocalcaemia with hyperphophataemia • elevated PTH levels • lack of renal cAMP and phosphaturic response to PTH infusion • reduced tissue response to GHRH, TSH, LH and FSH hormones.

A Brief History of Everyone Who Ever Lived by Adam Rutherford

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, dark matter, delayed gratification, demographic transition, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Eyjafjallajökull, Google Earth, Gregor Mendel, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, sceptred isle, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, twin studies

They contain their own chromosome, a small loop of DNA separate from the vast majority contained within the nucleus of a cell. Mitochondrial DNA (which is sometimes written as mtDNA) is of great interest to geneticists and genealogists as it is only ever passed on from mother to child, and thus can exclusively chart a matrilineage. phenotype The phenotype is the physical manifestation of a gene or genotype. For example, a particular version of the gene MC1R (the genotype) will mean your phenotype will be a redhead. protein The primary functional biological molecules in living things. They are made up of simple molecules called amino acids assembled into long strings. These fold up to make a three-dimensional structure, and often assemble with other proteins in cells to enact their function.

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One version seems to subtly affect how an individual responds to an anaesthetic that dentists frequently use. This is just one gene, with many versions and it has a variable phenotype, though we can mostly see the outcome with fiery clarity. Even when we know the genome intimately, and the patterns of inheritance, and the history of the DNA, and the migration patterns of the people who carried it, and evolutionary pressures that led to the perpetuation of the genes and the phenotype – even when we know all that, how it manifests can still be mysterious and surprising. Anyone who says differently is selling something. The British are coming While we’re in the north-east of Europe, let me indulge in some national pride to scrutinize this sceptred isle, and the finest genetic analyses of a people yet undertaken: just who are the British?

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We like it because it’s one of a very small handful of traits that has a relatively straightforward relationship between the DNA and its outcome – the genotype and the phenotype. There are basically two types of earwax, sticky and dry. The gene that determines these two states is called ABCC11, which comes in two alleles to give them their more scientific and less revolting descriptor. The gene is 4,576 base pairs long, and at position 538 there is either a G or an A. If you have a G, the code writes the amino acid glycine, and if you have an A you get an arginine. This simple change slightly nudges the protein into a different shape, and the shape switches the nature of the wax. The inheritance of this terribly important phenotype plays out in a human ear in a straightforward Mendelian way.

Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds & Shape Our Futures by Merlin Sheldrake

Anthropocene, Apollo 11, biofilm, buy low sell high, carbon footprint, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, Easter island, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, late capitalism, low earth orbit, Mason jar, meta-analysis, microbiome, moral panic, NP-complete, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, TED Talk, the built environment, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, traveling salesman, two and twenty

It’s possible to make sense of this sort of shape-shifting within a scientific framework. In The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins points out that genes don’t just provide the instructions to build the body of an organism. They also provide instructions to build certain behaviors. A bird’s nest is part of the outward expression of the bird’s genome. A beaver’s dam is part of the outward expression of a beaver’s genome. And an ant’s death grip is part of the outward expression of the genome of Ophiocordyceps fungi. Through inherited behaviors, Dawkins argues, the outward expression of an organism’s genes—known as its “phenotype”—extends into the world. Dawkins was careful to place “stringent requirements” on the idea of the extended phenotype.

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Dawkins was careful to place “stringent requirements” on the idea of the extended phenotype. Although it is a speculative concept, he dutifully reminds us, it is a “tightly limited speculation.” There are three crucial criteria that have to be met to prevent phenotypes becoming too extended (if a beaver’s dam is an expression of the beaver’s genome, then what about the pond that forms upstream of the dam, and the fish that live in the pond, and…). First, extended traits must be inherited—Ophiocordyceps, for example, inherits a pharmacological talent for infecting and manipulating ants. Second, extended traits must vary from generation to generation—some Ophiocordyceps are more precise manipulators of ant behavior than others.

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Psilocybin-producing mushrooms, like LSD, do so too, but in the most intimate possible setting: the inside of our own minds. * * * — IN THE CASE of Ophiocordyceps, an infected ant’s behavior can be thought of as fungal behavior. The death grip, summit disease—these are extended characteristics of the fungus, part of its extended phenotype. Can the alterations in human consciousness and behavior brought about by psilocybin mushrooms be thought of as part of the extended phenotype of the fungus? The extended behavior of Ophiocordyceps leaves an imprint in the world in the form of fossilized scars on the underside of leaves. Can the extended behavior of psilocybin mushrooms be thought of as leaving an imprint in the world in the form of ceremonies, rituals, chants, and the other cultural and technological outgrowths of our altered states?

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again by Eric Topol

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 23andMe, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Apollo 11, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, Big Tech, bioinformatics, blockchain, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, digital twin, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, fault tolerance, gamification, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Santayana, Google Glasses, ImageNet competition, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, Joi Ito, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, medical residency, meta-analysis, microbiome, move 37, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, nudge unit, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, pattern recognition, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, post-truth, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, techlash, TED Talk, text mining, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, traumatic brain injury, trolley problem, War on Poverty, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working-age population

It took twenty seconds for a form of AI called natural-language processing to ingest the boy’s electronic medical record and determine eighty-eight phenotype features (almost twenty times more than the doctors had summarized in their problem list). Machine-learning algorithms quickly sifted the approximately 5 million genetic variants to find the roughly 700,000 rare ones. Of those, 962 are known to cause diseases. Combining that information with the boy’s phenotypic data, the system identified one, in a gene called ALDH7A1, as the most likely culprit. The variant is very rare, occurring in less than 0.01 percent of the population, and causes a metabolic defect that leads to seizures.

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This might include all of one’s medical, social, behavioral, and family histories, as well as one’s biology: anatomy, physiology, and environment. Our biology has multiple layers—our DNA genome, our RNA, proteins, metabolites, immunome, microbiome, epigenome, and more. In the biomedical research community, the term that is frequently used is “deep phenotyping”; we saw an example of the approach in the case of the newborn boy with status epilepticus. Deep phenotyping is both thick, spanning as many types of data as you can imagine, and long, covering as much of our lives as we can, because many metrics of interest are dynamic, constantly changing over time. A few years ago, I wrote a review in which I said we needed medical data that spanned “from prewomb to tomb.”3 A former mentor told me that I should have called the span “from lust to dust.”

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Woebot had more users in its first few months than would see a psychologist in a hundred years.8 Until recent years, our assessment of behavior, mood, and cognition was largely subjective, during brief episodic visits in a contrived, clinical environment. When this did occur, it usually was to respond to mental health difficulties rather than to prevent them. Table 8.1 lists some of the various and still proliferating ways we can now collect objective data to deeply phenotype mood and mental health state. The term “digital phenotyping” conveys the point that each feature can be digitized and produce a variety of metrics. Most of these can be obtained passively via smartphones in a patient’s real world. With the addition of connected sensors, many of the physiological parameters can be unobtrusively gathered, often on a continuous basis.

A Hunter-Gatherer's Guide to the 21st Century: Evolution and the Challenges of Modern Life by Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein

autism spectrum disorder, biofilm, Carrington event, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, dark matter, delayed gratification, discovery of DNA, double helix, epigenetics, Francisco Pizarro, germ theory of disease, Gregor Mendel, helicopter parent, hygiene hypothesis, lockdown, meta-analysis, microbiome, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, phenotype, planned obsolescence, precautionary principle, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind

In biology, we speak of plasticity, often phenotypic plasticity, to refer to the many outcomes that are possible from the same starting materials. Roughly speaking, a genotype (say, the alleles for brown eyes) produces a phenotype (the actual brown eyes). Phenotype is the observable form of an organism. For many traits, though, a particular genotype encodes information for a range of possible phenotypes,17 and interactions with the molecular, cellular, gestational, and external environment determine what phenotype will actually be produced. Phenotypic plasticity allows individuals to respond in real time to changing environments, to avoid being canalized into set patterns and lifeways by their genes.

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Design constraint trade-offs also reveal that you can’t be both the most robust and the most efficient. Less intuitively, you also can’t be fastest and bluest.23 Humans do a great job of evading some trade-offs, of course. For instance, we have addressed the fast-versus-impenetrable trade-off by building outside of ourselves—by having extended phenotypes.24 The domestication of horses, and advent of castles, allowed some humans to be both fast and impenetrable. And as we discussed in chapter 1, we seem to have beaten the odds when it comes to the trade-off between specialists and generalists. Humans are a broadly generalist species, with the capacity for individuals—and cultures—to go deep and specialize in myriad contexts and skill sets.

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Zebra finch chicks, whose parents “told” them about high temperatures while they were still in their eggs, alter their begging behavior as nestlings, and when they become adults, they prefer hotter nest sites.21 Even our critically important aortic arch, the first arterial branch off the heart that takes oxygenated blood to the body, has several common anatomies within human populations, which can develop from highly similar genetic starting gates.22 Plasticity provides the possibility of alternate phenotypes, often through simple rules that do not prescribe precise outcomes. The result, ever more so with increasing levels of complexity, is exploration of new territory, literal and metaphorical.23 One place that plasticity manifests in humans is the wide variety of approaches to parenting across cultures.

The Future of the Brain: Essays by the World's Leading Neuroscientists by Gary Marcus, Jeremy Freeman

23andMe, Albert Einstein, backpropagation, bioinformatics, bitcoin, brain emulation, cloud computing, complexity theory, computer age, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, Drosophila, epigenetics, Geoffrey Hinton, global pandemic, Google Glasses, ITER tokamak, iterative process, language acquisition, linked data, mouse model, optical character recognition, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, race to the bottom, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, semantic web, speech recognition, stem cell, Steven Pinker, supply-chain management, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, traumatic brain injury, Turing machine, twin studies, web application

If there is a one-to-one correspondence between DNA and the phenotype, then every somatic cell in the body (which contains exactly the same genotype) would be identical. Instead, the phenotypes of cells vary from brain cells (neurons) to liver cells. Because of this, Waddington proposed that the mechanisms through which a genotype produces a phenotype should be termed epigenetics. Considering that cellular phenotypes undergo dramatic plasticity during development while the genotype of these cells remains stable implicit in Waddington’s definition is the notion that a phenotype can be altered without changes to the genotype.

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Interestingly, these same features of organization can be altered by the sensory driven activity that the developing organism is exposed to. Because cortical field size and connectivity can be changed through different mechanisms, this implies that in a given lineage, some aspect of brain organization owes its particular phenotype to genes, activity-dependent mechanisms, or some combination of both. However, a similar phenotype in a different mammal may have arisen by a very different combination of these factors. From a personal rather than scientific standpoint, the final important thing I’ve learned is don’t be taken in by the boondoggle, don’t get caught up in technology, and be very suspicious of “initiatives.”

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The many neural cell types, although traditionally defined by the complex morphologies of axons and dendrites first glimpsed under the microscopes of Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal, can also be defined by a process of discrete counting. Indeed, all of the cells in the body share (very closely) the same genome, the differences between them being due to the different levels of expression of the different genes. From the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology we know that gene expression, which accounts for the phenotypic differences between the body’s genetically identical cells proceeds as DNA →(transcription) Messenger RNA →(translation) Protein and thus, by counting the numbers of each messenger RNA in a cell, we can determine its cell type. The same goes for tracking the history of molecular expression in the cell over time, for example, to observe changes in gene expression that accompany learning and memory; except here you need not only to count molecules but also to label these molecules with time stamps—digital strings that encode the current time.

Safe Haven: Investing for Financial Storms by Mark Spitznagel

Albert Einstein, Antoine Gombaud: Chevalier de Méré, asset allocation, behavioural economics, bitcoin, Black Swan, blockchain, book value, Brownian motion, Buckminster Fuller, cognitive dissonance, commodity trading advisor, cryptocurrency, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, delayed gratification, diversification, diversified portfolio, Edward Thorp, fiat currency, financial engineering, Fractional reserve banking, global macro, Henri Poincaré, hindsight bias, Long Term Capital Management, Mark Spitznagel, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, random walk, rent-seeking, Richard Feynman, risk free rate, risk-adjusted returns, Schrödinger's Cat, Sharpe ratio, spice trade, Steve Jobs, tail risk, the scientific method, transaction costs, value at risk, yield curve, zero-sum game

Indeed, not all safe havens are even safe havens—and certainly very few, if any, are cost‐effective. But we owe it to ourselves to find out, and to at least establish a criterion for measuring them against each other. PHENOTYPES We need a safe haven concept, or definitions to determine whether something should be included in the safe haven category. We need to describe that essential cartoon safe haven form. We start with phenotypes—the expression of an organism's observable traits or responses as it interacts with its environment. This is also the best way to approach the cartoon essence of safe havens. How a safe haven interacts with its environment, or its functional essentialism, is another way of saying its payoff relative to the dynamics of the broad macroeconomic environment in which it lives.

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THE GREAT DILEMMA FIRST PRINCIPLES MODUS TOLLENS DEDUCTIVE DICE Chapter Two: Nature's Admonition THE SWISS FAMILY BERNOULLI THE SAINT PETERSBURG PARADOX EMOLUMENTUM MEDIUM THE GEOMETRIC AVERAGE THE OTHER SAINT PETERSBURG PARADOX CONCAVITY OF CURVE THE LOGARITHMIC RHINE FALLS Chapter Three: The Eternal Return AN EXISTENTIAL IMPERATIVE INTO THE MULTIVERSE DICE WITH SCHRÖDINGER'S DEMON (N = ∞) DICE WITH NIETZSCHE'S DEMON (N = 1) THE HUSTLE OF NON‐ERGODICITY MAGIC TRICK OR MATH TRICK? SIDE BETS A GLIMPSE OF TREASURE Part Two: What Comes After Chapter Four: A Taxonomy ESSENTIALISM MORE DIFFERENT THAN ALIKE PHENOTYPES RISK‐MITIGATION IRONY IMPOSTERS THE DOGMA OF DIVERSIFICATION INDUCTIVE DICE Chapter Five: Holism THE CUCKOO IN THE CLOCK KEEPING BOTH EYES CLINICAL TRIALS THE COST‐AND‐EFFECT RELATIONSHIP RESHUFFLING AGNOSTICISM OFFENSIVE DEFENSE A NARROW, BROKEN WINDOW FRAME LOOKING DOWN THE TRACK THE GREAT PIRATES Chapter Six: Bold Conjectures EPISTEMOLOGY NEPTUNE OR VULCAN?

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This led him, of course, to a theory of natural selection and his opus, On the Origin of Species. What Aristotle and Darwin observed in the natural world can guide us in our study of safe havens. The diversity and change within the safe haven species is so great that it, too, could form new ones. Its members have their own different phenotypes, making some far more advantaged or cost‐effective (fitter) than others. Thus, we have our own safe haven species problem: Can we identify a safe haven “essence” and use it to classify them? Or are they all just individual things—each one of a kind? Further confounding the problem, our classifications are a moving target.

Darwin Among the Machines by George Dyson

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, backpropagation, Bletchley Park, British Empire, carbon-based life, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, Donald Davies, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, IFF: identification friend or foe, independent contractor, invention of the telescope, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, launch on warning, low earth orbit, machine readable, Menlo Park, Nash equilibrium, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, pattern recognition, phenotype, RAND corporation, Richard Feynman, spectrum auction, strong AI, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, zero-sum game

“This tendency to act on any thing which can have importance for survival is the key to the understanding of the formation of complex instruments and organs and the ultimate development of a whole body of somatic or non-genetic structures.”28 Once the concept of translation from genotype to phenotype is given form, Darwinian evolution picks up speed—not just the evolution of organisms, but the evolution of the genetic language and translation system that provide the flexibility and redundancy to survive in a noisy, unpredictable world. A successful interpretive language not only tolerates ambiguity, it takes advantage of it. “It is almost too easy to imagine possible uses for phenotype structures—because the specification for an effective phenotype is so sloppy,” wrote A. G. Cairns-Smith in his Seven Clues to the Origin of Life. “A phenotype has to make life easier or less dangerous for the genes that (in part) brought it into existence.

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This brings us back to Butler versus Darwin, because during this extended evolutionary prelude Lamarckian, not neo-Darwinian, selection would have been at work. We should think twice before dismissing Lamarck because Lamarckian evolution may have taken our cells the first—and most significant—step toward where we stand today. Genotype and phenotype may have started out synonymous and only later become estranged by the central dogma of molecular biology that allows communication from genotype to phenotype but not the other way. Life, however, arrives at distinctions by increments and rarely erases its steps. Remnants of Lamarckian evolution may be more prevalent, biologically, than we think—not to mention Lamarckian tendencies among machines.

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“With present speed, it may take 10,000 generations (about 80 machine hours on the IBM 704. . .) to reach an average game quality higher than 1,” Barricelli estimated, this being the quality expected of a rank human beginner playing for the first few times.24 In 1963, using the large Atlas computer at Manchester University, this objective was achieved for a short time, but without further improvement, a limitation that Barricelli attributed to “the severe restrictions . . . concerning the number of instructions and machine time the symbioorganisms were allowed to use.”25 In contrast to the IAS experiments, in which the numerical symbioorganisms consisted solely of genetic code, the Tac-Tix experiments led to “the formation of non-genetic numerical patterns characteristic for each symbioorganism. Such numerical patterns may present unlimited possibilities for developing structures and organs of any kind to perform the tasks for which they are designed.”26 A numerical phenotype had taken form. This phenotype was interpreted as moves in a board game, via a limited alphabet of machine instructions to which the gene sequence was mapped, just as sequences of nucleotides code for an alphabet of amino acids in translating proteins from DNA. “Perhaps the closest analogy to the protein molecule in our numeric symbioorganisms would be a subroutine which is part of the symbioorganism’s game strategy program, and whose instructions, stored in the machine memory, are specified by the numbers of which the symbioorganism is composed,” Barricelli explained 27 In coding for valid instructions at the level of phenotype rather than genotype, evolutionary search is much more likely to lead to meaningful sequences, for the same reason that a meaningful sentence is far more likely to be evolved by choosing words out of a dictionary than by choosing letters out of a hat.

Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

23andMe, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, Arthur D. Levinson, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, cloud computing, CRISPR, data science, disintermediation, double helix, Elon Musk, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Larry Ellison, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Menlo Park, microbiome, mouse model, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, South China Sea, SpaceShipOne, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, zero day

* * * — TO ACCOMPLISH IMPRESSIVE FEATS such as this, HLI needed two kinds of information: high-resolution sequencing of people’s individual genomes, as well as deep dives into each patient’s personal and medical history. Collectively, this is known as phenotypic data. Phenotypic data synced a patient’s genome with the real world of his or her health and background. Was the person 20 years old or 60? Were they Olympic specimens, or did they have heart problems and arthritis? How tall were they? What did they eat? Were they obese or slim? Where did they come from and what was the health of their parents and siblings like? Did they have any diseases? Did their parents? Combining genomic and phenotypic information created what was known as an “integrated genome,” because it revealed both sides of the same human coin, and helped to match what you experienced in life with the details of your DNA.

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And if none of those children had come across that particular strain of flu, they would have been just fine. The point for HLI was that the best way to drop medical costs, improve health, and ensure that a killer disease didn’t get you was to understand what secrets your genome held. But again, that would only be possible when huge amounts of the genetic and phenotypic information could be assembled. Now, at the end of 2016, almost three years after HLI’s founding, Venter had upped the stakes and officially set one million integrated human genomes as the company’s goal. Why a million? When Bloom would embark upon his meetings with pharmaceutical companies or insurance conglomerates or federal agencies, he had a nice analogy he liked to use to explain the idea.

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But it could be worse: What if someone decided to engage you in insights about Zen Buddhism or Sartre’s views on existentialism or even an ounce of biology? That would require a very deep vocabulary, as well as subtle grammar and syntax—which meant, to use the vernacular, you were screwed. The same held true for the genome. Without lots and lots of genomes synced with integrated phenotypic information, good luck comprehending what the strangely linked nucleotides are trying to tell you. You need, in effect, to improve your vocabulary, upgrade your Japanese dictionary. So the Data were important. And HLI had been making progress in those first three years after its founding growing the dictionary: It had gone from zero integrated genomes to 40,000, which was about 37,000 more than anyone else in the world had at the time.

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands by Eric Topol

23andMe, 3D printing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anne Wojcicki, Atul Gawande, augmented reality, Big Tech, bioinformatics, call centre, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, connected car, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, dark matter, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, digital divide, disintermediation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, gamification, global village, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, information asymmetry, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, job automation, Julian Assange, Kevin Kelly, license plate recognition, lifelogging, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, meta-analysis, microbiome, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum cryptography, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, Snapchat, social graph, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, X Prize

Health Span The human reference genome, which has been regarded as the platinum standard for genomic variation, has a significant flaw—the individuals who were used to construct it were young without any phenotype. So what we consider as the “anchor” may be riddled with disease-related variants. For example, a major predisposition for clotting disorders is attributed to the gene variant known as Factor V Leiden. But if you look up the Factor V gene in the reference genome, it’s Factor V Leiden! We need a reference genome with rigorous phenotypic characterization to avoid this problem. By collecting a large cohort of individuals with extreme health span (such as in the “Wellderly” project that we’ve been engaged in at Scripps for the past eight years) and performing whole genome sequencing, we can have an assured healthy background reference genome for comparison.

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Regalado, “Stephen Wolfram on Personal Analytics,” MIT Technology Review, May 8, 2013, http://www.technologyreview.com/news/514356/stephen-wolfram-on-personal-analytics/. 8. N. A. Christakis and J. H. Fowler, Connected (New York, NY: Little, Brown and Co., 2009). 9. “Phenotype,” Wikipedia, accessed August 13, 2014, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenotype. 10. “Microphones as Sensors: Teaching Old Microphones New Tricks,” The Economist, June 1, 2013, http://www.economist.com/news/technology-quarterly/21578518-sensor-technology-microphones-are-designed-capture-sound-they-turn-out. 11. G. Slabodkin, “Study: iPhone App for Speech Laterality Just as Reliable as Lab Brain Tests,” FierceMobileHealthcare, February 12, 2013, http://www.fiercemobilehealthcare.com/story/study-iphone-app-speech-laterality-just-reliable-lab-brain-tests/2013-02-12. 12.

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FIGURE 5.2: The human GIS—multiple superimposed and integrated layers of medical information. Source: Adapted from E. J. Topol, “Individualized Medicine from Prewomb to Tomb,” Cell 157 (2014): 241–253. The Panoromic View Let’s now unpack the human GIS to define and understand each component. The “ome” attached to each denotes the study of something. The phenome refers to all the phenotypic traits of an individual, such as height, weight, and eye and skin color. I like to combine it with one’s social graph, which broadens the “look from the outside” of a person to their social network. The physiome is the collection of one’s physiologic metrics, such as heart rate and blood pressure.

Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution by Francis Fukuyama

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, assortative mating, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, Columbine, cotton gin, demographic transition, digital divide, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, impulse control, life extension, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, precautionary principle, presumed consent, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, Scientific racism, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Turing test, twin studies

As noted in the discussion of height, environment can change median heights, but it cannot push human heights above or below certain limits, nor can it make women on average taller than men. Those parameters are still set by nature. Moreover, there is very often a linear relationship between environment, genotype, and phenotype that ensures that if the genetic variance is distributed normally, the phenotypic variance will also be distributed normally. That is, the better our diets, the taller we tend to be (within our species-typical limits); height distribution curves still have single median points despite the fact that they are affected by environment. Most human characteristics do not resemble the mountain plant that looks entirely different depending on elevation.

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In many cases, twins reared apart will nonetheless share many of the same environmental circumstances, making it impossible to disaggregate natural from cultural influences. Among the “shared environments” that a behavior geneticist may overlook is that of the mother’s womb, which has a strong influence on how a given genotype develops into a phenotype, or individual human being. Identical twins necessarily share the same womb, but the same fetus growing up in a different womb might turn out quite differently if the mother is malnourished, drinks, or takes drugs. The second, and less accurate, way of uncovering the natural sources of behavior is to do a cross-cultural survey of a particular trait or activity.

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One would presumably not want to create a human baby until one had a much higher chance of success, and even then the cloning process might produce defects that wouldn’t show up for years. The dangers that exist for cloning would be greatly magnified in the case of genetic engineering, given the multiple causal pathways between genes and their ultimate expression in the phenotype.16 The Law of Unintended Consequences would apply here in spades: a gene affecting one particular disease susceptibility might have secondary or tertiary consequences that are unrecognized at the time that the gene is reengineered, only to show up years or even a generation later. The final constraint on any future ability to modify human nature has to do with populations.

What Kind of Creatures Are We? (Columbia Themes in Philosophy) by Noam Chomsky

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, Brownian motion, classic study, conceptual framework, en.wikipedia.org, failed state, Great Leap Forward, Henri Poincaré, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, language acquisition, liberation theology, mass incarceration, means of production, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Turing test, wage slave

This gives further reason to conclude that the kind of creatures we are, possessed of the kind of powers for language and thought we possess, should get an evolutionary account of the sort presented in chapter 1 rather than what Chomsky, citing Lewontin in chapter 2, describes as the “storytelling” about gradual evolution from our creaturely ancestors, a mode of explanation that one would indulge in only if one does not pay enough prior and scientific attention to the nature of the phenotype being explained. It is storytelling partly also, as Lewontin is cited as saying, because of the “tough luck” of not having access to any evidence on which these explanations could be based. They are hidden from human cognitive access, another form of our limitation. Thus limits on our cognition are inevitable for a variety of reasons, chief among which is the taking seriously of the sheer fact that we are biological creatures.

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Not untypical is a current study on evolution of language, where the authors open by writing that “we understand language as the full suite of abilities to map sound to meaning, including the infrastructure that supports it,”9 basically a reiteration of Aristotle’s dictum, and too vague to ground further inquiry. Again, no biologist would study evolution of the visual system assuming no more about the phenotype than that it provides the full suite of abilities to map stimuli to percepts along with whatever supports it. Much earlier, at the origins of modern science, there were hints at a picture somewhat similar to Darwin’s and Whitney’s. Galileo wondered at the “sublimity of mind” of the person who “dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person… by the different arrangements of twenty characters upon a page,” an achievement “surpassing all stupendous inventions,” even those of “a Michelangelo, a Raphael, or a Titian.”10 The same recognition, and the deeper concern for the creative character of the normal use of language, was soon to become a core element of Cartesian science-philosophy, in fact a primary criterion for the existence of mind as a separate substance.

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The editors of the MIT Invitation to Cognitive Science in which he published these conclusions found them persuasive, as I do, though his analysis, largely ignored, has not impeded the growth of a huge literature of what Lewontin calls “storytelling,” particularly in the case of language. The storytelling typically proceeds without even spelling out the essential nature of the phenotype, a prerequisite to any serious evolutionary inquiry. And it also typically constructs stories about communication, a different though perhaps more appealing topic, because one can at least imagine continuities and small changes in accord with conceptions of evolution that are conventional though dubious at best.

Why Information Grows: The Evolution of Order, From Atoms to Economies by Cesar Hidalgo

Ada Lovelace, Albert Einstein, Arthur Eddington, assortative mating, business cycle, Claude Shannon: information theory, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Douglas Hofstadter, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Ford Model T, frictionless, frictionless market, George Akerlof, Gödel, Escher, Bach, income inequality, income per capita, industrial cluster, information asymmetry, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, New Economic Geography, Norbert Wiener, p-value, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, price mechanism, Richard Florida, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, Skype, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, tacit knowledge, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, transaction costs, working-age population

Looking at industries in lieu of knowledge and knowhow is similar to what biologists do when looking at phenotypes (the physical and functional characteristics of an organism) as expressions of genotypes (the information embodied in an organism’s DNA). Genes, in their simplest definition, are the segments of DNA that code for proteins, while phenotypes are the physical and functional characteristics of organisms, such as the color of your hair or your susceptibility to hypertension. What I will try to do in this chapter is similar to what much of genetics is about, yet instead of trying to establish a connection between phenotypes and genes, I will try to find a connection between the knowledge and knowhow available in a location and the industries that are present in them.

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What I will try to do in this chapter is similar to what much of genetics is about, yet instead of trying to establish a connection between phenotypes and genes, I will try to find a connection between the knowledge and knowhow available in a location and the industries that are present in them. Phenotypes and genotypes are a useful analogy because they represent a pair of related entities in which one is more easily observable than the other—phenotypes are easier to observe than genes, and industries are easier to observe than knowledge or knowhow. This duality is useful because it implies that we can measure the most visible quantity as a proxy for the other. For instance, mapping the spatial distribution of the genes that cause a person to be tall is currently quite difficult.

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., 60–61 Economic diversification, product space and, 137–139 Economic growth, economic complexity and, 157–162, 180 Economic growth models, 146–148, 162 human capital and, 148–149 social capital and, 151 Economic order, growth of information and evolution of, xx–xxi Economics, idea of information and, xiv–xv Economic sociology, 111–118 transaction cost theory and, 117–118 Economic value balance of imagination and, 55, 58–59, 60 context of product and, 63–64 Economy computational capacity of, 75, 180–181 describing, 145–146 diversified, 180 knowhow embedded in networks, 167–169 products and characterization of, 155–162 quantization principle and, 168 reproductive limitations of, 168 social networks and, 111–124 as system amplifying practical use of knowledge/knowhow, 68, 69, 70 as system of information growth, 8–9, 177–180 Ecosystems, reproductive limitations of, 168 Eddington, Arthur, 11 Edison, Thomas Alva, 11, 59, 69 Eigen, Manfred, 18 Einstein, Albert, 25, 28, 40, 90 Electricity, practical uses of, 59–60, 69 Energy creation of objects and, 43, 44, 181 information and, 175, 177 information processing and, 43 Engineers, information and, xiv English, as “hub” language, 101 Entropy, 11 Boltzmann and, 14, 15–17 computational ability of matter and, 177 information and, ix, xx, 14–16, 176 information-rich anomalies and, 31 multiplicity-of-states definition, 16–24 second law of thermodynamics and, 27 Shannon and, 14–15, 17–18 solids and, 176, 177 statistical-physics definition, 16–17 steady-state of out-of-equilibrium systems minimizes, 32, 175 Entropy barrier, 40 Equilibrium, order emerging from out-of-equilibrium systems, 29–30 Ernst & Young, 113 Ethiopia, 161 Evolution coevolution of markets and standards, 100 of information and economic order, xix–xx of physical order, 175–181 Experiential learning, 79–80, 81 Exploitation narrative, developing countries and, 55, 58–59, 60 Export diversity, economic complexity and, 157–161, 180 Exports as crystallized imagination, 51–55 diversity of physical and human capital and, 154–156 geographic distribution of industries and, 131–134 knowledge and knowhow embodied in, 52–55 Export structure, product space and, 137–139 Facebook, 92 Familial societies, 115 Family networks formation of, 115–116 low-trust familial societies and, 121–123 trust and, 121–122 Faraday, Michael, 59, 60, 69 Fijitsu, 92 Firmbytes, 89, 107 Firm interactions, social networks and, 93 Firms networks of, 89, 92–93 size of, 89, 91 transaction cost theory of, 89–91, 93 Firm-to-firm links classification of, 94–95 collaborations or large projects and, 102–103 cost of, 91, 93, 94–95 sizes of, 93–94 Ford, Henry, 60, 88, 171 Fordlandia, 170–171 Ford Motor Company, 87–88, 89, 170–171 France, government role in economy, 122–123 Fruit exports, 155 Fukuyama, Francis, 109, 115, 116, 117, 121–122, 122–123, 179 Functions, order and, 63 Gaua Islanders, 170 GDP (gross domestic product), 146 GDP (gross domestic product) per capita, export diversity and, 157–161, 180 Gene analogy, 142 Genetic factors, ability to accumulate knowledge and, 84 Genotypes/phenotypes analogy, 130, 136 Geographic distribution of industries, 131–136 of knowledge and knowhow, 77, 80–81, 127–128 of production of complex vs. simpler products, 77, 83, 134–136 Germany, formation of large networks in, 115, 116 Getting a Job (Granovetter), 112–113 Gibbs, J. Willard, 28 Gorilla Glass screen, 92 Governance, social capital and, 151 Government bureaucratic burden and, 103 role in French economy, 122–123 Granovetter, Mark, 109, 111, 112–113, 114–115, 179 Graphical user interfaces, 120, 142 Guardiola, Josep “Pep,” 73–74 Guitar, augmentation of our capacities and, 66–67 Guns, Germs, and Steel (Diamond), 169–170 Haber, Fritz, 58 Hadza people, 117 Hanaman, Franjo, 59 Hartley, Ralph, xvii Hayek, Friedrich, xiv Health care sector, costs as overbureaucratized network, 104, 106 Heisenberg, Werner, 39 Helmholtz, Hermann von, 28 Hemingway, Ernest, 70 Herr, Hugh, 50–51, 61, 178 Hidalgo, Iris, 3–4 High-trust societies, 115, 120–121, 122, 123 Homophily, formation of social networks and, 114 Honduras, exports, 132 HP (Hewlett-Packard), 142 Human capital, 148–149, 152 export data and diversity of, 154–156 Humans augmentation of capacities, 66–67 computational capacity of matter and, 178, 179–180 as embodiment of knowledge and knowhow, 8 The Human Use of Human Beings (Wiener), 70–71 IBM, 95 Ideas, knowledge/knowhow vs., 61–62 Imagination, crystallized.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst by Robert M. Sapolsky

autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, biofilm, blood diamond, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Brownian motion, car-free, classic study, clean water, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, corporate personhood, corporate social responsibility, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, domesticated silver fox, double helix, Drosophila, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Flynn Effect, framing effect, fudge factor, George Santayana, global pandemic, Golden arches theory, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, intentional community, John von Neumann, Loma Prieta earthquake, long peace, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Mahatma Gandhi, meta-analysis, microaggression, mirror neurons, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, nocebo, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, publication bias, RAND corporation, risk tolerance, Rosa Parks, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, social contagion, social distancing, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, transatlantic slave trade, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, trolley problem, twin studies, ultimatum game, Walter Mischel, wikimedia commons, zero-sum game, zoonotic diseases

Genotype Versus Phenotype, and the Most Meaningful Level of Selection To appreciate this, let’s contrast genotype and phenotype. Genotype = someone’s genetic makeup. Phenotype = the traits observable to the outside world produced by that genotype.* Suppose there’s a gene that influences whether your eyebrows come in two separate halves or form a continuous unibrow. You’ve noted that unibrow prevalence is decreasing in a population. Which is the more important level for understanding why—the gene variant or the eyebrow phenotype? We know after chapter 8 that genotype and phenotype are not synonymous, because of gene/environment interactions.

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Maybe a subset of the population belongs to a religion where you must cover your eyebrows when around the opposite sex, and thus eyebrow phenotype is untouched by sexual selection. You’re a grad student researching unibrow decline, and you must choose whether to study things at the genotypic or phenotypic level. Genotypic: sequencing eyebrow gene variants, trying to understand their regulation. Phenotypic: examining, say, eyebrow appearance and mate choice, or whether unibrows absorb more heat from sunlight, thereby damaging the frontal cortex, producing inappropriate social behavior and decreased reproductive success. This was the debate—is evolution best understood by focusing on genotype or phenotype? The most visible proponent of the gene-centered view has long been Dawkins, with his iconic “selfish gene” meme—it is the gene that is passed to the next generation, the thing whose variants spread or decline over time.

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Amid some evidence for single-gene selection (an obscure phenomenon called intragenomic conflict, which we won’t go into), most people who vote for the importance of gene(s) over phenotype view single-gene selfishness as a bit of a sideshow and vote for the genome level of selection being most important. Meanwhile, there’s the view that phenotype trumps genotype, something championed by Ernst Mayr, Stephen Jay Gould, and others. The core of their argument is that it’s phenotypes rather than genotypes that are selected for. As Gould wrote, “No matter how much power Dawkins wishes to assign to genes, there is one thing he cannot give them—direct visibility to natural selection.”

The Blind Watchmaker; Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design by Richard Dawkins

Boeing 747, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, lateral thinking, Menlo Park, pattern recognition, phenotype, random walk, silicon-based life, Steven Pinker, the long tail

It is trivially easy to select for a particular genetic formula, so long as you can read the genes of all the animals. But natural selection doesn’t choose genes directly, it chooses the effects that genes have on bodies, technically called phenotypic effects. The human eye is good at choosing phenotypic effects, as is shown by the numerous breeds of dogs, cattle and pigeons, and also, if I may say so, as is shown by Figure 5. To make the computer choose phenotypic effects directly, we should have to write a very sophisticated pattern-recognition program. Pattern-recognizing programs exist. They are used to read print and even handwriting. But they are difficult, ‘state of the art’ programs, needing very large and fast computers.

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These diverging processes are best thought of as locally autonomous in the manner of the ‘recursive’ procedure of Chapter 3, rather than as coordinated in some grand central design. ‘Action’, in the sense used in this chapter, is what a geneticist is talking about when he mentions the ‘phenotypic effect’ of a gene. DNA has effects upon bodies, upon eye colour, hair crinkliness, strength of aggressive behaviour and thousands of other attributes, all of which are called phenotypic effects. DNA exerts these effects initially locally, after being read by RNA and translated into protein chains, which then affect cell shape and behaviour. This is one of the two ways in which the information in the pattern of DNA can be read out.

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In 1995 he became the first Charles Simonyi Professor of the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford University. Richard Dawkins’s first book, The Selfish Gene (1976; second edition, 1989), became an immediate international bestseller and was translated into all the major languages. Its sequel, The Extended Phenotype, followed in 1982. His other bestsellers include The Blind Watchmaker (1986; Penguin, 1988), River Out of Eden (1995), Climbing Mount Improbable (1996; Penguin, 1997), Unweaving the Rainbow (Penguin, 1999) and The Ancestor’s Tale (2004). Richard Dawkins won both the Royal Society of Literature Award and the Los Angeles Times Literary Prize in 1987 for The Blind Watchmaker.

A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy by Joel Mokyr

Andrei Shleifer, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, business cycle, classic study, clockwork universe, cognitive dissonance, Copley Medal, creative destruction, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, Deng Xiaoping, Edmond Halley, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, flying shuttle, framing effect, germ theory of disease, Haber-Bosch Process, Herbert Marcuse, hindsight bias, income inequality, information asymmetry, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, John Harrison: Longitude, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land tenure, law of one price, Menlo Park, moveable type in China, new economy, phenotype, price stability, principal–agent problem, rent-seeking, Republic of Letters, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, seminal paper, South Sea Bubble, statistical model, survivorship bias, tacit knowledge, the market place, the strength of weak ties, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, ultimatum game, World Values Survey, Wunderkammern

Below I list some of the main advantages of an evolutionary approach to the history of culture.9 First, evolutionary systems are characterized by a fundamental duality of information and action, of genotype and phenotype. Distinctions between genotype and phenotype are hazardous to extend to cultural history, but all the same something can be learned from them. Culture is about matters of the mind; behavior and actions are the observable outcomes of preferences and knowledge (Mesoudi et al., 2013). But, as already noted, the mapping from beliefs to behavior is no simpler than that from genes to phenotypes; at best there are loose statistical associations masking the interactions of many variables.10 One reason is that beliefs, much like other genotypical processes, affect “adjacent” beliefs.

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Evolutionary models are larger than Richard Dawkins, even larger than Charles Darwin (Hodgson and Knudsen, 2010). Above all, they involve selection, but the selection here is not the natural selection that occurs through population dynamics but the conscious choices made by individuals. Every person forms a unique cultural phenotype much like every person forms a unique biological genotype, but how is this phenotype formed? Cultural evolution sees this as essentially a quasi-Lamarckian process, in which individuals acquire cultural characteristics through learning and imitation during their lifetimes and pass these on to others. They choose their cultural elements (or stick to the default, which are the beliefs and preferences they acquire from their parents during socialization).

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Much like genes, these traits are largely shared by people of the same culture; a single individual cannot have a cultural trait that is not shared by others, but each individual is unique in that it is highly unlikely that two people share precisely the same combination of cultural elements. There is no puzzle here: by analogy, all individuals have somewhat different genotypes (identical twins excluded) yet they share the vast bulk of their genes with other people and even with other mammals that have quite different phenotypes. Furthermore, this definition stresses that culture involves social learning, so that one’s beliefs, values, and knowledge are not built-up from scratch for each individual but are acquired from others. The key concepts of attitude and aptitude are contained in the larger category of culture, and they will remain at the center of the discussion.

Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories From the Frontline by Steven K. Kapp

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, book value, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, demand response, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, epigenetics, feminist movement, glass ceiling, Internet Archive, Jeremy Corbyn, medical malpractice, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, neurotypical, New Journalism, pattern recognition, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, slashdot, theory of mind, twin studies, universal basic income, Wayback Machine

‘Us’ and ‘them’: The limits and possibilities of a ‘politics of neurodiversity’ in neoliberal times. Disability & Society, 29 (7), 1117–1129. 5. Bailey, A., & Parr, J. (2003). Implications of the broader phenotype for concepts of autism. In G. R. Bock & J. A. Goode (Eds.), Autism: Neural basis and treatment possibilities (Vol. 251 of Novartis Foundation Symposia). Chichester, UK: Wiley. 6. Couteur, A., Bailey, A., Goode, S., Pickles, A., Robertson, S., Gottesman, I., et al. (1996). A broader phenotype of autism: The clinical spectrum in twins. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 37 (7), 785–801. 7. Posserud, M.-B., Lundervold, A. J., & Gillberg, C. (2006).

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See vaccines, and autism Autism Acceptance Day/Autism Acceptance Month 12 Autism Act (2009) (UK) 15 autism advocacy 11, 14, 24, 98, 157, 306, 308 and Autism Speaks, 221, 228, 230 AutismAndRace.com 250 autism-as-tragedy paradigm 26–27, 28, 30, 33, 34, 91, 229 Autism Awareness Day 239 autism diagnosis 23, 90, 167–189, 263, 296 Autism Dividend, The 282 “autism epidemic” 92, 94, 223, 238 Autism Every Day 95, 130, 148 Autism Hub 97, 126, 129–131 Autism in Adulthood 140 Index Autism/Neurodiversity Manifesto 3, 15, 255–274 autism policy 221 autism quackery 156 autism research 151, 224, 229, 311, 312 and dehumanization, 73 ethical concerns with, 7 participatory, 13, 133, 139 problematic, 135 autism rights v, 1, 2, 8, 14, 305, 308 Autism Society of America 12, 83, 95, 180 Autism Speaks 130, 131, 221–231, 278, 279 autism spectrum 9, 169, 170, 180, 185, 248, 298 autism therapy ix, 6, 60 autism-vaccine disinformation 158 autism-vaccine litigation 96 Autistica 277–281 autistic activism 46, 75, 116, 131, 134–141, 307 autistic culture 1, 35–37 “Autistic Distinction, The” 92–93 Autistic Genocide Clock v, 13, 123–131, 307 autistic identity 134, 158, 201, 306 Autistic Passing Project 174 Autistic Pride Day 12 Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) 9, 130–131, 136, 148–150, 158, 231 DSM-5 lobbying/recommendations by, 167–189, 309 autistic space 4, 13, 35, 111–114, 117, 118, 120, 121 321 autistic spectrum (InLv), independent living on the 41–48, 109, 110 Autistics Speaking Day 12 “autistic superiority” 73, 289 autistics.org 12, 65–75, 134, 295, 307 autistic traits 26, 70, 91, 120, 126, 288, 296 and DSM-5, 172, 176, 185, 187, 189 autoethnography 216 autonomy 2, 8, 58, 198, 206, 246, 277, 305, 313 Autonomy (journal) 14, 211–219, 307 Autreat 12, 13, 24, 30, 35, 36, 48, 97, 216, 310 and Autscape, 109, 110, 112–114 Autscape 13, 48, 109–121, 282, 292, 295, 307, 310 aversives 200, 203, 205, 206 “awareness” 83, 198, 238 AWN (Autistic Women and NonBinary Network) 13, 147–154, 157 B Baggs, Mel 57, 98, 158, 198, 295, 298 Bartak, Lawrence 27 BBS (bulletin board systems) 41, 43, 44 behaviorism 58, 175, 195–196, 198, 279 Berkowitz, Lori 151, 246 Bettelheim, Bruno 68, 68n2 biology 3, 5, 46, 225, 228, 288, 297 bio-medicalization 296 322 Index biomedical model, Western 8 Birmingham, University of 57, 60, 215, 218, 280 blogging 129, 134, 161, 201, 258–260 Blume, Harvey 45, 47, 90 Booth, Janine 268–270, 274 Bovell, Virginia 58, 277 Bowen, Paul 59, 60 Breakstone, Savannah Logsdon 150, 151 Bridging the Gaps 31, 32 broad autism phenotype/broader autistic phenotype 91, 288 broader autism community vii, 15, 311 Brook, Kabie 283, 284 Brown, Lydia X.Z. 243, 310 bullying 67, 69, 70, 119, 313 Burns, Charles 110 “butterfly effect” 268–269 C CAFETY (Community Alliance for the Ethical Treatment of Youth) 202 Cal (Cal Montgomery) 65, 73, 78, 83, 198, 199, 295, 310 CARD (Center for Autism and Related Disorders) ix caregivers/caregiving 6, 311, 312 Carley, Michael John 170, 181 Carlock, William 26 CAS (Critical Autism Studies) 9, 211, 219, 307 catatonia 42, 47, 52, 55 causation, of autism 25, 26, 95, 149, 155, 238, 312 environmental, 3, 6, 8, 96 CBPR (Community Based Participatory Research) 134–137, 140 “challenging behaviors” 52 chemical restraints 237, 307 chronic illnesses 3 civil rights 41, 126, 127, 129, 134, 136, 234 civil rights movements 10, 66, 72, 147, 152 class 3, 5, 67, 167, 171, 187, 197 clinical practice 183, 189 Clinton, Hillary 237–239, 306 cognitive abilities/cognitive capabilities 185, 309, 313 cognitive demands 172, 178 cognitive differences 29, 92, 93, 99, 309 cognitive impacts 172, 178 cognitive profiles 309 cognitive variety 29, 92, 93, 99, 309 Colley, Mary 214 communication 3, 11, 26, 61, 98.

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Dad was an analytical thinker with minimal tolerance for his own frustration or others’ emotionality; he was practical, brusque, and disinclined to social niceties. (One especially memorable phone call began in mid-sentence, as if I were mid-conversation with him a continent away.) I gradually recognized that I, too, lay somewhere along the banks of the “broader autistic phenotype”: intense focus; bluntness; anxiety and occasional sensory overload; fondness for collecting, organizing, and diving deeply into subjects that interest me. Why had nearly a decade passed before Dave and I figured out that our youngest child was on the spectrum? Perhaps because he was not so different from his grandfather, or from me.

Never Bet Against Occam: Mast Cell Activation Disease and the Modern Epidemics of Chronic Illness and Medical Complexity by Lawrence B. Afrin M. D., Kendra Neilsen Myles, Kristi Posival

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, epigenetics, Helicobacter pylori, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, megacity, microbiome, mouse model, obamacare, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, pre–internet, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell

The curious thing about sickle cell anemia, though, is that even though every sickle cell anemia patient has exactly the same beta globin mutation, roughly 15% of such patients have a really rough course (a “poor phenotype”) of the disease, while the other 85% or so have a much easier time (though certainly no picnic), implying that there must be something else going on in the 15% that makes their course so much worse. A few years ago I began realizing that most poor-phenotype sickle cell anemia patients have symptoms that are much easier for MCAS to explain than sickle cell anemia, and when I tested them for MCAS, I found it in most of them, and I also began finding that treating such MCAS would sometimes enable a poor-phenotype sickle cell anemia patient to “transform” into a good-phenotype sickle cell anemia patient.

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On the other hand, inflammation clearly worsens not only the vaso-occlusive crises themselves but also the risk for development of such crises, and it’s clear that some SCA patients are chronically more inflamed than others and thus have chronically worse courses of the disease – patients I will call “the poor-phenotype sicklers.” Inflammation is an awfully complex phenomenon, though, and we remain just as far from a complete understanding of why some SCA patients are chronically inflamed as we do for non-SCA patients. Regardless of why they are more inflamed, though, poor-phenotype sicklers on average clearly suffer not only more frequent and severe crises but also incur more frequently and severely the complications of SCA beyond vaso-occlusive crises, a few examples of which are strokes and other blood clots, a type of respiratory failure called acute chest syndrome, and kidney failure.

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As mentioned earlier in this book, soon after I began recognizing MCAS in many of my chronically ill patients whose known diagnoses didn’t account for many of their symptoms, I began seeing much the same pattern in most of the poor-phenotype sicklers already under my care. Wondering if MCAS might be one significant source of inflammation in them which might be controllable to the point of turning them into good-phenotype sicklers, I began looking for MCAS in them, and the more I looked for it, the more I found it, and the more I found it, the more I treated it, and the more I treated it, the better they got. I reported my findings in 32 such patients in an article, which the American Journal of the Medical Sciences was kind enough to publish in 2014.

Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World by Paul Stamets

clean water, Colonization of Mars, dark matter, Exxon Valdez, invention of gunpowder, Louis Pasteur, phenotype, precautionary principle

Once established, the mycelium may remain resident for decades. The forms of spawn used in the spored oil, plug, rope and sawdust all pivot around a predominant phenotype (a single individual) while the spores in the chain-saw oil provide for alternative phenotypes originating from the same mother mushroom. Having these additional phenotypes improves the adaptability of the species entering into the stump’s complex microbial universe. Which phenotype dominates is influenced by environmental factors. In the process called anastomosis or “same-self fusion,” the mycelium seeks itself and fuses with compatible substrains, and spores and mycelium marry into a single organism.

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This variation in forms shows how mutable the phenotype can be. I most commonly find black morels in fire pits, and what may be sister species growing amongst landscaping bark, in gardens, near construction sites, and beneath fir trees. Morels growing in these varied habitats all have black ridges, although I do not know if they are different species. If morel taxonomists were to cultivate morels and fruit them, they would likely be more lenient in their efforts to strictly separate these species by morphology or habitats. I have long been curious about the differences in DNA that are expressed when one phenotype is elicited from the background habitat versus another.

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If you are creating your own cultures, it is essential that you use mushrooms that are fresh. If fresh mushrooms are not available, you can purchase cultures (spawn) or spores from commercial sources. What are the differences between cultures created from spores and those created from tissue? Each mating of 2 spores expresses but one of several possible phenotypes from the genome of the contributing mushrooms. In contrast, using a piece of living tissue from the mushroom—cloning—captures the exact genetic composition of the contributing mushroom. Cloning usually requires knowledge of sterile tissue culture technique and a clean room laboratory. (For more information on these techniques, refer to the books listed in the paragraph below.)

The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

Albert Einstein, anthropic principle, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bletchley Park, Boeing 747, Brownian motion, cosmological principle, David Attenborough, Desert Island Discs, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, invisible hand, John von Neumann, Jon Ronson, luminiferous ether, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, placebo effect, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Schrödinger's Cat, scientific worldview, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Thorstein Veblen, trickle-down economics, unbiased observer

The second follows from the theory that I advocated in The Extended Phenotype: the individual you are watching may be working under the manipulative influence of genes in another individual, perhaps a parasite. Dan Dennett reminds us that the common cold is universal to all human peoples in much the same way as religion is, yet we would not want to suggest that colds benefit us. Plenty of examples are known of animals manipulated into behaving in such a way as to benefit the transmission of a parasite to its next host. I encapsulated the point in my ‘central theorem of the extended phenotype’: ‘An animal’s behaviour tends to maximize the survival of the genes “for” that behaviour, whether or not those genes happen to be in the body of the particular animal performing it.’

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Not by direct molecule-to-molecule combat but by proxy. The proxies are their ‘phenotypic traits’ – things like leg length or fur colour: manifestations of genes fleshed out as anatomy, physiology, biochemistry or behaviour. A gene’s fate is normally bound up with the bodies in which it successively sits. To the extent that it influences those bodies, it affects its own chances of surviving in the gene pool. As the generations go by, genes increase or decrease in frequency in the gene pool by virtue of their phenotypic proxies. Might the same be true of memes? One respect in which they are not like genes is that there is nothing obviously corresponding to chromosomes or loci or alleles or sexual recombination.

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If its merciless rationalism doesn’t enrage you at some point, you probably aren’t alive.” —Julian Barnes, author of Arthur and George “A magnificent book, lucid and wise, truly magisterial.” —Ian McEwan, author of Atonement Books by Richard Dawkins THE SELFISH GENE THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE THE BLIND WATCHMAKER RIVER OUT OF EDEN CLIMBING MOUNT IMPROBABLE UNWEAVING THE RAINBOW A DEVIL’S CHAPLAIN THE ANCESTOR’S TALE THE GOD DELUSION Richard Dawkins THE GOD DELUSION A MARINER BOOK HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY Boston • New York Copyright © 2006 by Richard Dawkins Preface © 2008 by Richard Dawkins ALL RIGHTS RESERVED First published in Great Britain by Bantam Press, a division of Transworld Publishers, 2006 For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

Information: A Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, carbon footprint, Claude Shannon: information theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, digital divide, disinformation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, George Akerlof, Gordon Gekko, Gregor Mendel, industrial robot, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Internet of things, invention of writing, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Laplace demon, machine translation, moral hazard, Nash equilibrium, Nelson Mandela, Norbert Wiener, Pareto efficiency, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, prisoner's dilemma, RAND corporation, RFID, Thomas Bayes, Turing machine, Vilfredo Pareto

Genetic information Genetics is the branch of biology that studies the structures and processes involved in the heredity and variation of the genetic material and observable traits (phenotypes) of living organisms. Heredity and variations have been exploited by humanity since antiquity, for example to breed animals. But it was only in the 19th century that Gregor Mendel (1822-1884), the founder of genetics, showed that phenotypes are passed on, from one generation to the next, through what were later called genes. In 1944, in a brilliant book based on a series of lectures, entitled What Is Life?, the physics Nobel laureate Erwin Schrodinger (1887-1961) outlined the idea of how genetic information might be stored.

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In the precise sense in which one may speak of semantic information, genetic information can hardly count as an instance of it. It simply lacks all its typical features, including meaningfulness, intentionality, aboutness, and veridicality. DNA contains the genetic code, precisely in the sense that it physically contains the genes which code for the development of the phenotypes. So DNA does contain genetic information, like a CD may contain some software. But the genetic code or, better, the genes, are the information itself. Genes do not send information, in the sense in which a radio sends a signal. They work more or less successfully and, like a recipe for a cake, may only partly guarantee the end result, since the environment plays a crucial role.

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Biological information, in the predicative sense of the world, is procedural: it is information for something, not about something. Genetic information can now be placed on our map (see Figure 15). 15. Genetic information A final comment before switching to neural information. Of course, genes play a crucial role in explaining not only the development of individual organisms but also the inheritance of phenotypes across generations. Therefore, informational approaches have been adopted both in genetics and in evolutionary biology and even at the higher level of biological anthropology. Memes (alleged units or elements of cultural ideas, symbols, or practices), for example, have been postulated as cultural analogues to genes, which are transmitted from one mind to another through communication and imitable phenomena, self-replicating and responding to selective pressures.

The Impact of Early Life Trauma on Health and Disease by Lanius, Ruth A.; Vermetten, Eric; Pain, Clare

autism spectrum disorder, classic study, cognitive load, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, delayed gratification, epigenetics, false memory syndrome, Helicobacter pylori, impulse control, intermodal, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, p-value, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, twin studies, yellow journalism

Taken together, these findings suggest that parental withdrawal may be particularly problematic for those vulnerable to borderline personality disorder from a point early in development. 51 Section 1: Impact on health and disease “Maternal buffering”:€does quality of early care moderate the expression of child genetic predisposition? 52 Inadequate early care is an important risk factor in human development for multiple later psychopathologies. Results from animal models are now supporting the concept of phenotypic plasticity, where offspring phenotypes are seen to vary as a function of environmental context, despite similar genotypes [55]. Studies from Meaney and colleagues have repeatedly demonstrated that maternal care behaviors in rats, such as pup licking and grooming, foster enduring alterations of offspring gene expression [43,56].

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One could argue that the heritability estimate of phenylketonuria is 100%, since individuals who are carrying two defective copies of the gene are bound to express the phenotype (autosomal recessive heritance pattern). However, if the individual’s diet is devoid of phenylalanine, then the mutation will have no effect in practice. In this case, both the genetic vulnerability (mutation) and the environmental factor (phenylalanine) are required for the full expression of the phenotype. Unfortunately, the field of molecular genetics has only recently begun to investigate gene–environment interactions as they pertain to psychiatric disorders.

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Our understanding of the connection between emotional trauma in childhood and the pathways to biomedical and psychopathology in adulthood is still being formed as neuroscientists begin to describe the changes that take place on the molecular level as a result of events or ongoing states of life that occurred hours, months or decades earlier. xiii Foreword The editors have paid attention to all parts of our enquiry into the significance of the earliest years of human development:€to the roles of abuse and attachment, to genetics and to the epigenetic effects of parenting and other experiences of early life that lead to phenotypic plasticity, to the distinctly partial process of resiliency, and to diagnosis and treatment. The chapter authors, a mix of the internationally distinguished and those on a clearly rising trajectory, provide a blend of clinical observation and highly specific technical information in this bold attempt to bring together what is becoming known by clinical study and by sophisticated technical approaches such as functional imaging.

Food Allergy: Adverse Reactions to Foods and Food Additives by Dean D. Metcalfe

active measures, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, classic study, confounding variable, epigenetics, Helicobacter pylori, hygiene hypothesis, impulse control, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mouse model, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Recombinant DNA, selection bias, statistical model, stem cell, twin studies, two and twenty

Other groups have shown the reactions were IgE mediated through prick skin tests (PSTs)[11–15,19, 25–32], leukocyte histamine release test [29], radioallergosorbent testing (RAST) [12,27,28,30–32], and immunoblotting for specific IgE [11–15]. Reactions have been reported with two common predominating phenotypes, food hypersensitivity and occupational respiratory disease. In the occupational respiratory disease phenotype, these cases involve predominately males with no atopic background. In the food hypersensitivity phenotype, all case reports have involved females, half of whom were atopic. Two of these females also showed occupational disease features, and many have described prior episodes of itching and burning with application of makeup, suspicious for contact reactions [12].

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However, TCRγδ⫹ CD8⫺CD4⫺ cells may occur as the majority of intra-epithelial lymphocytes, which suggests that a cytokine imbalance leads to the disease phenotype [144]. CD is primarily Th1 biased, whereas cow’s milk-protein allergy in individuals with an atopic predisposition appears to be predominantly Th2 biased. This is evidenced by a high production of IL-4, IL-5, and IL-13 and a low production of IFN-γ [145,146]. However, non-atopic individuals may exhibit a Th0-like cytokine phenotype [147]. A recent study has demonstrated differences in an immune activation profile between individuals with non-IgE-mediated cow’s milk allergy and CD.

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Lake hypothesized that food protein-induced proctocolitis may be a milder form of FPIES based on the fact that in FPIES, the maximal inflammatory response also involves the rectum [26]. Hence, proctocolitis in formula-fed infants would represent the mildest phenotype, whereas the protective effects of the breast milk such as presence of IgA antibodies and partially processed food proteins would prevent the expression of the full, more severe clinical phenotype in the breast-fed infants. Perhaps IgA or other immunologically active components of breast milk bind with the food allergens and release them in the rectum following cleavage by microbial IgA proteases or via other mechanisms [26].

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds by Daniel C. Dennett

Ada Lovelace, adjacent possible, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, AlphaGo, Andrew Wiles, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Build a better mousetrap, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, CRISPR, deep learning, disinformation, double entry bookkeeping, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Elon Musk, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fermat's Last Theorem, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Higgs boson, information asymmetry, information retrieval, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, iterative process, John von Neumann, language acquisition, megaproject, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Necker cube, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuart Kauffman, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Y2K

People—real or mythical—with truly “photographic memories” are suffering from a debilitating pathology, burdening their heads with worse than useless information.28 Evolution by natural selection churns away, automatically extracting tiny amounts (not “bits”) of information from the interactions between phenotypes (whole, equipped organisms) and their surrounding environments. It does this by automatically letting the better phenotypes reproduce their genes more frequently than the less favored.29 Over time, designs are “discovered” and refined, thanks to these encounters with information. R&D happens, designs are improved because they all have to “pay for themselves” in differential reproduction, and Darwinian lineages “learn” new tricks by adjusting their form.

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Richard Gregory, whose reflections on intelligence and equipment inspired me to name Gregorian creatures after him, emphasized that it not only took intelligence to use a pair of scissors, the pair of scissors enhanced the “intelligence” of users by giving them a large increase in available competence. These tools, like the hermit crab’s shell, the bird’s nest, the beaver’s dam, are acquired design improvements, but they are not part of our extended phenotypes (Dawkins 1982, 2004b); the general talent to recognize such things and put them to good use is the phenotypic feature that is transmitted by our genes. I sometimes suggest to my students that evolution by natural selection is nothing but “universal plagiarism”: if it’s of use to you, copy it, and use it. All the R&D that went into configuring whatever it is that you copy is now part of your legacy; you’ve added to your wealth without having to “reinvent the wheel.”

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Some day in the future we may find that there is a natural interpretation of transmission in the nervous system that yields a measure of bandwidth or storage capacity, in bits, of an encoding of whatever is being transmitted, processed, and stored, but until then the concept of information we use in cognitive science is semantic information, that is, information identified as being about something specific: faces, or places, or glucose, for instance. In other words, cognitive scientists today are roughly in the position that evolutionary theorists and geneticists were in before the analysis of the structure of DNA: they knew that information about phenotypic features—shapes of bodily parts, behaviors, and the like—was somehow being transmitted down through the generations (via “genes,” whatever they were), but they didn’t have the ACGT code of the double helix to provide them with a Shannon measure of how much information could be passed from parent to offspring as genetic inheritance.

The Ape That Understood the Universe: How the Mind and Culture Evolve by Steve Stewart-Williams

Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, carbon-based life, David Attenborough, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial independence, Garrett Hardin, gender pay gap, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, moral panic, out of africa, Paul Graham, Peter Pan Syndrome, phenotype, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies

The squirrels seem to be following a second rule as well: “Be nice to individuals who are similar to you.” This strategy is known as phenotype matching. (The phenotype is the collection of observable features of an organism, shaped by the interaction of its genes with the local environment.) Phenotype matching works because the more similar an individual is to oneself, the more probable it is that that individual is a relative. (Attentive readers will notice that early-life cohabitation and phenotypic similarity are also used as kinship cues in another context: incest avoidance. In a range of species, statistical indicators of relatedness appear to upregulate altruism but downregulate sexual attraction.

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First, like many other animals, humans seem to be especially willing to lend a helping hand to individuals they were raised with, or those they helped to raise. Second, also like many other animals, humans seem to be especially willing to help individuals who resemble them more closely than the average person in their social environment. To use the vernacular, early-life cohabitation and phenotypic similarity seem to function as kinship cues in our species, just as they do in many others. A responsiveness to these stimuli is plausibly a part of our species-typical mental architecture.29 It’s worth acknowledging that many of the research findings related to human kinship are utterly unsurprising.

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More precisely, lactose tolerance is found in people who trace their ancestry to these parts of the world, wherever they happen to live today. These people are the exceptions, though. Almost everyone else, including most Africans, Australian Aborigines, Asians, and Native Americans, have the typical mammalian phenotype: They can only digest lactose efficiently in infancy and early childhood. The fact that people of European ancestry tend to assume that most humans are lactose tolerant reflects a kind of ethnocentrism: a biological ethnocentrism. It also reflects historical myopia. Until recently, no one could digest lactose post-weaning.

Humankind: Solidarity With Nonhuman People by Timothy Morton

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, capitalist realism, David Brooks, Georg Cantor, gravity well, Ian Bogost, invisible hand, means of production, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, phenotype, planetary scale, Plato's cave, Richard Feynman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, trolley problem, Turing test, wage slave, zero-sum game

So, Milton was an “unproductive” worker because he didn’t produce any surplus value.8 Surplus value is produced when the capitalist obtains abstract homogeneous surplus labor time. Milton’s automated, nonhuman, algorithmic behavior—the poem just poured out of him—is valued, while the deliberate, “imaginative” entering into of a contract by a paid author is devalued. Paradise Lost was part of Milton the Silkworm’s “extended phenotype,” the expression of his artistic genome, just as a beaver’s genes don’t end at its whiskers but at her or his dam. This is an astounding reversal of the architect and the bee. It is the contract writer whose labor has been reduced upwards to an abstract, bland, homogeneous unit of labor time, so that it doesn’t much matter what the writer is expressing.

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As Marx says in the chapter on machines in Capital, capitalism produces the misery of the worker and the depletion of the soil: All progress in capitalist agriculture is a progress in the art, not only of robbing the worker, but of robbing the soil; all progress in increasing the fertility of the soil for a given time is a progress towards ruining the more long-lasting sources of that fertility … Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth—the soil and the worker.14 Soil is decomposing life forms and the bacteria whose extended phenotype these life forms are.15 Marx implies nonhumans, yet he erases them—it’s the fertility of the soil whose loss he laments, and this fertility is keyed to human metabolism; the soil is seen as it is accessed by humans. This is anthropocentric soil. But the good news is that the implication of nonhumans means that we might be able to un-erase them within Marxism; such an action seems highly unlikely within the realm of strict capitalist economic theory.

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Within a single page, Marx does go on to say that I differ from nonhumans in my ability to change how I participate in symbiosis, which provides the basis for the strong correlationist interpretation that unlike nonhumans, human species-being is the way in which humans create their own environment, an idea so caught in Hegelian antics that it forgets the simple fact of termites or beavers and any kind of “extended phenotype,” the fact that a spider’s genome includes not only spider legs but also spiders’ webs.21 Let’s continue exploring the phenomenology of the symbiotic real. Consider the Paris Spleen poems of Charles Baudelaire, poet-consumerist par excellence, bohemian inventor of the flâneur, or rather, the one who christened this quintessential, “Kantian” mode of consumption; the poet who originated the notion of ennui.

A World on the Wing: The Global Odyssey of Migratory Birds by Scott Weidensaul

Anthropocene, assortative mating, coronavirus, COVID-19, Elon Musk, Google Earth, jitney, long peace, low earth orbit, meta-analysis, microbiome, microcredit, off grid, phenotype, quantum entanglement, SpaceX Starlink, the scientific method

The ability of an organism to change in the face of different environmental conditions is one aspect of a grab bag of possible modifications to a plant’s or animal’s physical form, physiology, or behavior that biologists call phenotypic plasticity. This differs from evolutionary change, which is wholly genetic and passed down through generations; an organism’s phenotype is a combination of its genetic background (its genotype) and how the expression of that genotype is affected by its environment. So far, evidence for true climate-driven evolutionary change among migratory birds is sparse, and differentiating between evolution and phenotypic plasticity has been difficult—though the difference is important. Ornithologists assume that birds will evolve in response to climate change, but will they be able to do so quickly enough to ward off its worst impacts?

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Ornithologists assume that birds will evolve in response to climate change, but will they be able to do so quickly enough to ward off its worst impacts? Or will phenotypic changes stretch only so far, eventually snapping as climatic change accelerates? When scientists in Sweden observed great reed warblers returning from Africa six days earlier than they had two decades previously, was that evolution or plasticity? After a great many calculations, they concluded it was the latter—but admitted they could not be certain. However, researchers working with pied flycatchers in Germany were able to exactly replicate a classic experiment first carried out in 1981, in which chicks were raised in captivity and shielded from all external seasonal cues to determine the genetically based timing of migration.

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The ever-busy Theunis Piersma was part of a team that found a surprising climate-induced change in red knots that nest in the Russian Arctic, where—as in so much of the world—the seasons are running amok, with spring advancing half a day a year over three decades. In that time, red knots have begun to physically shrink; especially in years with early snowmelt, juvenile knots weigh less, and have shorter bills, legs, and wings. This could be evolutionary or it could be (and likely is) phenotypic plasticity, since knots that are missing the Arctic insect peak and are undernourished may not grow as well as they otherwise would. But this change has life-or-death consequences for the knots once they reach their wintering grounds on the mudflats of the west African coast. Those with typically long bills can more easily reach a larger, more abundant type of clam that lives well below the surface, but the stunted knots with their shorter bills are forced to subsist on smaller, rarer clams closer to the top, and on low-quality seagrass rhizomes.

Complexity: A Guided Tour by Melanie Mitchell

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Alfred Russel Wallace, algorithmic management, anti-communist, Arthur Eddington, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, cellular automata, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, complexity theory, computer age, conceptual framework, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, discrete time, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Garrett Hardin, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Henri Poincaré, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Conway, John von Neumann, Long Term Capital Management, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Network effects, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, Paul Erdős, peer-to-peer, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, Ray Kurzweil, reversible computing, scientific worldview, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine

After many bitter arguments between the early Darwinists and Mendelians, this false opposition was cleared up by the 1920s when it was discovered that, unlike the traits of Mendel’s pea plants, most traits in organisms are determined by many genes, each with several different alleles. The huge number of possible combinations of these many different alleles can result in seemingly continuous variation in an organism. Discrete variation in the genes of an organism can result in continuous-seeming variation in the organ-ism’s phenotype—the physical traits (e.g., height, skin color, etc.) resulting from these genes. Darwinism and Mendelism were finally recognized as being complementary, not opposed. One reason the early Darwinists and Mendelians disagreed so strongly is that, although both sides had experimental evidence supporting their position, neither side had the appropriate conceptual framework (i.e., multiple genes controlling traits) or mathematics to understand how their respective theories fit together.

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Soon after this, it was worked out how the code was translated by the cell into proteins, how DNA makes copies of itself, and how variation arises via copying errors, externally caused mutations, and sexual recombination. This was clearly a “tipping point” in genetics research. The science of genetics was on a roll, and hasn’t stopped rolling yet. The Mechanics of DNA The collection of all of an organism’s physical traits—its phenotype—comes about largely due to the character of and interactions between proteins in cells. Proteins are long chains of molecules called amino acids. Every cell in your body contains almost exactly the same complete DNA sequence, which is made up of a string of chemicals called nucleotides. Nucleotides contain chemicals called bases, which come in four varieties, called (for short) A, C, G, and T.

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The key, it turns out, is not these isolated genes, but the way different genes interact, just as has been found in real genetics. And just as in real genetics, it’s very difficult to figure out how these various interactions lead to the overall behavior or fitness. It makes more sense to look at the actual behavior of each strategy—its phenotype—rather than its genome. I wrote a graphics program to display Robby’s moves when using a given strategy, and spent some time watching the behavior of Robby when he used strategy M and when he used strategy G. Although the two strategies behave similarly in many situations, I found that strategy G employs two tricks that cause it to perform better than strategy M.

Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome by Nessa Carey

dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Downton Abbey, Drosophila, epigenetics, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kickstarter, mouse model, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs

Eur J Hum Genet. 2010 Nov;18(11):1196–201 23. Sahoo T, del Gaudio D, German JR, Shinawi M, Peters SU, Person RE, Garnica A, Cheung SW, Beaudet AL. Prader-Willi phenotype caused by paternal deficiency for the HBII-85 C/D box small nucleolar RNA cluster. Nat Genet. 2008 Jun;40(6):719–21 24. For a full description see http://omim.org/entry/180860 25. For a full description see http://omim.org/entry/130650 26. Data collated in Kotzot D. Maternal uniparental disomy 14 dissection of the phenotype with respect to rare autosomal recessively inherited traits, trisomy mosaicism, and genomic imprinting. Ann Genet. 2004 Jul-Sep;47(3):251–60 27.

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As the repeat length increases, the symptoms become more severe and are obvious at an earlier age. That’s why the disease gets worse as it passes down the generations, such as in the family that opened this chapter. It also became apparent that usually only mothers passed on the really big repeats, the ones that led to the severe congenital phenotype. This ongoing expansion of a repeated sequence of DNA was a very unusual mutation mechanism. But the identification of the expansion that causes myotonic dystrophy shone a light on something even more unusual. Knitting with DNA Until quite recently, mutations in gene sequences were thought to be important not because of the change in the DNA itself but because of their downstream consequences.

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So some amino acids can be coded for by different three-letter combinations. At one extreme, glycine is coded for by GGA, GGC, GGG and GGT(U). At the other, the amino acid methionine is only coded for by the combination AT(U)G. But if the amino acid sequence encoded by the mutated gene doesn’t change in Hutchinson-Gilford Progeria, what causes the dramatic phenotype in this condition? Look again at Figure 17.5. The two-base sequence at the beginning of each intervening junk region within a gene is GT. In the patients where the normal GGC changes to GGT, the amino acid region gains an inappropriate extra splice signal. In the context of all the other splicing signals in that genomic region, this inappropriately positioned GT acts strongly.

Artificial Whiteness by Yarden Katz

affirmative action, AI winter, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, autonomous vehicles, benefit corporation, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Californian Ideology, Cambridge Analytica, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, colonial rule, computer vision, conceptual framework, Danny Hillis, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, desegregation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, general purpose technology, gentrification, Hans Moravec, housing crisis, income inequality, information retrieval, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, phenotype, Philip Mirowski, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, rent control, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Seymour Hersh, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, talking drums, telemarketer, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks

As we will see throughout this book, it has been a tool in the arsenal of institutions predicated on white supremacy. But beyond that, AI also reproduced the shape of whiteness as an ideology. As an ideology, whiteness has always had a nebulous and shifting character. Who is “white,” when, where, and how is historically a contradictory and dynamic affair, one that cannot be reduced to a simple phenotypic matter of “white” versus “nonwhite.” Yet the shifting trajectory of whiteness as an ideology has been consistently steered by the aims of empire and capital. Whiteness has been shaped by the need to accumulate land, maintain the supply of unfree labor, and, in settler-colonialist societies, erase indigenous peoples.

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But marrying my grandmother, having three light-skinned daughters, establishing a small but respected shop in his town, and wearing his racism against more marginalized nonwhites on his sleeve all got him closer. At the very least, all these made his nonwhite identity recede into the background in some contexts (after all, it was being recognized that even Ashkenazi Jews from Poland can be quite dark, especially under the sun of the Levant). Yet, in another twist, my grandmother—despite her phenotype—was actually white of a lesser shade in the eyes of the European Ashkenazi Jews that formed the elite of her society. Though born in Palestine, she was a Sephardic Jew of Bulgarian origin; a lower rank by the settler-colonialist coordinate system connecting Jewishness and whiteness. I share this anecdote to say that who is “white,” when, where, and how, is an elastic affair.

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While the one-drop-of-blood rule made one “black” in the eyes of the law—as conducive to maintaining the supply of unfree labor—Native Americans often had to meet a more stringent criterion based on “blood quantum” in order to count as “Indian” for the U.S. government.26 This did not mean, of course, that Native Americans became fully “white” with respect to privilege and social standing, but rather that the settler-colonialist impulse to erase indigenous peoples, or violently assimilate them into white society, was the prevailing consideration—and that this was a distinct logic from that applied to enslaved Africans.27 These are some of the contingencies and contradictions that go into the making of whiteness. As Charles Mills has observed, racial categories are thus simultaneously “unreal,” in that they lack the solid grounding in phenotypic features such as light skin, and “real,” in that racial categories have “a massive effect on people’s psychology, culture, socioeconomic opportunities, life chances, civil rights.”28 The all too real consequences of whiteness come from its connection to concrete systems of power. From colonial America to the present, whiteness has been intertwined with capitalist conceptions of property inscribed into law.

The Origins of the British by Stephen Oppenheimer

active measures, agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Eratosthenes, gravity well, Gregor Mendel, it's over 9,000, mass immigration, Neolithic agricultural revolution, out of africa, phenotype, Recombinant DNA, the scientific method, trade route

The answer is simply that the map is based on blood group frequencies, not on blood group gene frequencies. Our expression of blood groups in the blood typing test depends on the genes we get – one from each parent (our genotype). Blood group A is dominant, which means that the result of our blood test (our phenotype) is group A, whether we get one or two A genes from our parents. Group O is recessive, which means that we must receive both our parental genes as O to have an O blood group phenotype. If one parent gives us an O and the other gives us an A, we will test as A. Therefore analyses of blood group frequency will automatically overstate A gene frequencies if this very basic fact is overlooked.

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These changes can lead to loss (or, alternatively, very high frequency) of certain alleles. The loss of certain alleles erodes genetic variability, and its effects are greatest in populations of small size. genotype The genetic make-up of an individual, as determined by the alleles present. In the example of blood groups, the blood group phenotype A may be the result of either AO genotype or AA genotype. Compare phenotype. glottochronology A technique in linguistics which uses vocabulary comparison (lexico-statistics) to estimate the time of divergence of two related languages by comparing the numbers of shared cognates. It is analogous to the use of radiocarbon dating in that it uses decay as a measurement of time, but has been widely rejected by linguists, owing to variation in the rate of lexical decay.

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P-celtic Alternative name for the Brythonic branch of the insular-celtic group of languages, so called because it uses a ‘P’ sound where Q-celtic languages, in the Goidelic branch, use a ‘Q’ (or hard ‘C’) sound. phenotype The expression of the genes present in an individual. This may be directly observable (eye colour) or apparent only with specific tests (blood group). The blood group A is an example of a phenotype with several possible underlying genotypes (AO and AA), since A is dominant and O recessive. Compare genotype. phylogeography The study of the patterns of genetic differentiation on a gene tree across landscapes.

Accelerando by Stross, Charles

book value, business cycle, call centre, carbon-based life, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, Conway's Game of Life, dark matter, disinformation, dumpster diving, Extropian, financial engineering, finite state, flag carrier, Flynn Effect, Future Shock, glass ceiling, gravity well, John von Neumann, junk bonds, Kickstarter, knapsack problem, Kuiper Belt, machine translation, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, market bubble, means of production, military-industrial complex, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neal Stephenson, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, packet switching, performance metric, phenotype, planetary scale, Pluto: dwarf planet, quantum entanglement, reversible computing, Richard Stallman, satellite internet, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skinner box, slashdot, South China Sea, stem cell, technological singularity, telepresence, The Chicago School, theory of mind, Turing complete, Turing machine, Turing test, upwardly mobile, Vernor Vinge, Von Neumann architecture, warehouse robotics, web of trust, Y2K, zero-sum game

Manfred spits some virtual cash at the brutal face of the cash register, and it unfetters the suitcase, unaware that Macx has paid a good bit more than seventy-five euros for the privilege of collecting this piece of baggage. Manfred bends down and faces the camera in its handle. "Manfred Macx," he says quietly. "Follow me." He feels the handle heat up as it imprints on his fingerprints, digital and phenotypic. Then he turns and walks out of the slave market, his new luggage rolling at his heels. A short train journey later, Manfred checks into a hotel in Milton Keynes. He watches the sun set from his bedroom window, an occlusion of concrete cows blocking the horizon. The room is functional in an overly naturalistic kind of way, rattan and force-grown hardwood and hemp rugs concealing the support systems and concrete walls behind.

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The metacortex – a distributed cloud of software agents that surrounds him in netspace, borrowing CPU cycles from convenient processors (such as his robot pet) – is as much a part of Manfred as the society of mind that occupies his skull; his thoughts migrate into it, spawning new agents to research new experiences, and at night, they return to roost and share their knowledge. While Manfred sleeps, he dreams of an alchemical marriage. She waits for him at the altar in a strapless black gown, the surgical instruments gleaming in her gloved hands. "This won't hurt a bit," she explains as she adjusts the straps. "I only want your genome – the extended phenotype can wait until … later." Blood-red lips, licked: a kiss of steel, then she presents the income tax bill. There's nothing accidental about this dream. As he experiences it, microelectrodes in his hypothalamus trigger sensitive neurons. Revulsion and shame flood him at the sight of her face, the sense of his vulnerability.

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Lots of hard problems have proven to be tractable. The planetary genome and proteome have been mapped so exhaustively that the biosciences are now focusing on the challenge of the phenome: Plotting the phase-space defined by the intersection of genes and biochemical structures, understanding how extended phenotypic traits are generated and contribute to evolutionary fitness. The biosphere has become surreal: small dragons have been sighted nesting in the Scottish highlands, and in the American midwest, raccoons have been caught programming microwave ovens. The computing power of the solar system is now around one thousand MIPS per gram, and is unlikely to increase in the near term – all but a fraction of one percent of the dumb matter is still locked up below the accessible planetary crusts, and the sapience/mass ratio has hit a glass ceiling that will only be broken when people, corporations, or other posthumans get around to dismantling the larger planets.

Psychopathy: An Introduction to Biological Findings and Their Implications by Andrea L. Glenn, Adrian Raine

dark triade / dark tetrad, epigenetics, longitudinal study, loss aversion, meta-analysis, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), statistical model, theory of mind, trolley problem, twin studies

Across large samples, statistical modeling techniques can determine the proportion of the variance in a particular trait or phenotype (in this case, psychopathy or a subcomponent of it) that is accounted for by genetic versus environmental factors. Genetic factors either can be additive or nonadditive. Additive means that genes summate to contribute to a phenotype. For example, hypothetically, alleles at five different locations may contribute to the determination of an individual’s height (the phenotype). An additive effect means that the individual’s height is the sum of the effect of each of these alleles on height.

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Nonadditive effects mean that genes are configured in a unique way to form the personality trait, rather than simply being the cumulative 22 << Genetics effect of several genes. This means that if just one gene is different, the personality trait may not exist. Nonadditive effects come in three types—dominance, epistasis, and emergensis. Dominance means that if one of two alleles is dominant, the phenotype will reflect the dominant allele, rather than a summation of the two alleles. For example, alleles for brown eyes tend to be dominant, whereas alleles for blue eyes are recessive. If an individual has one allele for brown eyes and one allele for blue eyes, the result is that the individual will have brown eyes, rather than a mix between brown and blue.

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If an individual has one allele for brown eyes and one allele for blue eyes, the result is that the individual will have brown eyes, rather than a mix between brown and blue. In the case of dominance, DZ twin correlations are expected to be about 25 percent of the MZ correlations. Epistatic and emergenic effects simply mean that multiple genes must interact or be configured in a specific way in order for the phenotype to be present. Because these configurations are so specific, these types of effects do not run in families and can be thought of as random; thus, the correlation between DZ twins is typically close to zero, whereas the effect will be present in MZ twins who share the exact same genes. Environmental effects can also be divided into two types—shared and nonshared.

The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger by Richard Wilkinson, Kate Pickett

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, basic income, Berlin Wall, classic study, clean water, Diane Coyle, epigenetics, experimental economics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, germ theory of disease, Gini coefficient, God and Mammon, impulse control, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, meta-analysis, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, moral panic, Murray Bookchin, offshore financial centre, phenotype, plutocrats, profit maximization, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, statistical model, The Chicago School, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, ultimatum game, upwardly mobile, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

A recent 12-year study of working-age men in the USA found that if they became unemployed, they gained weight.136 When their annual income dropped they gained, on average, 5.5 lbs. THE THRIFTY PHENOTYPE One additional idea that suggests a causal link between higher levels of income inequality in a society and higher body weights is known as the ‘thrifty phenotype’ hypothesis. Put simply, this theory suggests that when a pregnant woman is stressed, the development of her unborn child is modified to prepare it for life in a stressful environment. It isn’t yet clear whether stress hormones themselves do the damage, or whether stressed foetuses are less well nourished, or both things happen, but these ‘thrifty phenotype’ babies have a lower birthweight and a lower metabolic rate.

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In conditions of scarcity during our evolutionary past this adaptation would have been beneficial, but in our modern world, where stress during pregnancy is unlikely to be due to food shortages and babies are born into a world of plenty, it’s maladaptive. Babies with a thirfty phenotype in a world where food is plentiful are more prone to obesity, to diabetes and to cardiovascular disease. As this book shows, societies with higher levels of income inequality have higher levels of mistrust, illness, status insecurity, violence and other stressors, so the thrifty phenotype may well be contributing to the high prevalence of obesity in them. THE EQUALITY DIET It is clear that obesity and overweight are not problems confined to the poor.

The Hidden Half: How the World Conceals Its Secrets by Michael Blastland

air freight, Alfred Russel Wallace, banking crisis, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, central bank independence, cognitive bias, complexity theory, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, epigenetics, experimental subject, full employment, George Santayana, hindsight bias, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, nudge unit, oil shock, p-value, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, random walk, randomized controlled trial, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, selection bias, the map is not the territory, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, twin studies

It’s tempting to speculate that one crayfish – eventually the biggest – grabbed the first food, ate more, grew bigger, then threw its weight or energy around to take the lion’s share and grow bigger still, so an initial advantage was compounded. Except that they all had more than enough to eat, all the time; the researchers made sure of it. The genetic make-up of an individual is called the genotype. How it turns out to look and behave is the phenotype. The emergence of multiple, varied phenotypes from a single genotype in the same environment is one of the latest, greatest of nature’s curiosities to crave attention. The secret life of causes We’re left to wonder if the causes lie beyond discovery, maybe hidden in the minute detail of the marmorkrebs’ experience.

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I can also imagine a more fine-toothed classification of different types of cancer, for example, implying different treatments depending on which type we have. But ‘personalized’ in a general sense is a huge step beyond what we now know, or quite possibly can know. Even if we knew everyone’s exact genotype, we have to remember the marmorkrebs’ astonishing variation – from identical genotypes to radically different phenotypes – and rightly wonder how far knowing everyone’s personal genotype can take us in the prediction of what will happen to each person or how they will respond to treatment. My instincts – you can tell – are with the sceptics, and after waving a finger in the air of the argument I’d say that precision or personalized medicine is about one part promise to an equal part hype.

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., ‘Ecology: Parthenogenesis in an Outsider Crayfish’, Nature, vol. 421, 2003. 5 Frank Lyko, head of epigenetics at the German Cancer Research Center, in comments to Newsweek magazine, February 2018. 6 Unless there are more significant mutations which also cause marked differences, but you would not expect this to be an everyday, every-creature event. 7 G. Vogt et al., ‘Production of Different Phenotypes from the Same Genotype in the Same Environment by Developmental Variation’, Journal of Experimental Biology, vol. 211, 2008, pp. 510–523. 8 The paper is less cited than you would expect. Even Google scholar, which I’m reliably informed tends to overestimate, records 120 citations in 10 years – not nearly as often as it deserves.

Cognitive Gadgets: The Cultural Evolution of Thinking by Cecilia Heyes

Asperger Syndrome, behavioural economics, classic study, complexity theory, epigenetics, Higgs boson, intermodal, language acquisition, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, neurotypical, phenotype, social intelligence, the built environment, theory of mind, twin studies

Similarly, the still-thriving field of human behavioral ecology (Cronk, 1991; Laland and Brown, 2011) largely ignores the mind as it uses mathematical modeling to investigate whether distinctively human behaviors, especially foraging behaviors, are likely to be adaptive (to enhance reproductive fitness) and, if so, to be adaptations (to have evolved because they enhance reproductive fitness). Adopting a strategy that has been described as the “phenotypic gambit” (Grafen, 1984; Hoppitt and Laland, 2013) and “blackboxing” (Heyes, 2016a), human behavioral ecologists sometimes allude to the brain, but very rarely to the mind, and when they do say something about the mind, they usually reach for folk psychology. Consequently, although sociobiology and human behavioral ecology have provided valuable information about human evolution, I think evolutionary psychologists were right to point out, some twenty years ago, that it was high time the mind was taken more seriously.

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Like evolutionary psychology at its best, cultural evolutionary psychology takes this to be a question about the mind, drawing on cognitive science, rather than folk psychology, for information about how the mind works. Like cultural evolutionary theory, cultural evolutionary psychology embraces the evidence that human phenotypes are shaped not only by genetic inheritance and learning, but also by cultural evolution. However, unlike both of its conceptual ancestors, cultural evolutionary psychology finds evidence—in social cognitive neuroscience and a broad range of other fields—that the influence of cultural evolution is not confined to the grist of human thought.

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Current Biology, 22(21), 2059–2062. Fernald, A. (1991). Prosody in speech to children: Prelinguistic and linguistic functions. Annals of Child Development, 8, 43–80. Fernandes, H. B., Woodley, M. A., and te Nijenhuis, J. (2014). Differences in cognitive abilities among primates are concentrated on g: Phenotypic and phylogenetic comparisons with two meta-analytical databases. Intelligence, 46, 311–322. Ferrari, P. F., Rozzi, S., and Fogassi, L. (2005). Mirror neurons responding to observation of actions made with tools in monkey ventral premotor cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17(2), 212–226.

The Science of Language by Noam Chomsky

Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Alfred Russel Wallace, backpropagation, British Empire, Brownian motion, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, dark matter, Drosophila, epigenetics, finite state, Great Leap Forward, Howard Zinn, language acquisition, phenotype, public intellectual, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, theory of mind, trolley problem

For one thing, there is the fact that modification requires mutation, and mutation can only proceed within the constraints set by physics and chemistry, among other sciences: possible structures and modifications of structure are limited by the laws of nature. Various structural features of organisms, for example, cannot be explained by genetic instruction sets alone, nor can the way phenotypical development takes place; ‘epigenetic’ factors play a crucial role in the latter. Scaling of skeletal structure (the genome cannot be thought to provide a complete specification of the sizes of each bone in a specific organism) and symmetry (the fact that each rib on the right has a homologue on the left, each wing of a butterfly the same pattern as the other . . .) are two examples.

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Exploiting a connection to this view of learning is misguided strategy; one ends up defending something for which there is no warrant except that it appears to be all-encompassing. There is no modesty to this view – no recognition that selection's role is limited, if even that. Nothing is said about how evolution and phenotype development and growth must take place within the constraints set by physics, chemistry, biology, perhaps some form of information theory. There is no mention of the fact that many genes are conserved over species and clades. Epigenetic factors are ignored. ‘Happy accidents’ of the sort found in what Lewontin and Gould called “spandrels” are not mentioned.

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Chapter 6 Page 37, On parameters and canalization I discuss variation in languages and parameters’ role in it in Appendix VIII; parameters appear too several times in the main text. Principles are the ‘natural laws’ of the language faculty, universal across the human species. Canalization – the fact that development yields a robust and distinct phenotype despite differences in gene, environment, and ‘input’ – is discussed briefly in Appendix VIII too, and is taken up again in the text below. What might parameters have to do – if anything – with canalization? Using for simplicity's sake the headedness macroparameter, assume, as is reasonable, that the child's language faculty's initial state, UG (as specified in the genome), for whatever reason, allows for either option.

Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

1919 Motor Transport Corps convoy, Abraham Wald, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Benoit Mandelbrot, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, cloud computing, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, Danny Hillis, dark matter, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, fault tolerance, Fellow of the Royal Society, finite state, Ford Model T, Georg Cantor, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, housing crisis, IFF: identification friend or foe, indoor plumbing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, John von Neumann, machine readable, mandelbrot fractal, Menlo Park, Murray Gell-Mann, Neal Stephenson, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, packet switching, pattern recognition, Paul Erdős, Paul Samuelson, phenotype, planetary scale, RAND corporation, random walk, Richard Feynman, SETI@home, social graph, speech recognition, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, Turing complete, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture

28 Missing was the distinction between genotype (an organism’s coded genetic sequence) and phenotype (the physical expression of that sequence) that allows Darwinian selection to operate at levels above the genes themselves. In selecting for instructions at the level of phenotype rather than genotype, an evolutionary search is much more likely to lead to meaningful sequences, for the same reason that a meaningful sentence is far more likely to be constructed by selecting words out of a dictionary than by choosing letters out of a hat. To make the leap from genotype to phenotype, Barricelli concluded, “We must give the genes some material they may organize and may eventually use, preferably of a kind which has importance for their existence.”

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“This tendency to act on any thing which can have importance for survival is the key to the understanding of the formation of complex instruments and organs and the ultimate development of a whole body of somatic or non-genetic structures.”29 Translation from genotype to phenotype was required to establish a presence in our universe, if numerical organisms were to become more than laboratory curiosities, here one microsecond and gone the next. No matter how long you wait, numbers will never become organisms, just as nucleotides will never become proteins. But they may learn to code for them. Once the translation between genotype and phenotype is launched, evolution picks up speed—not only the evolution of the resulting organisms, but the evolution of the genetic language and translation system itself.

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In 1963, using the Atlas computer at Manchester University, at that time the most powerful computer in the world, this objective was achieved for a short time, but without further improvement, a limitation that Barricelli attributed to “the severe restrictions … concerning the number of instructions and machine time the symbioorganisms were allowed to use.”33 In contrast to the IAS experiments, in which the organisms consisted solely of genetic code, the Tac-Tix experiments led to “the formation of non-genetic numerical patterns characteristic for each symbioorganism. Such numerical patterns may present unlimited possibilities for developing structures and organs of any kind.” A numerical phenotype had taken form, interpreted as moves in a board game, via a limited alphabet of machine instructions to which the gene sequence was mapped, just as sequences of nucleotides code for an alphabet of amino acids in translating to proteins from DNA. “Perhaps the closest analogy to the protein molecule in our numeric symbioorganisms,” Barricelli speculated, “would be a subroutine which is part of the symbioorganism’s game strategy program, and whose instructions, stored in the machine memory, are specified by the numbers of which the symbioorganism is composed.”34 “Since computer time and memory still is a limiting factor, the non-genetic patterns of each numeric symbioorganism are constructed only when they are needed and are removed from the memory as soon as they have performed their task,” Barricelli explained.

Emergence by Steven Johnson

A Pattern Language, agricultural Revolution, AOL-Time Warner, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, Claude Shannon: information theory, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Douglas Hofstadter, edge city, epigenetics, game design, garden city movement, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, hypertext link, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kevin Kelly, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, mass immigration, Menlo Park, mirror neurons, Mitch Kapor, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, Norbert Wiener, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, pez dispenser, phenotype, Potemkin village, power law, price mechanism, profit motive, Ray Kurzweil, SimCity, slashdot, social intelligence, Socratic dialogue, stakhanovite, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, urban renewal, Vannevar Bush

Run through enough cycles, and you have a recipe for engineering masterworks like the human eye—without a bona fide engineer in sight. The genetic algorithm was an attempt to capture that process in silicon. Software already has a genotype and a phenotype, Holland recognized; there’s the code itself, and then there’s what the code actually does. What if you created a gene pool of different code combinations, then evaluated the success rate of the phenotypes, eliminating the least successful strands? Natural selection relies on a brilliantly simple, but somewhat tautological, criterion for evaluating success: your genes get to pass on to the next generation if you survive long enough to produce a next generation.

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Holland’s system revolved around a series of neat parallels between computer programs and earth’s life-forms. Each depends on a master code for its existence: the zeros and ones of computer programming, and the coiled strands of DNA lurking in all of our cells (usually called the genotype). Those two kinds of codes dictate some kind of higher-level form or behavior (the phenotype): growing red hair or multiplying two numbers together. With DNA-based organisms, natural selection works by creating a massive pool of genetic variation, then evaluating the success rate of the assorted behaviors unleashed by all those genes. Successful variations get passed down to the next generation, while unsuccessful ones disappear.

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New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Corbusier, Le. Towards a New Architecture. New York: Dover Publications, 1986. Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Dawkins, Richard. Climbing Mount Improbable. New York and London: W. W. Norton, 1996. ———. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982. ———. Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite for Wonder. London: Penguin Press, 1998. Dean, Katie. “Attention Kids: Play This Game.” Wired News. December 19, 2000. Dehaene, Stanislas, Michel Kerszberg, and Jean-Pierre Changeux.

Upgrade by Blake Crouch

bioinformatics, butterfly effect, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, dark matter, deepfake, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hyperloop, independent contractor, job automation, low earth orbit, messenger bag, mirror neurons, off grid, pattern recognition, phenotype, ride hailing / ride sharing, supervolcano, time dilation

The specific arrangement of these four nucleobases creates the code for all biological life on the planet. This code is the genotype, and the way it physically expresses in a life-form (eye color, for instance), combined with its interactions with the environment, is called the phenotype. But understanding the correlation between genotype and phenotype—which DNA code programs which traits—still largely eludes us. Edwin rose from the chair. Then he walked to the door, zipped it open, and stepped through to the other side. As I watched him zip me back into my universe of sealed plastic, I felt truly alone. It reminded me of my time in prison and the crushing sense that others could come and go.

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She shrugged. “Whenever someone signs up for The Story of You, they have to complete a 350-question personality test and use our imaging app to submit a full-body scan that gives us mountains of data. I have the genomic code of seventy-nine million diverse people and more than twenty-three thousand phenotype data points for each of them. From all over the world. If I could develop a sufficiently powerful AI to handle this data set, and ask the right questions, who knows what I might accomplish.” And then she looked at me with a frightening intensity. “It’s one thing to build a new life-form, cure illness, or even attempt the work we’re doing now with our locusts.

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“Yes, of course.” His eyes lit up, and I caught a glimpse of the scientist behind the criminal. “She had the data set. Probably built an algorithm to reverse-engineer DNA code from the physical attributes of her customers. Wow. She really did it. Actually built a program to extrapolate genotype from phenotype.” I watched him thinking it through. “People can lie on a questionnaire. She probably designed spiders to scrape public records and compare death certificates. Social media. Hack a few insurance companies and compare her data to their medical records. Get a reasonable confidence ratio.” There was jealousy behind his glee.

The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles by Bruce H. Lipton

Albert Einstein, Benoit Mandelbrot, Boeing 747, correlation does not imply causation, data science, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Isaac Newton, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, Mars Rover, nocebo, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, sugar pill

“A fine structural analysis of normal and modulated cells in myogenic culture.” Developmental Biology 60: 26-47. Lipton, B. H. (1977b). “Collagen synthesis by normal and bromodeoxyuri-dine- treated cells in myogenic culture.” Developmental Biology 61: 153-165. Lipton, B. H., K. G. Bensch, et al. (1991). “Microvessel Endothelial Cell Transdifferentiation: Phenotypic Characterization.” Differentiation 46: 117-133. Lipton, B. H., K. G. Bensch, et al. (1992). “Histamine-Modulated Transdif-ferentiation of Dermal Microvascular Endothelial Cells.” Experimental Cell Research 199: 279-291. Chapter One Adams, C. L., M. K. L. Macleod, et al. (2003). “Complete analysis of the B-cell response to a protein antigen, from in vivo germinal centre formation to 3-D modelling of affinity maturation.”

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Nature 409: 141-144. Kling, J. (2003). “Put the Blame on Methylation.” The Scientist 27-28. Lederberg, J. (1994). Honoring Avery, MacLeod, And McCarty: The Team That Transformed Genetics. The Scientist 8: 11. Lipton, B. H., K. G. Bensch, et al. (1991). “Microvessel Endothelial Cell Transdifferentiation: Phenotypic Characterization.” Differentiation 46: 117-133. Nijhout, H. F. (1990). “Metaphors and the Role of Genes in Development.” Bioessays 12(9): 441-446. Pearson, H. (2003). “Geneticists play the numbers game in vain.” Nature 423: 576. Pennisi, E. (2003a). “A Low Number Wins the GeneSweep Pool.” Science 300: 1484.

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“A Map of the Interactome Network of the Metazoan C. elegans.” Science 303: 540+. Liboff, A. R. (2004). “Toward an Electromagnetic Paradigm for Biology and Medicine.” Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine 10(1): 41-47. Lipton, B. H., K. G. Bensch, et al. (1991). “Microvessel Endothelial Cell Transdifferentiation: Phenotypic Characterization.” Differentiation 46: 117-133. McClare, C. W. F. (1974). “Resonance in Bioenergetics.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 227: 74-97. Null, G., Ph.D., C. Dean, M.D. N.D., et al. (2003). Death By Medicine. New York, Nutrition Institute of America. Oschman, J. L. (2000).

The Psychopath Inside: A Neuroscientist's Personal Journey Into the Dark Side of the Brain by James Fallon

Bernie Madoff, epigenetics, Everything should be made as simple as possible, Gregor Mendel, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, personalized medicine, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, TED Talk, theory of mind

The neurologist Helen Mayberg of Emory University found that you could immediately treat major depression by turning it off using deep brain stimulation (DBS), a technique that involved threading an electrode deep into the brain. Reduced activity in this area is associated with psychopathy, which may explain why you don’t see a lot of major depressives who are also psychopaths. After some anatomical slides, I presented a slide listing many of my clinical, subclinical, physical, and behavioral phenotypes (my actual traits and disorders). I also listed my risk for related illnesses through an ingenuity “network analysis” that takes into consideration all of my genetic alleles, the interaction of these genes, and what diseases and traits are inferred from this network. I had just received these results, as a more thorough follow-up to the genetic results I’d received two years prior for the Wall Street Journal article.

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On the left of the slide were all of the syndromes I’ve had in my life, and their age of onset and age of offset where appropriate: asthma, allergies, panic attacks, OCD, hyper-religiosity, hypertension, obesity, essential tremor, addictions, hypomania, high-risk behaviors, putting others at risk, impulsivity, insomnia, flat empathy, aggression, hedonism, individualism, creative bursts, and verbosity. Next to that list of traits and clinical conditions, were statistical estimates of how at risk my genes put me for particular disorders, including various neurological, psychological, behavioral, endocrine, respiratory, and metabolic disorders. The phenotype-genotype pairings matched up very well. (After examining the nightmare combination of genes I inherited, Fabio had said, “It’s surprising that you ever made it through fetal development, let alone your adolescence.” I could have been another of my mother’s miscarriages, or a case of teenage suicide.)

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Archives of General Psychiatry 66, no. 9 (2009): 978. Potkin, Steven G., Jessica A. Turner, Guia Guffanti, Anita Lakatos, James H. Fallon, Dana D. Nguyen, Daniel Mathalon, Judith Ford, John Lauriello, and Fabio Macciardi. “A genome-wide association study of schizophrenia using brain activation as a quantitative phenotype.” Schizophrenia Bulletin 35, no. 1 (2009): 96–108. Raine, Adrian. “From genes to brain to antisocial behavior.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 17, no. 5 (2008): 323–328. Rosell, Daniel R., Judy L. Thompson, Mark Slifstein, Xiaoyan Xu, W. Gordon Frankle, Antonia S. New, Marianne Goodman, et al.

Survival of the Friendliest: Understanding Our Origins and Rediscovering Our Common Humanity by Brian Hare, Vanessa Woods

autism spectrum disorder, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, desegregation, domesticated silver fox, Donald Trump, drone strike, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Law of Accelerating Returns, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Nelson Mandela, New Urbanism, nuclear winter, out of africa, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), self-driving car, smart cities, social intelligence, Stanford marshmallow experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, trade route, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, zero-sum game

Petraglia, “Inter-continental Variation in Acheulean Bifaces,” in Asian Paleoanthropology (New York: Springer, 2011), 49–55. 27. W. Amos, J. I. Hoffman, “Evidence That Two Main Bottleneck Events Shaped Modern Human Genetic Diversity,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences (2009). 28. A. Manica, W. Amos, F. Balloux, T. Hanihara, “The Effect of Ancient Population Bottlenecks on Human Phenotypic Variation,” Nature 448, 346–48 (2007). 29. S. H. Ambrose, “Late Pleistocene Human Population Bottlenecks, Volcanic Winter, and Differentiation of Modern Humans,” Journal of Human Evolution 34, 623–51 (1998), published online Epub1998/06/01/. 30. J. Krause, C. Lalueza-Fox, L. Orlando, W.

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Zollikofer, “Neomorphosis and Heterochrony of Skull Shape in Dog Domestication,” Scientific Reports 7, 13443 (2017). 5. E. Tchernov, L. K. Horwitz, “Body Size Diminution Under Domestication: Unconscious Selection in Primeval Domesticates,” Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 10, 54–75 (1991). 6. L. Andersson, “Studying Phenotypic Evolution in Domestic Animals: A Walk in the Footsteps of Charles Darwin” in Cold Spring Harbor Symposia on Quantitative Biology (2010). 7. Helmut Hemmer, Domestication: The Decline of Environmental Appreciation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). 8. Jared Diamond, “Evolution, Consequences and Future of Plant and Animal Domestication,” Nature 418, 700–707 (2002). 9.

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Kharlamova, “Animal Evolution During Domestication: The Domesticated Fox as a Model,” Bioessays 31, 349–60 (2009). 13. A. V. Kukekova, L. N. Trut, K. Chase, A. V. Kharlamova, J. L. Johnson, S. V. Temnykh, I. N. Oskina, R. G. Gulevich, A. V. Vladimirova, S. Klebanov, “Mapping Loci for Fox Domestication: Deconstruction/Reconstruction of a Behavioral Phenotype,” Behavior Genetics 41, 593–606 (2011). 14. A. V. Kukekova, J. L. Johnson, X. Xiang, S. Feng, S. Liu, H. M. Rando, A. V. Kharlamova, Y. Herbeck, N. A. Serdyukova, Z.J.N. Xiong, “Red Fox Genome Assembly Identifies Genomic Regions Associated with Tame and Aggressive Behaviours,” Evolution 2, 1479 (2018). 15.

Beyond Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Advanced Guide to Building Muscle, Staying Lean, and Getting Strong by Michael Matthews

agricultural Revolution, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, fear of failure, G4S, Gary Taubes, meta-analysis, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial

Cooling, and Neil A. King. “Differences in postprandial responses to fat and carbohydrate loads in habitual high and low fat consumers (phenotypes).” British Journal of Nutrition 88, no. 02 (2002): 125-132. 97. Cooling, J., and J. E. Blundell. “Lean male high-and low-fat phenotypes—different routes for achieving energy balance.” International Journal of Obesity & Related Metabolic Disorders 24, no. 12 (2000). 98. Blundell, John E., and John Cooling. “High-fat and low-fat (behavioural) phenotypes: biology or environment?.” Proceedings of the Nutrition Society 58, no. 04 (1999): 773-777. 99. Pittas, Anastassios G., and Susan B.

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“Metabolic studies in human obesity during overnutrition and undernutrition: thermogenic and hormonal responses to norepinephrine.” Metabolism 35, no. 2 (1986): 166-175. 220. Keller, Andreas, Angela Graefen, Markus Ball, Mark Matzas, Valesca Boisguerin, Frank Maixner, Petra Leidinger et al. “New insights into the Tyrolean Iceman’s origin and phenotype as inferred by whole-genome sequencing.” Nature communications 3 (2012): 698. 221. http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2010/08/100831-cannibalism-cannibal-cavemen-human-meat-science/ 222. Cordain, Loren, Janette Brand Miller, S. Boyd Eaton, Neil Mann, Susanne HA Holt, and John D. Speth. “Plant-animal subsistence ratios and macronutrient energy estimations in worldwide hunter-gatherer diets.”

Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture by Bernardo Kastrup

active measures, cellular automata, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, conceptual framework, dark matter, Higgs boson, Isaac Newton, phenotype, placebo effect, quantum entanglement, retail therapy, scientific worldview, sugar pill, systems thinking, the scientific method

Each segment of an organism’s DNA is either associated with a functional characteristic – an aspect of anatomy or physiology – or consists of non-coding DNA with no known phenotypical role.130 This non-coding DNA accumulates over time through evolution due to certain genetic amplification processes.131 For now, let’s consider only the functionally active part of the DNA. It is mutations in this part that lead to speciation, or the creation of new species. To say that the genetic mutations at the root of evolution are random implies this: if we simply looked at the functional changes caused by each raw genetic mutation before natural selection either fixed or deleted it, we should not be able to identify any phenotypical pattern or trend. There should be no preferential direction or gradient in the kinds of functional changes caused by the raw mutations over time.

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It isn’t representative of the original phenomenon. Because of the gaps in the data, we are unable to discern the underlying pattern and might wrongly conclude that the original phenomenon itself was random. Like the incomplete data set above, the fossil record preserves only a small amount of the raw genetic mutations – or their functional, phenotypical correlates – that occurred during the course of evolution. Of all successful and unsuccessful species that have ever lived on Earth from the dawn of life, and of the countless unique organisms with non-viable mutations that never reproduced, how many have been preserved in the fossil record? And of those preserved, how much of the full range of their anatomy and physiology can be inferred from the record?

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Dennett, D. (1991). Consciousness Explained. London: Penguin Books. Dennett, D. (2003). The Illusion of Consciousness. TED2003. [Online]. Available from: http://www.ted.com/talks/dan_dennett_on_our_consciousness [Accessed 19 December 2014]. Doolittle, W. F. and Sapienza, C. (1980). Selfish genes, the phenotype paradigm and genome evolution. Nature, 284, pp. 601–603. Dresler, M. et al. (2011). Dreamed Movement Elicits Activation in the Sensorimotor Cortex. Current Biology, 21(21), pp. 1833–1837. Expanding the shrinks. The Economist (British Edition), 11 October 2014. [Online]. Available from: http://www.economist.com/news/britain/21623773-popularity-cbt-freezing-out-more-traditional-forms-therapy-expanding-shrinks [Accessed 23 December 2014].

A Natural History of Beer by Rob DeSalle

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, Louis Pasteur, microbiome, NP-complete, phenotype, placebo effect, wikimedia commons

But they much prefer to absorb fat from food because carb conversion from fat costs ten times more in energy expenditure. Some researchers contend that this insulin system evolved as a product of natural selection during times of periodic starvation. This is the basis of the so-called thrifty phenotype. Thrifty individuals have the physiological capacity to store fat very efficiently and can easily become overweight in bountiful times—although they will get by better in times of shortage. Non-thrifty phenotypes use up their fat stores more rapidly and tend to be leaner, but will starve more readily. Figure 12.2. The human gastrointestinal tract. When beer enters the mouth, its components start a circuitous route through the body (Figure 12.2).

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Breeders continue to grapple with the same two major kinds of traits: yield and quality. Yield traits include features like numbers of seeds set, capacity to breed multiple times a year, or the brittle seed character that, if mutated, allows for more efficient harvesting. Quality traits are those that impact the protein content, oil content, or any other phenotype concerned with the nutritive content of the plant. During the twentieth century, barley breeders were still using their knowledge of classical genetics to facilitate breeding in a tedious and labor-intensive process. With the rise of genomic technology, and the ease with which it can be applied to large numbers of lines and landraces, a very different approach to barley and other grain breeding has now become possible, using cheaper and faster techniques.

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An array of physiological responses results, the most visible being flushing of the face. People with this variant learn to shun alcohol because it causes discomfort and even pain. The CYP2E1 gene, too, has variants that have been implicated in alcohol avoidance. The protein this gene produces is active in the brain, and people with the variant phenotype become tipsy with very little alcohol in their systems. If they are smart, they stop drinking after the first couple of beers. People with variant CYP2E1 and ALDH2.2 genes tend not to become alcoholics, for obvious reasons. Among the rest of the population, any tendency toward alcoholism seems to be determined in a very complex manner.

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

Ada Lovelace, Alan Turing: On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem, Albert Einstein, AltaVista, bank run, bioinformatics, Bletchley Park, Brownian motion, butterfly effect, Charles Babbage, citation needed, classic study, Claude Shannon: information theory, clockwork universe, computer age, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, discovery of DNA, Donald Knuth, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, en.wikipedia.org, Eratosthenes, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Henri Poincaré, Honoré de Balzac, index card, informal economy, information retrieval, invention of the printing press, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, Jaron Lanier, jimmy wales, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, Louis Daguerre, machine translation, Marshall McLuhan, Menlo Park, microbiome, Milgram experiment, Network effects, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, Norman Macrae, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, pre–internet, quantum cryptography, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Rubik’s Cube, Simon Singh, Socratic dialogue, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, stochastic process, talking drums, the High Line, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, Turing machine, Turing test, women in the workforce, yottabyte

.”♦ Such genes—these replicators, these survivors—know nothing about altruism and nothing about reading, of course. Whatever and wherever they are, their phenotypic effects matter only insofar as they help the genes propagate. Molecular biology, in its signal achievement, had pinpointed the gene in a protein-encoding piece of DNA. This was the hardware definition. The software definition was older and fuzzier: the unit of heredity; the bearer of a phenotypic difference. With the two definitions uneasily coexisting, Dawkins looked past them both. If genes are meant to be masters of survival, they can hardly be fragments of nucleic acid.

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Loewenstein, The Touchstone of Life: Molecular Information, Cell Communication, and the Foundations of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93–94. ♦ “SELECTION FAVORS THOSE GENES WHICH SUCCEED”: Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 117. ♦ DAWKINS SUGGESTS THE CASE OF A GENE: Ibid., 196–97. ♦ THERE IS NO GENE FOR LONG LEGS: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 37. ♦ HABIT OF SAYING “A GENE FOR X”: Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, 21. ♦ “ALL WE WOULD NEED IN ORDER”: Ibid., 23. ♦ “ANY GENE THAT INFLUENCES THE DEVELOPMENT OF NERVOUS SYSTEMS”: Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, 60. ♦ “IT IS NO MORE LIKELY TO DIE”: Ibid., 34

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And it is harder still to specify genes for more complex qualities—genes for obesity or aggression or nest building or braininess or homosexuality. Are there genes for such things? Not if a gene is a particular strand of DNA that expresses a protein. Strictly speaking, one cannot say there are genes for almost anything—not even eye color. Instead, one should say that differences in genes tend to cause differences in phenotype (the actualized organism). But from the earliest days of the study of heredity, scientists have spoken of genes more broadly. If a population varies in some trait—say, tallness—and if the variation is subject to natural selection, then by definition it is at least partly genetic. There is a genetic component to the variation in tallness.

Brain Energy: A Revolutionary Breakthrough in Understanding Mental Health--And Improving Treatment for Anxiety, Depression, OCD, PTSD, and More by Christopher M. Palmer Md

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Drosophila, epigenetics, impulse control, it's over 9,000, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, neurotypical, personalized medicine, phenotype, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, traumatic brain injury

Many in the field hold these disorders apart from things like depression and anxiety, sometimes calling these the “biological” disorders. So, what do we know about them? What makes them different from each other? A lot of money has been spent researching this question. The NIMH funded a multisite study called the Bipolar Schizophrenia Network on Intermediate Phenotypes (B-SNIP). This study included more than 2,400 people with schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, or bipolar disorder; their first-degree relatives; and people without these disorders (normal controls). The researchers examined key biological and behavioral measures, examining brain scans, genetic testing, EEGs, blood parameters, inflammation levels, and performance on a variety of cognitive tests.

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Researchers have studied the babies that were conceived or carried during this famine and compared them to the general population and even their own siblings who were born when the mothers had normal access to food. The babies born during the famine were more likely to develop both metabolic and mental disorders later in life. This and other studies led to the thrifty phenotype hypothesis, which proposes that babies deprived of proper nutrition in utero are more likely to develop obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease later in life. Unfortunately, this hypothesis overlooks or ignores the fact that these babies are also more likely to develop mental disorders. These babies were found to have double the risk for schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder, as well as increased rates of depression, bipolar disorder, and addiction.12 Researchers have been studying the pancreas to understand the elevated rates of diabetes, the heart to understand the elevated rates of cardiovascular disease, and the brain to understand the psychiatric and neurological disorders but have failed to see the metabolic connection among all of them.

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Front Neuroendocrinol 35(1) (2014): 8–30. doi: 10.1016/j.yfrne.2013.08.001. 16L. Mosconi, V. Berti, C. Quinn, P. McHugh, G. Petrongolo, R. S. Osorio, C. Connaughty, A. Pupi, S. Vallabhajosula, R. S. Isaacson, M. J. de Leon, R. H. Swerdlow, and R. D. Brinton. “Perimenopause and Emergence of an Alzheimer’s Bioenergetic Phenotype in Brain and Periphery.” PLoS One 12(10) (2017): e0185926. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0185926 17Y. Hara, F. Yuk, R. Puri, W. G. Janssen, P. R. Rapp, and J. H. Morrison. “Presynaptic Mitochondrial Morphology in Monkey Prefrontal Cortex Correlates with Working Memory and Is Improved with Estrogen Treatment.”

Ageless: The New Science of Getting Older Without Getting Old by Andrew Steele

Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, bioinformatics, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwatching, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, CRISPR, dark matter, deep learning, discovery of penicillin, double helix, Easter island, epigenetics, Hans Rosling, Helicobacter pylori, life extension, lone genius, megastructure, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, Peter Thiel, phenotype, precautionary principle, radical life extension, randomized controlled trial, Silicon Valley, stealth mode startup, stem cell, TED Talk, zero-sum game

Senescent cells do that by secreting inflammatory molecules which alert the immune system to their presence, asking to be removed. This means that an immune cell on search-and-destroy duty will be attracted over by the molecular ruckus and engulf the senescent cell, ridding your body of the problem. This molecular flag-waving is known as the SASP – the ‘senescence-associated secretory phenotype’ (secretory because the cells secrete these molecules, and phenotype is a biological term meaning an attribute or behaviour). Perversely, it’s this calling for help which provides the means for these cells to cause such damage in our bodies. If the SASP does catch the attention of a passing immune cell and secures the senescent cell a hasty removal, all is well – but, if the senescent cell survives and keeps on pumping out inflammatory chemicals, this can effectively accelerate ageing throughout the body.

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Well, in the intervening decades since its discovery we’ve learned that PAI-1 is a protein which isn’t just involved in blood clotting; like most genes, it is involved in a number of different processes around the body. Perhaps most crucially when it comes to ageing, PAI-1 is associated with cellular senescence: it’s both involved in a cell’s internal decision-making when it considers becoming senescent, and it’s a component of the senescence-associated secretory phenotype by which senescent cells wreak their havoc around the body. Dialling down the odds of senescence and the potency of the SASP are both plausible ways to extend lifespan. While the carriers of a single copy of the mutation seem not to have any problems with blood clotting, it’s also possible that a slightly less eager clotting system might be of benefit as you get older, reducing the odds of problems like stroke.

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DOI: 10.18632/oncotarget.23748 ageless.link/zc6zye Reprogramming biology and curing ageing A brief introduction to the idea of using systems biology for medicine can be found in Rolf Apweiler et al., ‘Whither systems medicine?’, Exp. Mol. Med. 50, e453 (2018). DOI: 10.1038/emm.2017.290 ageless.link/vfusyd … simulate … Mycoplasma genitalium Jonathan R. Karr et al., ‘A whole-cell computational model predicts phenotype from genotype’, Cell 150, 389–401 (2012). DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2012.05.044 ageless.link/cecsmo … stop the virus rapidly evolving resistance … A. S. Perelson et al., ‘HIV-1 dynamics in vivo: Virion clearance rate, infected cell life-span, and viral generation time’, Science 271, 1582–6 (1996). DOI: 10.1126/science.271.5255.1582 ageless.link/ub43sm … train a computer model to recognise … DR mimetics … Diogo G.

Life's Greatest Secret: The Race to Crack the Genetic Code by Matthew Cobb

a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, Benoit Mandelbrot, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, Claude Shannon: information theory, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, CRISPR, dark matter, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, factory automation, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Large Hadron Collider, military-industrial complex, New Journalism, Norbert Wiener, phenotype, post-materialism, Recombinant DNA, Stephen Hawking, synthetic biology

Nearly forty years on, I am still interested in the non-genetic transmission of information down the generations and the underlying mechanisms – one of my PhD students, Becky Lockyer, has recently studied them in Drosophila.17 The existence of intergenerational transmission of environmentally induced changes is now well established, and it is known that these effects can buffer populations of organisms against rapid environmental change before new adaptations evolve.18 They form part of the complex route from DNA to phenotype, presenting biologists with fascinating examples of plasticity – how a given DNA sequence can generate a variety of different phenotypes. Some of these effects can be thought-provoking, like the study I heard about in 1977. For example, in 2009 Larry Feig’s group at Tufts University in Boston reported that if female rats were given an enriched environment during their adolescence, their offspring – conceived after the enrichment had ceased – showed an increased learning ability.

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In his 1957 talk, Crick pointed to the handful of proteins that had thus far been sequenced in more than one organism and made a leap of the imagination that eventually transformed how we study evolution: Biologists should realise that before long we shall have a subject which might be called ‘protein taxonomy’ – the study of the amino acid sequences of the proteins of an organism and the comparison of them between species. It can be argued that these sequences are the most delicate expression possible of the phenotype of an organism and that vast amounts of evolutionary information may be hidden away within them.34 Crick was right. Today, protein fragments from the depths of time, such as bits of collagen from Tyrannosaurus rex, can be used to study evolution.35 Burnet’s contribution to evolutionary biology was less dramatic but equally insightful.

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As a consequence, some philosophers and scientists have suggested that we need a new definition of ‘gene’, and have come up with various complex alternatives.86 Most biologists have ignored these suggestions, just as they passed over the argument by Pontecorvo and Lederberg in the 1950s that the term ‘gene’ was obsolete.87 In 2006, a group of scientists came up with a cumbersome definition of ‘gene’ that sought to cover most of the meanings: ‘A locatable region of genomic sequence, corresponding to a unit of inheritance, which is associated with regulatory regions, transcribed regions and/or other functional sequence regions.’88 In reality, definitions such as ‘a stretch of DNA that is transcribed into RNA’, or ‘a DNA segment that contributes to phenotype/function’, seem to work in most circumstances.89 There are exceptions, but biologists are used to exceptions, which are found in every area of the study of life. The chaotic varieties of elements in our genome resist simple definitions because they have evolved over billions of years and have been continually sieved by natural selection.

Just Keep Buying: Proven Ways to Save Money and Build Your Wealth by Nick Maggiulli

Airbnb, asset allocation, Big Tech, bitcoin, buy and hold, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, diversification, diversified portfolio, financial independence, Hans Rosling, index fund, it's over 9,000, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Seder, lifestyle creep, mass affluent, mortgage debt, oil shock, payday loans, phenotype, price anchoring, risk-adjusted returns, Robert Shiller, Sam Altman, side hustle, side project, stocks for the long run, The 4% rule, time value of money, transaction costs, very high income, William Bengen, yield curve

As Armstrong and his colleague Morgan Bond discovered, when food is scarce the char shrink their digestive tracts in order to use less energy. When the salmon arrive, their digestive organs grow to twice their normal size.¹ In biology this concept is called phenotypic plasticity, or the ability for an organism to change its physiology in response to its environment. Not only is phenotypic plasticity useful for understanding how plants, birds, and fish change based on their surroundings—it can also be useful when determining how much money you should save. The Problem with Most Savings Advice When you Google “how much should I save” you will get over 150,000 results.

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In addition, their estimates show that those in the top 5% of earners saved 37% annually while those in the top 1% saved 51% of their income each year.³ Similarly, two economists at UC Berkeley found that savings rates were positively correlated with wealth in every decade in U.S. history from 1910 to 2010, with the exception of the 1930s.⁴ This is why savings rules like “save 20% of your income” are so misguided. Not only do they ignore fluctuations in income, but they also assume that everyone can save at the same rate, which is empirically false. This is where the Dolly Varden char and phenotypic plasticity come in. Instead of consuming the same number of calories throughout the year, the char change their caloric intake (and their metabolism) based on how much food is available. We should do the same thing when it comes to saving money. When we have the ability to save more, we should save more—and when we don’t, we should save less.

Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health by Daniel Lieberman

A. Roger Ekirch, active measures, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, classic study, clean water, clockwatching, Coronary heart disease and physical activity of work, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, death from overwork, Donald Trump, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Santayana, hygiene hypothesis, impulse control, indoor plumbing, Kickstarter, libertarian paternalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, phenotype, placebo effect, publication bias, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), social distancing, Steven Pinker, twin studies, two and twenty, working poor

., et al. (2007), Association analysis of the ACTN3 R577X polymorphism and complex quantitative body composition and performance phenotypes in adolescent Greeks, European Journal of Human Genetics 15:88–93. 39 Pitsiladis, Y., et al. (2013), Genomics of elite sporting performance: What little we know and necessary advances, British Journal of Sports Medicine 47:550–55; Tucker, R., Santos-Concejero, J., and Collins, M. (2013), The genetic basis for elite running performance, British Journal of Sports Medicine 47:545–49. 40 Bray, M. S., et al. (2009), The human gene map for performance and health-related fitness phenotypes: The 2006–2007 update, Medicine and Science in Sports and Exercise 41:35–73; Guth, L.

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., et al. (2008), Exercise-induced redistribution of T lymphocytes is regulated by adrenergic mechanisms, Brain, Behavior and Immunity 22:324–38; Bigley, A. B., et al. (2014), Acute exercise preferentially redeploys NK-cells with a highly differentiated phenotype and augments cytotoxicity against lymphoma and multiple myeloma target cells, Brain, Behavior and Immunity 39:160–71; Bigley, A. B., et al. (2015), Acute exercise preferentially redeploys NK-cells with a highly differentiated phenotype and augments cytotoxicity against lymphoma and multiple myeloma target cells. Part II: Impact of latent cytomegalovirus infection and catecholamine sensitivity, Brain, Behavior and Immunity 49:59–65. 63 Kohut, M.

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E. (2018), Debunking the myth of exercise-induced immune suppression: Redefining the impact of exercise on immunological health across the lifespan, Frontiers in Immunology 9:648. 19 Dhabhar, F. S. (2014), Effects of stress on immune function: The good, the bad, and the beautiful, Immunology Research 58:193–210; Bigley, A. B., et al. (2014), Acute exercise preferentially redeploys NK-cells with a highly differentiated phenotype and augments cytotoxicity against lymphoma and multiple myeloma target cells, Brain, Behavior, and Immunity 39:160–71. 20 Campbell, J. P., and Turner, J. E. (2018), Debunking the myth of exercise-induced immune suppression. 21 Lowder, T., et al. (2005), Moderate exercise protects mice from death due to influenza virus, Brain, Behavior and Immunity 19:377–80. 22 Wilson, M., et al. (2011), Diverse patterns of myocardial fibrosis in lifelong, veteran endurance athletes, Journal of Applied Physiology 110:1622–26; La Gerche, A., et al. (2012), Exercise-induced right ventricular dysfunction and structural remodelling in endurance athletes, European Heart Journal 33:998–1006; La Gerche, A., and Heidbuchel, H. (2014), Can intensive exercise harm the heart?

The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry by Gary Greenberg

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, back-to-the-land, David Brooks, Edward Jenner, impulse control, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kickstarter, late capitalism, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, meta-analysis, neurotypical, phenotype, placebo effect, random walk, selection bias, statistical model, theory of mind, Winter of Discontent

In 2003, she and a group of colleagues tried to tease out the manic from the irritable among kids who were getting snared in Biederman’s expanded net. They looked for ways (other than the mania/irritability distinction) in which the two populations differed and proposed a “broad phenotype” that described the nonmanic patients. They called this phenotype “severe mood and behavioral dysregulation” and proposed “multisite clinical trials” to test whether the category was valid—whether, that is, the children would differ from one another not only according to their symptoms but also according to their family histories, the course of their troubles, and their response to treatment.

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“After the third or fourth”: Herb Peyser interview, January 23, 2012. 7. Freud once said: See Freud, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious. 8. “orderly and democratic process”: David Shaffer interview, December 8, 2011. 9. “David probably misinterpreted”: Allen Frances e-mail, January 23, 2012. 10. “that children with the broad phenotype”: Leibenluft et al., “Defining Clinical Phenotypes of Juvenile Mania,” 436. 11. “claim to define a new diagnosis”: Leibenluft, “Severe Mood Dysregulation,” 131. 12. “Justification for Temper Dysregulation Disorder with Dysphoria”: “Justification for Temper Dysregulation Disorder,” http://www.dsm5.org/Proposed%20Revision%20Attachments/Justification%20for%20Temper%20Dysregulation%20Disorder%20with%20Dysphoria.pdf. 13. it announced a new “naming convention”: American Psychiatric Association, “APA Modifies DSM Naming Convention to Reflect Publication Changes,” news release, March 9, 2010. 14.

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Leibenluft, Ellen. “Severe Mood Dysregulation, Irritability, and the Diagnostic Boundaries of Bipolar Disorder in Youths.” American Journal of Psychiatry 168, no. 2 (February 2011): 129–42. Leibenluft, Ellen, Donald S. Charney, Kenneth E. Towbin, Robinder K. Banghoo, and Daniel S. Pine. “Defining Clinical Phenotypes of Juvenile Mania.” American Journal of Psychiatry 160, no. 3 (2003): 430–37. Lethem, Jonathan. The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions, Etc. New York: Doubleday, 2011. LeVay, Simon. Queer Science: The Use and Abuse of Research into Homosexuality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. Livesley, W. John.

Unmasking Autism: Discovering the New Faces of Neurodiversity by Devon Price

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, Black Lives Matter, COVID-19, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, emotional labour, George Floyd, Greta Thunberg, impulse control, independent contractor, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, multilevel marketing, neurotypical, phenotype, QAnon, randomized controlled trial, remote working, Rubik’s Cube, seminal paper, theory of mind, TikTok, traumatic brain injury, universal basic income

NOTES Thomas, P., Zahorodny, W., Peng, B., Kim, S., Jani, N., Halperin, W., & Brimacombe, M. (2012). The association of autism diagnosis with socioeconomic status. Autism, 16(2), 201–213. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 1 Hull, L., Petrides, K. V., & Mandy, W. (2020). The female autism phenotype and camouflaging: A narrative review. Review Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 1–12. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 2 “Interview with Temple Grandin.” January 2, 2006. Retrieved April 14, 2019. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 3 Petrou, A. M., Parr, J. R., & McConachie, H. (2018).

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Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 40(12), 1495–1504. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 46 Bora, E., Aydın, A., Saraç, T., Kadak, M. T., & Köse, S. (2017). Heterogeneity of subclinical autistic traits among parents of children with autism spectrum disorder: Identifying the broader autism phenotype with a data-driven method. Autism Research, 10(2), 321–326. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 47 https://www.cdc.gov/​mmwr/​volumes/​67/​ss/​pdfs/​ss6706a1-H.pdf. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 48 Mandell, D. S., et al. (2009). Racial/ethnic disparities in the identification of children with autism spectrum disorders.

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BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 66 https://www.nami.org/​Support-Education/​Publications-Reports/​Public-Policy-Reports/​The-Doctor-is-Out#:~:text=800%2D950%2DNAMI&text=Each%20year%20millions%20of%20Americans,States%20go%20without%20any%20treatment. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 67 Bora, E., Aydin, A., Saraç, T., Kadak, M. T., & Köse, S. (2017). Heterogeneity of subclinical autistic traits among parents of children with autism spectrum disorder: Identifying the broader autism phenotype with a data-driven method. Autism Research, 10(2), 321–326. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 68 For a state-by-state breakdown of what is covered, see here: https://www.ncsl.org/​research/​health/​autism-and-insurance-coverage-state-laws.aspx. BACK TO NOTE REFERENCE 69 https://www.clarifiasd.com/​autism-diagnostic-testing/​#:~:text=There%20is%20a%20cost%20associated,more%20than%20doubles%20the%20cost.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James E. Lovelock

Ada Lovelace, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, butterfly effect, carbon footprint, Clapham omnibus, cognitive dissonance, continuous integration, David Attenborough, decarbonisation, discovery of DNA, disinformation, Edward Lorenz: Chaos theory, Garrett Hardin, Henri Poincaré, Herman Kahn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), mandelbrot fractal, mass immigration, megacity, Northern Rock, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, Pierre-Simon Laplace, planetary scale, quantum entanglement, short selling, Stewart Brand, Tragedy of the Commons, University of East Anglia, Virgin Galactic

Scientists may pretend to deplore the New Age, but that does not stop them reading its publications and in no time Gaia’s face was turned to the wall, especially in the neo‐Darwinist community of scientists. Neither Lynn Margulis nor I could make a convincing defence – partly because, as we had stated it, the Gaia hypothesis was wrong. We had said that organisms, or the biosphere, regulated the Earth’s climate and composition. Somewhat later, in his book The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins showed that this was impossible. He said it so well and clearly that the subject was then regarded by the scientific community as closed. Richard Dawkins is an extraordinarily talented author and persuader and in his book he vented his scorn on the Gaia hypothesis with the powerful erudition that he now uses to censure theology.

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He was true to his word and the next paper on the topic was one I wrote with Robert Charlson, Meinrat Andreae and Steven Warren on the connection between clouds, condensation nuclei, dimethyl sulphide and its source, ocean algae. I accepted Dawkins’ criticism that there was no way for life or the biosphere to regulate anything beyond the phenotype of its component individual organisms. So what on Earth was doing the regulating? I had no doubt that climate and chemistry were regulated, so what did it if not life? As I have explained earlier, the traditional Earth scientists, led by James Walker and H. D. Holland, were sure that regulation was done by geochemistry and geophysics alone and that life was a mere passenger or at most a contributor.

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., New York, 2008) Millennium Ecosystem Assessment Report (Island Press, Washington, DC, 2005) Sir Crispin Tickell, Climate Change and World Affairs (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1986) 3 Consequences and Survival Sir David Attenborough, Life on Earth (HarperCollins, London, 1979) Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype (W. H. Freeman, Oxford and San Francisco, 1982) Brian Fagan, The Long Summer (Granta, London, 2005) Richard Fortey, The Earth (Harper Collins, London, 2004) Al Gore, An Inconvenient Truth (Bloomsbury, London, 2006) Tim Lenton and W. von Bloh, ‘Biotic Feedback Extends Lifespan of Biosphere’, Geophysical Research Letters (2001) James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia (Allen Lane/Penguin, London, 2006) Fred Pearce, When the Rivers Run Dry (Transworld, London, 2006) H.

The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter by Joseph Henrich

agricultural Revolution, capital asset pricing model, Climategate, cognitive bias, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, demographic transition, disinformation, endowment effect, experimental economics, experimental subject, Flynn Effect, impulse control, language acquisition, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Nash equilibrium, nocebo, out of africa, phenotype, placebo effect, profit maximization, randomized controlled trial, risk tolerance, side project, social intelligence, social web, Steven Pinker, sugar pill, sunk-cost fallacy, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, ultimatum game

One of the debates in this literature involves opposing “innate” and “learned” in explaining our abilities and behaviors. As we’ll see, much behavior is both 100% innate and 100% learned. For example, humans have clearly evolved to walk on two legs, and it’s one of our species’ behavioral signatures. Yet we also clearly learn to walk. From natural selection’s point of view, it only cares that the phenotype it “wants” emerges when it needs it. To get there, it will use learning, attention biases, motivational changes, anatomical adjustments, inferential biases, and pain responses to make sure that the required developmental processes run to completion, on schedule. Thus, showing that something is learned only tells us about the developmental process but not about whether it was favored by natural selection acting on genes.

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Recently, the journalist Nicholas Wade (2014) has sought to argue that continental races do indeed capture behaviorally important genetic variation in humans. Wade combines three lines of evidence: (1) analyses of global genetic variation, (2) specific cases of natural selection favoring locally or regionally adaptive traits, as discussed in this chapter, and (3) phenotypic differences in behavior, psychology, or biology (IQ, Aggression, etc.). His first line of evidence uses recent analyses of global samples to establish a genetic reality for classical continental races. And, yes, there is continental-level genetic variation, but as I’ll explain, that doesn’t imply natural selection is operating to differentiate these continental populations.

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“The hot hand in basketball: On the misperception of random sequences.” Cognitive Psychology 17 (3):295–314. Giuliano, P., and A. Alesina. 2010. “The power of the family.” Journal of Economic Growth 15 (2):93–125. Gizer, I. R., H. J. Edenberg, D. A. Gilder, K. C. Wilhelmsen, and C. L. Ehlers. 2011. “Association of alcohol dehydrogenase genes with alcohol-related phenotypes in a Native American community sample.” Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research 35 (11):2008–2018. Gneezy, A., and D. M. T. Fessler. 2011. “Conflict, sticks and carrots: war increases prosocial punishments and rewards.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. doi:10.1098/rspb.2011.0805.

Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane

Benoit Mandelbrot, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clockwork universe, double helix, Drosophila, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, Louis Pasteur, mandelbrot fractal, out of africa, phenotype, power law, random walk, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, seminal paper, stem cell, unbiased observer

In fact, in physically stressful circumstances, bacteria can even speed up the mutation rate in their genes. So there is a dilemma in bacteria about whether selection is ‘for’ the genes or the cell as a whole. In many respects the cell is the replicator. Mutations in a gene don’t necessarily change the phenotype (the function or appearance of the organism) but by definition they must change the gene itself, perhaps even scrambling its sequence out of recognition over aeons. Mutations accumulate because many of them have little or no effect on function, and so go unnoticed by natural selection—they are said to be ‘neutral’.

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Because genes can change, while the cell and its constituents remain essentially unchanged, the bacterial cell might be considered more stable an evolutionary unit than its genes. For example, cyanobacteria (the bacteria that ‘invented’ photosynthesis) have certainly changed their gene sequences over evolution, but if the fossil evidence can be believed, the phenotype has barely changed over billions of years. If, as Dawkins has argued, the worst enemy of the selfish gene is a competitive (polymorphic, or altered) form of the same gene, then neutral mutations are the selfish gene scrambler par excellence: gene sequences diverge over time as neutral mutations accumulate.

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But the ideal of collaboration does not give proper weight to the conflict between the various selfish entities that make up an individual, and in particular to the cells and mitochondria within the cells. While conflict between various selfish entities is entirely in keeping with Dawkins’s philosophy, he did not develop the idea in The Selfish Gene—these ideas awaited his own later book The Extended Phenotype, and in the 1980s and 1990s the important work of Yale biologist Leo Buss and others. Thanks to the exploration of such conflicts and their resolutions, evolutionary biologists now appreciate that colonies of cells (or genes, if you like) do not constitute true individuals, but rather form a looser association, in which individual cells may still act independently.

In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's by Joseph Jebelli

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, CRISPR, double helix, Easter island, Edward Jenner, epigenetics, global pandemic, Isaac Newton, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, parabiotic, phenotype, placebo effect, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Skype, stem cell, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, traumatic brain injury

., ‘Effect of curcumin-associated and lipid ligand-functionalized nanoliposomes on aggregation of the Alzheimer’s Aβ peptide’. 10. Popper, The Logic of Scientific Discovery, p. 316. Chapter 21: Clues from Colombia 1. Lemere, Lopera, et al., ‘The E280A presenilin 1 Alzheimer mutation produces increased A beta 42 deposition and severe cerebellar pathology’. 2. Sepulveda-Falla, Glatzel, Lopera, ‘Phenotypic profile of early-onset familial Alzheimer’s disease caused by presenilin-1 E280A mutation’. 3. Belluck, ‘Alzheimer’s Stalks a Colombian Family’. Chapter 22: Alzheimer’s Legacy 1. Brookmeyer, Johnson, et al., ‘Forecasting the global burden of Alzheimer’s disease’. 2. Zissimopoulos, Crimmins, St Clair, ‘The value of delaying Alzheimer’s disease onset’. 3.

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., Blomqvist, G., Holt, D. P.,… Långström, B., ‘Imaging brain amyloid in Alzheimer’s disease with Pittsburgh Compound-B’, Annals of Neurology, 55 (3), 2004, 306–19 Kondo, T., Asai, M., Tsukita, K., Kutoku, Y., Ohsawa, Y., Sunada, Y.,… Inoue, H., ‘Modeling Alzheimer’s disease with iPSCs reveals stress phenotypes associated with intracellular Abeta and differential drug responsiveness’, Cell Stem Cell, 12 (4), 2013, 487–96 Kuhn, T. S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 2012 Lambert, J. C., Ibrahim-Verbaas, C. A., Harold, D., Naj, A. C., Sims, R., Bellenguez, C.,… Amouyel, P., ‘Meta-analysis of 74,046 individuals identifies 11 new susceptibility loci for Alzheimer’s disease’, Nature Genetics, 45 (12), 2013, 1452–8 Lane, N., Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life, Oxford University Press, 2006 Lapillonne, H., Kobari, L., Mazurier, C., Tropel, P., Giarratana, M.

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, Baker, H. V., Xu, W.,… Host Response to Injury, L. S. C. R. P., ‘Genomic responses in mouse models poorly mimic human inflammatory diseases’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 110 (9), 2013, 3507–12 Sepulveda-Falla, D., Glatzel, M., Lopera, F., ‘Phenotypic profile of early-onset familial Alzheimer’s disease caused by presenilin-1 E280A mutation’, Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease, 32 (1), 2012, 1–12 Shahim, P., Tegner, Y., Wilson, D. H., Randall, J., Skillback, T., Pazooki, D.,… Zetterberg, H., ‘Blood biomarkers for brain injury in concussed professional ice hockey players’, JAMA Neurology, 71 (6), 2014, 684–92 Shelley, M., Frankenstein: Or, the Modern Prometheus, Penguin Classics, 2003 Shen, H., ‘Studies cast doubt on cancer drug as Alzheimer’s treatment’, Nature, 23 May 2013, online: www.nature.com/news/studies-cast-doubt-on-cancer-drug-as-alzheimer-s-treatment-1.13058 Shenk, D., The Forgetting: Alzheimer’s: Portrait of an Epidemic, Anchor Books, 2001 Sherrington, R., Rogaev, E.

The End of Medicine: How Silicon Valley (And Naked Mice) Will Reboot Your Doctor by Andy Kessler

airport security, Andy Kessler, Bear Stearns, bioinformatics, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, Dean Kamen, digital divide, El Camino Real, employer provided health coverage, full employment, George Gilder, global rebalancing, Law of Accelerating Returns, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, moral hazard, Network effects, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, Sand Hill Road, Silicon Valley, stem cell, Steve Jurvetson, vertical integration

has tested POSITIVE for inactivity of the MSH2 gene. What? Positive? That’s my blood. MLH1 and MSH2 are known as “DNA mismatch repair genes” for the protein products of these genes and their responsibility in repairing mutations that occur in the genome. Inactivity is associated with mutations in other genes, a “mutator phenotype.” So I have a gene mutation that means other gene mutations don’t get repaired. What kind of circular nonsense is that? Is this a problem? Do I have colorectal cancer? It doesn’t say that. It just says my risks have gone up. What do I do? Should I become a vegan? I think I’d rather staple my eyelids to my forehead than become a vegan.

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The proof is the predictive value. We get that, we can roll it out.” “Bleed to read, right?” I asked. “Exactly,” Lee said. It was nice to know the lingo. “And this can be a first screen?” I asked. “Someday. First, you lower false positives by narrowing down to the high risk, familial risk, genetic risk and then this phenotype risk. False positives are expensive, way more than the cost of the tests. It’s the test, and then all the back end if you show positive—scans or biopsies, whatever.” No different from what John Simpson told me. Only when the scans were reliable could they become commonplace, because the back end was expensive.

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(patient) obesity: diets for illnesses related to “morbid” surgery for obstetrics old age ophthalmologists optics optometrists Oracle ovarian cancer over-the-wire catheters pacemakers pain relievers Palo Alto Medical Foundation pancreatic cancer pancreatitis pandemics Pap smears Pargluva patents paternity tests Pavlidis, John pediatricians Peja (resident) Penzias, Arno peptides Percutaneous Cardiovascular Procedure w/Drug-Eluting Stent with AMI Perkins, Tony Perot, Ross Personal Genome Project personal sequencing Pete, Dr. PET (positron emission tomography) scans Pfizer Inc. pharmaceuticals industry pharmacists phenotype risk Philip Morris Philips Philips Medical Systems photomasks photons physical exams physics placebos plaque, arterial plastic surgery platelet count polio polyclonal antibodies polymerase chain reaction (PCR) polymorphism polyps Popular Science positron emission tomography (PET) scans Prakash, Dr.

When Computers Can Think: The Artificial Intelligence Singularity by Anthony Berglas, William Black, Samantha Thalind, Max Scratchmann, Michelle Estes

3D printing, Abraham Maslow, AI winter, air gap, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, availability heuristic, backpropagation, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, brain emulation, call centre, cognitive bias, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, create, read, update, delete, cuban missile crisis, David Attenborough, DeepMind, disinformation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Ernest Rutherford, factory automation, feminist movement, finite state, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general-purpose programming language, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, industrial robot, Isaac Newton, job automation, John von Neumann, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, Mahatma Gandhi, mandelbrot fractal, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Parkinson's law, patent troll, patient HM, pattern recognition, phenotype, ransomware, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, self-driving car, semantic web, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, Skype, sorting algorithm, speech recognition, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Stuxnet, superintelligent machines, technological singularity, Thomas Malthus, Turing machine, Turing test, uranium enrichment, Von Neumann architecture, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zero day

There are also heterochromatic portions of the human genome which are so repetitive and long that they cannot be accurately sequenced with current technology. These regions contain few genes, and probably have no significant effect on an organism’s phenotype (i.e. its observable embodiment as opposed to its DNA or genotype). Non gene-producing fragments tend to be much more variable between individuals, which is what one would expect if there is no evolutionary pressure to keep them consistent. That said, more recent research (such as the ENCODE project) suggests that about 18% of the non-coding regions may indeed have some phenotypic effect. It appears that evolution takes what it finds, and if some random sequence of DNA can be interpreted in a meaningful way then that interpretation is utilized.

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If we assume that there is a total of 700 megabytes of information in the genome, of which 20% is meaningful, 10% relates to intelligence, and 2% is different from Chimpanzees, then the total difference between human and chimpanzee intelligence forming DNA is about 0.3 megabytes of real data. In computer software terms this is very tiny indeed. Yet the difference in phenotype could not be more remarkable. While chimpanzees can be taught basic sign language skills and solve non-trivial problems, their basic intelligence seems much closer to that of dogs and horses than man’s. Chimpanzees can learn to use simple tools and form social groups, but man can solve differential equations and fly to the moon.

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This limits the ability of similar tricks to be used in the mapping between our genome and our intelligence. Natural selection works by making small, incremental changes to an organism’s DNA, which may result in small, incremental improvements to the organism. This means there has to be a relatively direct and robust relationship between our genotype and our phenotype. Evolution just could not work with a too highly-packed, fractal-like representation because making any small change to the gene sequence would produce a radically different brain. It would require chancing upon just the right formula in one go, which is virtually impossible. Repeated patterns What does happen is that genes define a pattern that then gets replicated multiple times.

Global Catastrophic Risks by Nick Bostrom, Milan M. Cirkovic

affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, anthropic principle, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, availability heuristic, backpropagation, behavioural economics, Bill Joy: nanobots, Black Swan, carbon tax, carbon-based life, Charles Babbage, classic study, cognitive bias, complexity theory, computer age, coronavirus, corporate governance, cosmic microwave background, cosmological constant, cosmological principle, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, death of newspapers, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, distributed generation, Doomsday Clock, Drosophila, endogenous growth, Ernest Rutherford, failed state, false flag, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, Georg Cantor, global pandemic, global village, Great Leap Forward, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hindsight bias, information security, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of agriculture, Kevin Kelly, Kuiper Belt, Large Hadron Collider, launch on warning, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, means of production, meta-analysis, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, mutually assured destruction, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, Oklahoma City bombing, P = NP, peak oil, phenotype, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, power law, precautionary principle, prediction markets, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, reversible computing, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, scientific worldview, Singularitarianism, social intelligence, South China Sea, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, the long tail, The Turner Diaries, Tunguska event, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, uranium enrichment, Vernor Vinge, War on Poverty, Westphalian system, Y2K

The task of changing even a tiny fraction of these genes would be enormous, especially since each such change could lead to dangerous and unexpected side effects. It is far more likely that our growing understanding of gene function will enable us to design specific drugs and other compounds that can produce desirable changes in our phenotypes and that these changes will be sufficiently easy and inexpensive that they will not be confined to a genetic elite (Wills, 1998) . Even such milder phenotypic manipulations are fraught with danger, however, as we have seen from the negative effects that steroid and growth hormone treatments have had on athletes. Second, the likelihood that a 'genetic elite' will become established seems remote.

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Evolution depends on the fact that genetic material does not replicate precisely, and that errors are inevitably introduced as genes are passed from one generation to the next. I n the absence o f mutation, evolutionary change would slow and eventually stop. The effects of mutations are not necessarily correlated with the sizes of the mutational changes themselves. Single changes in the base sequence of DNA can have no effect or profound effects on the phenotype - the allelic differences that affect skin colour, as discussed in Section 3 . 1 , can be traced to a single alteration in a base from G to A, changing one amino acid in the protein from an alanine to a threonine. At the other end ofthe spectrum, entire doublings of chromosome number, which take place commonly in plants and less often in animals, can disturb development dramatically - human babies who have twice the normal number of chromosomes die soon after birth.

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The measurement of human intellectual capabilities, and their heritability, is at a primitive stage. The heritability of i Q has received a great deal of attention, but a recent meta-analysis estimates broad heritability of IQ to be 0.5 and narrow heritability (the component of heritability that measures selectable phenotypic variation) to be as low as 0.34 (Devlin et al., 1997). But IQ is only one aspect of human intelligence, and other aspects of intelligence need investigation. Daniel Goleman has proposed that social intelligence, the ability to interact with others, is at least as important as I Q (Goleman, 1995 ), and Howard Gardner has explored multiple intelligences ranging from artistic and musical through political to mechanical (Gardner, 1993).

What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 13, Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, c2.com, carbon-based life, Cass Sunstein, charter city, classic study, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, computer vision, cotton gin, Danny Hillis, dematerialisation, demographic transition, digital divide, double entry bookkeeping, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, Exxon Valdez, Fairchild Semiconductor, Ford Model T, George Gilder, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, hive mind, Howard Rheingold, interchangeable parts, invention of air conditioning, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Joan Didion, John Conway, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, Lao Tzu, life extension, Louis Daguerre, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, meta-analysis, new economy, off grid, off-the-grid, out of africa, Paradox of Choice, performance metric, personalized medicine, phenotype, Picturephone, planetary scale, precautionary principle, quantum entanglement, RAND corporation, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, refrigerator car, rewilding, Richard Florida, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, silicon-based life, skeuomorphism, Skype, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, Stuart Kauffman, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, the built environment, the long tail, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Vernor Vinge, wealth creators, Whole Earth Catalog, Y2K, yottabyte

What he has found is that, in general, multiple runs of evolution produced similar traits in the phenotype—the outward body of the bacteria. Changes in the genotype occurred in roughly the same places, though the exact coding was often different. This suggests a convergence of broad form with details left to chance. Lenski is not the only scientist doing experiments like this. Others’ experiments show similar results from parallel evolution: Instead of getting novelty each time, you get what one scientific paper calls “the convergence of multiple evolving lines on similar phenotypes.” As geneticist Sean Carroll concludes, “Evolution can and does repeat itself at the levels of structures and patterns, as well as of individual genes. . . .

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New York: Basic Books, p. 130. 118 “where there is carbon-based life”: Michael Denton and Craig Marshall. (2001) “Laws of Form Revisited.” Nature, 410 (6827). http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/35068645. 120 “encoded implicitly in the genome”: Lynn Helena Caporale. (2003) “Natural Selection and the Emergence of a Mutation Phenotype: An Update of the Evolutionary Synthesis Considering Mechanisms That Affect Genomic Variation.” Annual Review of Microbiology, 57 (1). 121 from the same starting point: (2009) “Skeuomorph.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation. http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Skeuomorph&oldid=340233294. 122 “the embodiment of contingency”: Stephen Jay Gould. (1989) Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and Nature of History.

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New York: Basic Books, pp. xv, xviii. 126 “becomes increasingly inevitable”: Simon Conway Morris. (2004) Life’s Solution: Inevitable Humans in a Lonely Universe. New York: Cambridge University Press, p. xiii. 127 with details left to chance: Richard E. Lenski. (2008) “Chance and Necessity in Evolution.” The Deep Structure of Biology, ed. Simon Conway Morris. West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation. 127 “lines on similar phenotypes”: Sean C. Sleight, Christian Orlic, et al. (2008) “Genetic Basis of Evolutionary Adaptation by Escherichia Coli to Stressful Cycles of Freezing, Thawing and Growth.” Genetics, 180 (1). http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content/abstract/180/1/431. 127 “all outcomes would be different”: Sean Carroll. (2008) The Making of the Fittest: DNA and the Ultimate Forensic Record of Evolution.

Iron Sunrise by Stross, Charles

blood diamond, disinformation, dumpster diving, Future Shock, gravity well, hiring and firing, industrial robot, life extension, loose coupling, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, phenotype, planetary scale, postindustrial economy, quantum entanglement, RFID, side project, speech recognition, technological singularity, trade route, urban sprawl, zero-sum game

There’s a release about reinterpreting the absurdist elements of the Ugandan proletarian reformation dialectic through the refracting lens of neo-Dadaist ideological situationism.” “Whatever that means. Okay. Next question, where was this guy born? Where did he come from? What does he do?” “He was born somewhere in Paraguay. He’s had extensive phenotype surgery to make himself resemble his role model, the Last King of Scotland or President of Uganda or whoever he was. Got a brochure from one of his performances here — says he tries to act as an emulation platform for the original Idi Amin’s soul.” “And now he’s gone crazy, right? Can you dig anything up about the history of the original Mister Amin?

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His shoulder felt like a joint of uncooked meat, solid and immobile. There was a nasty stench in the air — if he’d lost bowel control already, that meant he was farther along than she’d wanted. “Witness for the Propagation, I request access to this one’s lineage. While the instance vector has proven unreliable, I believe with suitable guidance the phenotype may prove stable and effective.” Bayreuth was blinking at her in surprise. The Propagator nodded. “Your request has been received,” she said distantly. “A reproductive license is under consideration. Or were you thinking of a clone?” “No, recombination only.” Hoechst leaned closer, staring into U.

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She watched him over the rim of her glass, green eyes narrowed. Sweat-spiked black hair, high cheekbones, full red lips, narrow waist: a warrior’s body held in a sheath of silk that had taken master couturiers a month to stitch. She had the inhumanly symmetrical features that only a first-line clade could afford to buy for the alpha instances of their phenotype. “I brought you here because I think we may have gotten off on the wrong foot when we were first introduced.” Franz sat frozen in his chair, the glass of scotch — worth a small fortune, for it had been imported across more than two hundred light years — clutched in his right hand. “I’m not sure I understand you.”

A Dominant Character by Samanth Subramanian

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, Arthur Eddington, British Empire, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, Eddington experiment, epigenetics, Etonian, Fellow of the Royal Society, Gregor Mendel, Gunnar Myrdal, Louis Pasteur, peak oil, phenotype, statistical model, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple

These modifications alter the selective pressures on the organism, often to its advantage. (Niche construction is a new version of an older idea; Darwin studied earthworms with keen interest and described how they reworked the soil.) A third wrinkle is phenotypic plasticity, the ability of a single species to create multiple kinds of physical phenotypes, so as to best thrive according to the environment. A smartweed plant grown in bright sunlight will have thick but narrow leaves, to maximize photosynthesis and to remain cool; a genetically identical plant grown in dimmer conditions will sprout thin, broad leaves to capture as much light as possible.

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But the notion of the biochemical handiwork of genes had to be raised first, before it could be studied and expanded into the modern field of molecular genetics. John Innes was the ideal place to appraise the practical results of genetics and biochemistry. It held plot after plot of plants, their ancestries and breeding histories all carefully recorded, and their phenotypes—their heights or the colors of their flowers or their other features—plainly visible. Further, the institute had a crew of researchers who were adept at crossing plants for experiments. Many of these were women—unusual for the time, but Bateson had always collaborated with women, and he drafted several into John Innes from horticultural and agricultural colleges.

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See also New College (Oxford) Oxford Preparatory School, 63 Oxford University Junior Scientific Club, 57 oxygen Haldane tasting, 319 J.S.’s scientific study, 32 shortage, vs. carbon dioxide, 37–38 paint-pot theory, 110 Paley, William, 61 Natural Theology, 330 Pandavas, 271–72 panspermia, 126, 128 Pasteur, Louis, 207–8 Patnaik, Biju, 298 patriotism, 73 Pearson, Karl, 110, 111, 131 “peasant scientists,” 14 Penrose, Lionel, 205 peppered moth (Biston betularia), 113–15 phenotypic plasticity, 314 Philby, Kim, 167, 253 pH of blood, 102 Physiological Society in London, 76–77 physiology, research on underwater, 247–51 plants chromosomes, 260 genetics, 1 Plumer, Herbert, 76 political interests, 160–61 political philosophy, and evolutionary biology, 159 politics and Haldane, 175–78 scientific advances and, 21 scientists and, 10 Pollitt, Harry, 178, 210, 218, 219, 252, 267, 268, 269, 278 Polyakov, I.

A Crack in Creation: Gene Editing and the Unthinkable Power to Control Evolution by Jennifer A. Doudna, Samuel H. Sternberg

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, Anthropocene, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, carbon footprint, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, CRISPR, double helix, Drosophila, dual-use technology, Higgs boson, Mark Zuckerberg, microbiome, mouse model, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Steven Pinker, zoonotic diseases

Labradors are prone to some thirty genetic conditions, 60 percent of golden retrievers succumb to cancer, beagles are commonly afflicted with epilepsy, and Cavalier King Charles spaniels suffer from seizures and persistent pain due to their deformed skulls. These poignant medical problems haven’t kept humans from letting tastes dictate the genotype and phenotype of humankind’s best friend. Whatever one thinks of them, gene-edited cats and dogs—created with the help of biotechnology—are just around the corner. In late 2015, scientists in Guangzhou, China, reported the first application of CRISPR in beagles, using it to enhance muscle mass by knocking out the same myostatin gene linked to double muscling in whippet dogs and Belgian Blue cows.

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Finally, enthusiasm for making changes to the DNA of future humans was a natural outgrowth of breakthroughs in human genetics, especially the sequencing of the human genome. This incredible development made many people think that geneticists would soon be able to find the root causes of once-mysterious diseases as well as the genetic code for a much broader range of human phenotypes, from physical traits to cognitive ones. Once we fully understood the genetic factors that determine human health and performance, we might be able to select for—or perhaps even engineer—embryos with a genetic composition different than that of their parents. Better than that of their parents. Or so some scientists hoped.

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editing the myostatin gene in normal individuals to unleash enhanced, superhuman strength: E. P. Zehr, “The Man of Steel, Myostatin, and Super Strength,” Scientific American, June 14, 2013. gene-edited pigs had over 10 percent more lean meat than their unedited counterparts: L. Qian et al., “Targeted Mutations in Myostatin by Zinc-Finger Nucleases Result in Double-Muscled Phenotype in Meishan Pigs,”Scientific Reports 5 (2015): 14435. The scientists performed gene editing in a breed of goats known as Shannbei: X. Wang et al., “Generation of Gene-Modified Goats Targeting MSTN and FGF5 via Zygote Injection of CRISPR/Cas9 System,”Scientific Reports 5 (2015): 13878. so that chickens produce only females: S.

Spectrum Women: Walking to the Beat of Autism by Barb Cook, Samantha Craft

Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, cuban missile crisis, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, financial independence, Kickstarter, labor-force participation, longitudinal study, Maui Hawaii, neurotypical, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, phenotype, rolodex, seminal paper, sexual politics, theory of mind, women in the workforce

What Judith Singer articulated in 1998 with the term “neurodiversity,” expanded on later by Steve Silberman, was an idea of humanity not as a narrowly defined homogeneous being but as an ever-evolving, heterogeneous species whose evolutionary survival has been dependent on a widely diverse range of developmental phenotypes. That diversity includes what we call the autism spectrum (Silberman, 2015; Singer, 2016). Unfortunately, humans (as a whole—and, yes, I know I’m generalizing here) are not good at dealing with what they cannot categorize and contain in conceptual boxes, and they have difficulties accepting what is not “like them.”

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What we do know is that autism is found in consistent numbers throughout the human race and that it is a genetically mediated phenomenon, which means autistic people almost certainly have been around a very, very long time. We suspect that the autistic genome—possibly in terms of a broader autism phenotype—may be responsible for, or at least contribute to, excellence in our capacities in engineering, science, math, music, IT, maybe more. So that begs the question: why is it defined as “a disorder?” Another Merriam-Webster definition of development is “leading through a succession of changes each of which is preparatory for the next.”

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Currently, I am a detective with acute interest in research on female (mis)diagnosis. Dr. Will Mandy at University College London is the best researcher on autistic females to date. His study “The experiences of late-diagnosed women with autism spectrum conditions: An investigation of the female autism phenotype,” co-authored by autistic advocate Robyn Steward, appears in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, October 2016, Volume 46. Collecting a lot of clothes (I took up sewing to afford a wardrobe), hats, recordings, and/or books (my earliest friends) can be fine as long as it doesn’t turn into obsession.

Climbing Mount Improbable by Richard Dawkins, Lalla Ward

Boeing 747, Buckminster Fuller, computer age, Drosophila, Fellow of the Royal Society, industrial robot, invention of radio, John von Neumann, Menlo Park, phenotype, Robert X Cringely, stem cell, the long tail, trade route

CLIMBING MOUNT IMPROBABLE By the Same Author THE SELFISH GENE THE EXTENDED PHENOTYPE THE BLIND WATCHMAKER RIVER OUT OF EDEN Original drawings by Lalla Ward CLIMBING MOUNT IMPROBABLE Richard Dawkins W. W. Norton & Company New York London Copyright © 1996 by Richard Dawkins Original drawings copyright © 1996 by Lalla Ward All rights reserved First published as a Norton 1997 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Dawkins, Richard, 1941— Climbing mount improbable / Richard Dawkins; original drawings by Lalla Ward. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references.

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They are DC8 mutations because they involve the duplication of existing complexity, not the 747 invention of new complexity. There is something that could come to the evolutionary aid of the freak macro-mutant, namely the fact that the effect of a given gene depends upon the other genes that are present in the same body. The effect of a gene on a body, its so-called phenotypic effect, is not written on its surface. There is nothing in the DNA code of the achondroplasia gene that a molecular biologist could decode as ‘short’ or ‘dwarf’. It has the effect of making limbs short only when surrounded by lots of other genes, to say nothing of other features of the environment.

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dance, S. P. (1992) Shells. London: Dorling Kindersley. Darwin, C. (1859) The Origin of Species. Harmondsworth (1968): Penguin. Darwin, C. (1882) The Various Contrivances by Which Orchids are Fertilised by Insects. London: John Murray. Dawkins, R. (1982) The Extended Phenotype. Oxford: W. H. Freeman. Dawkins, R. (1986) The Blind Watchmaker. Harlow: Longman. Dawkins, R. (1989) ‘The evolution of evolvability’. In Artificial Life. (Ed. C. Langton.) Santa Fe: Addison-Wesley. Dawkins, R. (1989) The Selfish Gene. (2nd edn) Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dawkins, R. (1995) River Out of Eden.

The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution by Richard Dawkins

Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrew Wiles, Arthur Eddington, back-to-the-land, Claude Shannon: information theory, correlation does not imply causation, Craig Reynolds: boids flock, Danny Hillis, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, Dmitri Mendeleev, domesticated silver fox, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Gregor Mendel, heat death of the universe, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, invisible hand, Large Hadron Collider, Louis Pasteur, out of africa, phenotype, precautionary principle, Thomas Malthus

Also by Richard Dawkins The Selfish Gene The Extended Phenotype The Blind Watchmaker River Out of Eden Climbing Mount Improbable Unweaving the Rainbow A Devil’s Chaplain The Ancestor’s Tale The God Delusion THE GREATEST SHOW ON EARTH THE EVIDENCE FOR EVOLUTION RICHARD DAWKINS For Josh Timonen FREE PRESS A Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc. 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, NY 10020 Copyright © 2009 by Richard Dawkins Originally published in Great Britain in 2009 by Bantam Press an imprint of Transworld Publishers All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.

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This book is my personal summary of the evidence that the ‘theory’ of evolution is actually a fact – as incontrovertible a fact as any in science. It is not the first book I have written about evolution, and I need to explain what’s different about it. It could be described as my missing link. The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype offered an unfamiliar vision of the familiar theory of natural selection, but they didn’t discuss the evidence for evolution itself. My next three books, in their different ways, sought to identify, and dissolve, the main barriers to understanding. These books, The Blind Watchmaker, River Out of Eden and (my favourite of the three) Climbing Mount Improbable, answered questions like, ‘What is the use of half an eye?’

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Religious organizations, by contrast, are assumed to benefit humanity without any obligation to demonstrate it and even, apparently, if they are actively engaged in promoting scientific falsehood. NOTES PREFACE p. vii offered an unfamiliar vision: The Selfish Gene (1976; 30th anniversary edn 2006) and The Extended Phenotype (rev. edn 1999). p. vii My next three books: The Blind Watchmaker (1986), River Out of Eden (1995) and Climbing Mount Improbable (1996). p. vii My largest book: The Ancestor’s Tale (2004). CHAPTER 1: ONLY A THEORY? p. 5 In 2004 we wrote a joint article in the Sunday Times : ‘Education: questionable foundations’, Sunday Times, 20 June 2004.

The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis by Julie Holland

benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Burning Man, confounding variable, drug harm reduction, intentional community, longitudinal study, Mahatma Gandhi, mandatory minimum, Maui Hawaii, meta-analysis, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Stephen Hawking, traumatic brain injury, University of East Anglia, zero-sum game

The use of vegetative cuttings is used to preserve unique characteristics, as the new plant will have the same genotype (genetic composition) and thus the potential for the same phenotypic characteristics as the plant it was taken from, though a different environment may change the plant appearance and chemistry. Offspring of sexually propagated plants (those grown from seed) will have genotypes different from the parent plants, as inheritable characteristics (genes) that determine the plant phenotype come from both the male and the female plant. Planned plant crosses (mating of male and female plants by transfer of pollen from a specific male to a specific female) are used to develop new varieties.

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Other authorities (Schultes and Hofmann 1991) insist that morphological differentiation (narrower leaflets, thinner cortex, and more branches) and lack of cannabinoids within plants of European origin, as compared with plants in India, indicate two species, C. sativa (historically identified as the source of hemp fibers) and C. indica (historically identified as the source of canabinoid-containing resin). Additional species have been distinguished: C. ruderalis (wild/naturalized accessions) and C. chinensis (currently thought to be a subset of C. indica) have been proposed due to differentiation in phenotypic traits of the plants (Schultes and Hofmann 1991). A recent investigation on allozyme (an enzyme that differs by one amino acid from other forms of the same enzyme) variation within 157 populations of Cannabis (Hillig 2005) strongly suggests that the genus Cannabis consists of only two species, C. sativa and C. indica.

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Strains of Cannabis approved for industrial hemp production in Europe and elsewhere have been selected to produce only minute amounts of psychoactive constituents, while strains of Cannabis used for medicinal and recreational use have been selected for production of cannabinoids (Small and Marcus 2002). A study of ninety-seven Cannabis accessions (de Meijer et al. 2003) indicated that plants produced for delta-9-tetrahydrocannabidiol (THC) and cannabidiol (CBD) demonstrated a continuous variation in content of these constituents among the accessions with no phenotypic characteristic (physical appearance) that could accurately separate those with high THC from those with low THC content. All species of Cannabis can seemingly be bred to produce fiber or cannabinoids. BOTANICAL HISTORY Historically, botanical interest in Cannabis undoubtedly began as the plant became recognized as a source of food, fiber, and medicine.

Four Battlegrounds by Paul Scharre

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, active measures, activist lawyer, AI winter, AlphaGo, amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics, artificial general intelligence, ASML, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business continuity plan, business process, carbon footprint, chief data officer, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, DALL-E, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, digital map, digital rights, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, dual-use technology, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, fake news, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of journalism, future of work, game design, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, geopolitical risk, George Floyd, global supply chain, GPT-3, Great Leap Forward, hive mind, hustle culture, ImageNet competition, immigration reform, income per capita, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, Internet of things, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, large language model, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Nate Silver, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, one-China policy, Open Library, OpenAI, PalmPilot, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, phenotype, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QAnon, QR code, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, reshoring, ride hailing / ride sharing, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, self-driving car, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, slashdot, smart cities, smart meter, Snapchat, social software, sorting algorithm, South China Sea, sparse data, speech recognition, Steve Bannon, Steven Levy, Stuxnet, supply-chain attack, surveillance capitalism, systems thinking, tech worker, techlash, telemarketer, The Brussels Effect, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, TikTok, trade route, TSMC

Chinese state scientists have, at times, sought to combine AI with biometrics on the edge of what is scientifically possible. Scientists working with the Ministry of Public Security developed DNA-based face mapping technology, which attempts to reconstruct a digital image of a person’s face based on their DNA. The process, called DNA phenotyping, produces a rough image that is not accurate enough to identify an individual, but might help narrow down potential individuals based on approximate facial characteristics. It has been used occasionally by law enforcement in the United States, although the technique is controversial because it effectively profiles a wide swath of people.

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dbcode=CJFQ&dbname=CJFDLAST2016&filename=GOAN201601012&v=MDk0OTdvUjhlWDFMdXhZUzdEaDFUM3FUcldNMUZyQ1VSTDJlWitSdkZ5am5XcjNQSWlMS1lMRzRIOWZNcm85RVo=. 89who “has gone to internet cafes together more than twice”: “China: Police ‘Big Data’ Systems Violate Privacy, Target Dissent.” 89synthesize data to uncover and alert police to unusual activity: “China: Police ‘Big Data’ Systems Violate Privacy, Target Dissent.” 89purchasers of new mobile phones, data plans, or SIM cards: “China Due to Introduce Face Scans for Mobile Users,” BBC News, December 1, 2019, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-50587098; “工信部持续加强电话用户实名登记管理工作维护公民网络空间合法权益 [The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology continued to strengthen the real-name registration management of telephone users and safeguard the legitimate rights and interests of citizens in cyberspace],” Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of People’s Republic of China, September 27, 2019, http://www.miit.gov.cn/n1146285/n1146352/n3054355/n3057724/n3057728/c7448683/content.html (page discontinued). 89nationwide DNA collection program: Emile Dirks and James Leibold, Genomic Surveillance: Inside China’s DNA Dragnet (Australian Strategic Policy Institute, June 17, 2020), https://www.aspi.org.au/report/genomic-surveillance. 90the world’s largest DNA database: Wenxin Fan, Natasha Khan, and Liza Lin, “China Snares Innocent and Guilty Alike to Build World’s Biggest DNA Database,” Wall Street Journal, updated December 26, 2017, https://www.wsj.com/articles/china-snares-innocent-and-guilty-alike-to-build-worlds-biggest-dna-database-1514310353; Sui-Lee Wee and Paul Mozur, “China Uses DNA to Map Faces, With Help From the West,” New York Times, December 3, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/03/business/china-dna-uighurs-xinjiang.html. 90DNA phenotyping: Wee and Mozur, “China Uses DNA to Map Faces”; Christoph Lippert et al., “Identification of Individuals by Trait Prediction Using Whole-Genome Sequencing Data,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114, no. 38 (September 2017): 10166-10171, https://www.pnas.org/content/114/38/10166; Yaniv Erlich, Major Flaws in “Identification of Individuals by Trait Prediction Using Whole-Genome Sequencing Data” (bioRxiv, September 7, 2017), https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/185330v3; Donald Maye, “Corsight’s Upcoming DNA to FACE: ‘Terrifying’ Warns Privacy Expert,” IPVM, January 31, 2022, https://ipvm.com/reports/corsight-dna-face; Parabon Nanolabs, “Published Police Investigations,” https://snapshot.parabon-nanolabs.com/posters#subject-identified. 90technique is controversial: Ashley Southall, “Using DNA to Sketch What Victims Look Like; Some Call It Science Fiction,” New York Times, October 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/nyregion/dna-phenotyping-new-york-police.html; Tate Ryan-Mosley, “This Company Says It’s Developing a System That Can Recognize Your Face from Just Your DNA,” MIT Technology Review, January 31, 2022, https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/01/31/1044576/corsight-face-recognition-from-dna/; Sense About Science, “Making Sense of Forensic Genetics,” January 25, 2017, https://senseaboutscience.org/activities/making-sense-of-forensic-genetics/. 90DNA derived from men in Xinjiang: Wee and Mozur, “China Uses DNA to Map Faces.” 90legal restraints: “China: Police ‘Big Data’ Systems Violate Privacy, Target Dissent.” 90Regional surveillance networks: “‘天网’网什么” [“Skynet” Nets What]. 90Skynet is not always connected: “‘天网’网什么” [“Skynet” Nets What]. 90Chinese police face the hurdles of incompatible databases: “China: Police ‘Big Data’ Systems Violate Privacy, Target Dissent”; Maya Wang, “China’s Bumbling Police State,” Wall Street Journal, December 26, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-bumbling-police-state-11545869066. 90facial recognition sunglasses that police have used: Mozur, “Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams.” 12.

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., “Identification of Individuals by Trait Prediction Using Whole-Genome Sequencing Data,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114, no. 38 (September 2017): 10166-10171, https://www.pnas.org/content/114/38/10166; Yaniv Erlich, Major Flaws in “Identification of Individuals by Trait Prediction Using Whole-Genome Sequencing Data” (bioRxiv, September 7, 2017), https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/185330v3; Donald Maye, “Corsight’s Upcoming DNA to FACE: ‘Terrifying’ Warns Privacy Expert,” IPVM, January 31, 2022, https://ipvm.com/reports/corsight-dna-face; Parabon Nanolabs, “Published Police Investigations,” https://snapshot.parabon-nanolabs.com/posters#subject-identified. 90technique is controversial: Ashley Southall, “Using DNA to Sketch What Victims Look Like; Some Call It Science Fiction,” New York Times, October 19, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/19/nyregion/dna-phenotyping-new-york-police.html; Tate Ryan-Mosley, “This Company Says It’s Developing a System That Can Recognize Your Face from Just Your DNA,” MIT Technology Review, January 31, 2022, https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/01/31/1044576/corsight-face-recognition-from-dna/; Sense About Science, “Making Sense of Forensic Genetics,” January 25, 2017, https://senseaboutscience.org/activities/making-sense-of-forensic-genetics/. 90DNA derived from men in Xinjiang: Wee and Mozur, “China Uses DNA to Map Faces.” 90legal restraints: “China: Police ‘Big Data’ Systems Violate Privacy, Target Dissent.” 90Regional surveillance networks: “‘天网’网什么” [“Skynet” Nets What]. 90Skynet is not always connected: “‘天网’网什么” [“Skynet” Nets What]. 90Chinese police face the hurdles of incompatible databases: “China: Police ‘Big Data’ Systems Violate Privacy, Target Dissent”; Maya Wang, “China’s Bumbling Police State,” Wall Street Journal, December 26, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/chinas-bumbling-police-state-11545869066. 90facial recognition sunglasses that police have used: Mozur, “Inside China’s Dystopian Dreams.” 12.

The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us by Diane Ackerman

23andMe, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, airport security, Albert Einstein, Anthropocene, augmented reality, back-to-the-land, carbon footprint, clean water, climate change refugee, dark matter, dematerialisation, digital divide, double helix, Drosophila, epigenetics, Google Earth, Google Glasses, haute cuisine, Higgs boson, hindcast, Internet of things, Lewis Mumford, Loebner Prize, Louis Pasteur, Masdar, mass immigration, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, microbiome, mirror neurons, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, personalized medicine, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, refrigerator car, rewilding, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, skunkworks, Skype, space junk, stem cell, Stewart Brand, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the High Line, theory of mind, urban planning, urban renewal, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog

Now he’s among those ringing the biggest changes, including a dramatically new view of the human body and the jostles of cells that inhabit living tissues—even what a cell is and how a cell behaves. Not only do we know about stem cells, we’re starting to wield them in clever ways to mend the body, and it’s not arduous to do; it can be as simple as exposing cells to the right chemicals or stimuli. There’s been a stunning paradigm shift from the rule of phenotype—one cell type fated for one job and nothing else—to phenotypic elasticity, the idea that cells are far more versatile and can be repurposed, like a hammer used to anchor a kite. We now grasp that a wafer of skin can be retrained to do just about anything. It’s a new category of raw material, like wood or stone, with potent gifts.

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., 55, 73 New York University, 197–98 night fiddlers, 172–73 Nile perch, 131 Nin, Anaïs, 186 nitrogen, 36 NOAA, 210 Norrbotten, Sweden, 275–76, 277–78, 280 North Africa, 106 North Carolina, 46 northern goshawks, 132 Northwest Passage, 135 Norway, 101, 124, 132 Norway maples, 132 nuclear bomb, 191 nuclear power, 22, 100 nuclear winter, 8, 9 Obama, Barack, 177 Obama administration, 233 obesity, 196 ocean, acidification of, 65, 66, 154 octopuses, 202, 216 Ohio, 77 Ohyama, Ken, 23 oil, 99, 106 oil refineries, 22 oil spills, 300 Oman, 132 1D farming, see mariculture Operation Acoustic Kitty, 146 Operation Migration, 139–40 opossums, 129 Orangutan Awareness program, 28 Orangutan Outreach, 5, 6, 313 orangutans, 3–7, 25–28, 132, 216, 217, 231, 296 human genes shared by, 3 impending extinction of, 27–28, 313 solitary lives of, 4 tool use by, 5 orca whales, 135, 144 orchids, 206 Orff, Kate, 55 organic fertilizer, 64 Organovo, 238–39 Ornstein, Len, 54 Orthopets, 256 Oshkosh Airshow, 187 osteoarthritis, 248 otters, 124 Outer Island, 58 ovarian cancer, 281–82 Överkalix, Sweden, 279–80 oxen, 140 oxeye daisies, 132 oxygen, 41, 53 oysters, 54–55, 56, 57, 60, 61–63 Ozawa, Masakatsu, 23 P-52 (python), 128 pacemakers, 253 Panbanisha (bonobo), 201–2, 203 pancreas, 281 pansies, 90 Papua New Guinea, 72 Paradise Lost (Milton), 212–13 Paris, 95–96 Paris Habitat, 96 Parkinson’s disease, 253, 295 parks, 73–74, 78 parrots, 202 parsley, 89 Partula, 156–59 passenger pigeons, 151–52 Pasteur, Louis, 290 Patagonia National Park, 99 pathogens, 290 peacock feathers, 91 Pearce, Mick, 93–94 Pembrey, Marcus, 279, 281 penguins, 134–35 peonies, 125 People’s Daily, 146 peppers, 89 peregrine falcons, 132 periwinkles, 61–62 permafrost, 48 personality, 200, 214, 216–17, 222–23, 229, 253, 292, 297, 299, 303–4, 307 Peru, 77 pesticides, 153, 166 pets, 149–50 Pettit, Don, 16 Phelps, Michael, 258 phenotypic elasticity, 249–50 Philippines, 46 photonic clusters, 35 phytoplankton, 61 piezoelectricity, 317 pigeons, 140, 142, 144, 145–46 pigs, 71 in war, 146 Pistorius, Oscar, 258, 260 Plan Bee, 166 planes, 171, 191 planets, 220–21 Planets, The: A Cosmic Pastoral (Ackerman), 220 plankton, 134–35 PlantLab, 90 plants: in cities, 79–85 texting by, 205–7 plastic stents, 253 Pleistocene Park, 151 Pliocene, 29 PLOS ONE, 271 pneumonia, 183 Poland, 78, 132, 273 polar bears, 134 polar molecules, 35 polar T3, 90 pollution, 154 marine transport, 76 Polo, Marco, 272 polymer teeth, 253 Polynesia, 156, 157 Ponce, Brent, 260–61 ponies, 137–38 Pons, Lily, 264 poppies, 125 population growth, 10 Porter, Eliot, 25 poverty, 285, 286 Power Felt, 185 prairie dogs, 131 presence, 199 Price of Freedom: Americans at War exhibit, 145 probiotics, 300 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 129 produce, 89 Project Orcon, 145 Project Pigeon, 145 Project X-Ray, 145 proprioception, 175–76 prosthetics, 256–58 protein, 190 protozoans, 172, 289–90, 300 Przewalski’s horses, 132 Puerto Rico, 175 Puppe (orangutan), 26–27 purple finch, 137 pyrolysis technology, 76 pythons, 128–31, 133, 140, 315 Quai Branly Museum, 80–82, 84–85 quarries, 24 quasi-crystal, 34 rabbits, 126, 129, 133 rabies, 298 racoons, 129 rail trails, 77 rainforests, 79 rains, 41 Raison, Charles, 300–301 Rambuteau subway station, 95–96 Rand, Ayn, 59 rats, 282–83, 296 reading, 191–92 Reconciliation Ecology, 74 recycling, 52, 74, 78, 87, 88, 90 heat, 95–108 red clover, 166 Red Delicious, 137 red foxes, 153 red kites, 132 Red Sea Star Restaurant, 76 reef death, 36–37 refrigerators, 87 regenerative medicine, 244 Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, 254–55 reindeer, 132 Reiss, Diana, 202, 204 religion, 176 Relman, David, 300 Renaissance, 190 Renault, 83 renewable energy, 307 restaurant rooftop farms, 88 retinas, 253 Revolutionizing Prosthetics program, 258–59 Rezwan, Mohammed, 52–53 rhododendrons, 125 rice, 71 Rice Plant Conservation Science Center, 82 Rig Veda, 257 RinkWatch.org, 40, 314 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 78 Ripasso Energy, 100–101, 106 roadkill, 115–16 robomoths, 146–47 RobotCub Consortium, 218–19 robot fleas, 148 robotic evolution, 210, 213, 224–25 robots, 210–25 rocketships, 171 rock strata, 31, 35 roe deer, 124 Romania, 78, 124 Romans, 185 Rome, 267 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 145 rosemary, 90 Rosenzweig, Michael, 74 roses, 125 Rotterdam, Netherlands, 77 Royal Botanic Gardens, 118 Rwanda, 46 Ryu Chan Hyeon, 102 saber-tooth tigers, 162, 163 Sagan, Carl, 220 sage, 125 Sahara Desert, 54 Sahel, 46 St.

Unweaving the Rainbow by Richard Dawkins

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, complexity theory, correlation coefficient, David Attenborough, discovery of DNA, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Eddington experiment, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jaron Lanier, Mahatma Gandhi, music of the spheres, Necker cube, p-value, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Skinner box, Steven Pinker, Stuart Kauffman, world market for maybe five computers, Zipf's Law

The DNA of any one species doesn't literally come into direct contact with the DNA molecules of its predators, competitors or mutualistic partners. 'Climate' has to be understood less intimately than when the arena of gene cooperation is the interior of cells, as it is for genes within one species. In the larger arena, it is the consequences of genes in other species—their 'phenotypic effects'—that constitute an important part of the environment in which the natural selection of genes within neighbouring species goes on. A rainforest is a special kind of environment, fashioned and defined by the plants and animals that live in it. Every one of the species in a tropical rainforest consists of a gene pool, isolated from all other gene pools as far as sexual mixing is concerned, but in contact with their bodily effects.

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The co-evolution is what may have driven the inflation of the human brain. I said that I'd return to the illusion of the 'little man in the brain'. Not to solve the problem of consciousness, which is way beyond my capacity, but to make another comparison between memes and genes. In The Extended Phenotype, I argued against taking the individual organism for granted. I didn't mean individual in the conscious sense but in the sense of a single, coherent body surrounded by a skin and dedicated to a more or less unitary purpose of surviving and reproducing. The individual organism, I argued, is not fundamental to life, but something that emerges when genes, which at the beginning of evolution were separate, warring entities, gang together in cooperative groups, as 'selfish cooperators'.

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Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 26. Darwin, C. (1859) On the Origin of Species. London (1968): Penguin Books. 27. Davies, N. B. (1992) Dunnock Behaviour and Social Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 28. Dawkins, M. S. (1993) Through Our Eyes Only? Oxford: W. H. Freeman. 29. Dawkins, R. (1982) The Extended Phenotype. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 30. Dawkins, R. (1986) The Blind Watchmaker. London: Penguin Books. 31. Dawkins, R. (1989) The Selfish Gene. Second Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 32. Dawkins, R. (1995) River Out of Eden. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. 33. Dawkins, R. (1996) Climbing Mount Improbable.

Ask Me About My Uterus: A Quest to Make Doctors Believe in Women's Pain by Abby Norman

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, complexity theory, correlation does not imply causation, double helix, Downton Abbey, feminist movement, financial independence, Kickstarter, messenger bag, period drama, phenotype, quantum entanglement, Saturday Night Live, the scientific method, women in the workforce

Her current research project at Columbia, the development of a tracking app called Phendo, was her attempt to quantify the unquantifiable, not only for herself, but for the collective. For science, and for patients. One thing that’s missing from our understanding of endometriosis at every level, as Noémie pointed out, is its phenotype. For a disease like endo, a phenotype is the set of characteristics that can be observed: symptoms, test results, and microscopic evidence from tissue samplings, for example. Noémie and her team developed Phendo in the hope that they would be able to utilize a “citizen science” initiative to gather information about endo patients’ experiences, histology, and biomarkers.

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Saying that endometriosis (like hysteria before it) is a disease exclusive to women, or even of uteruses, isn’t just noninclusive—it’s not true. Endometriosis has been found in men. Take this clinical portrait: an eighty-five-year-old man had an endometrioma in his abdomen, and for ten years, it was believed to be a carcinoma of the prostate. When they studied this patient’s chromosomes, he was phenotypically male, and, as it turned out, he did in fact have prostate cancer. But he also had an endometrioma that was independent of the cancer. Another more recent case involved a fifty-two-year-old man who came to the emergency room with stabbing pain in his lower abdomen and pelvis which had been ongoing for about three weeks.

Data Source Handbook by Pete Warden

en.wikipedia.org, machine readable, Menlo Park, openstreetmap, phenotype, social graph

eBook <www.wowebook.com> "kind": "customsearch#result", "title": "mana cross pang confidante surplus fine formic beach metallurgy ...", "htmlTitle": "mana cross pang confidante surplus fine formic beach metallurgy \u003cb\u003e...\u003c/b\u003e", "link": "http://www.cs.caltech.edu/courses/cs11/material/advjava/lab4/unsorted_words.txt", "displayLink": "www.cs.caltech.edu", "snippet": "... phonic phenotype exchangeable Pete pesticide exegete exercise persuasion .... lopsided judiciary Lear proverbial warden Sumatra Hempstead confiscate ...", }, ... Wikipedia Wikipedia doesn’t offer an API, but it does offer bulk data downloads of almost everything on the site. One of my favorite uses for this information is extracting the titles of all the articles to create a list of the names of people, places, and concepts to match text against.

50 Future Ideas You Really Need to Know by Richard Watson

23andMe, 3D printing, access to a mobile phone, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, BRICs, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon credits, Charles Babbage, clean water, cloud computing, collaborative consumption, computer age, computer vision, crowdsourcing, dark matter, dematerialisation, Dennis Tito, digital Maoism, digital map, digital nomad, driverless car, Elon Musk, energy security, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, Ford Model T, future of work, Future Shock, gamification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, germ theory of disease, global pandemic, happiness index / gross national happiness, Higgs boson, high-speed rail, hive mind, hydrogen economy, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, life extension, Mark Shuttleworth, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, new economy, ocean acidification, oil shale / tar sands, pattern recognition, peak oil, personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, private spaceflight, profit maximization, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Florida, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, self-driving car, semantic web, Skype, smart cities, smart meter, smart transportation, space junk, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, Stewart Brand, strong AI, Stuxnet, supervolcano, synthetic biology, tech billionaire, telepresence, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Malthus, Turing test, urban decay, Vernor Vinge, Virgin Galactic, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, web application, women in the workforce, working-age population, young professional

First, many drugs are starting to fall out of patent restrictions, and generic drug makers (particularly in Asia) are becoming more aggressive about attacking patents so that generic “lookalike” drugs are getting to be cheaper and more commonplace. The second reason for the trend is technology. Developments in areas such as genomics and personal phenotyping mean that personalized medicine is becoming a reality, and pharmaceutical companies are shifting research and development expenditure toward specialty products and therapies that target niche medical conditions and subpopulations. A 9 million euro, EU-funded project, Food4Me, is being launched to look at all aspects of personalized nutrition—namely how food intake could be tailored to suit each individual’s physical and genetic makeup.

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A 9 million euro, EU-funded project, Food4Me, is being launched to look at all aspects of personalized nutrition—namely how food intake could be tailored to suit each individual’s physical and genetic makeup. Perhaps rather than call it personalized medicine, we should call it personalized health. There’s even a European study on delivering personalized nutrition according to phenotype. In the end, it really is up to you to look after yourself by whatever method you choose from the hundreds of possibilities available so that you don’t need medicine. Yes, patients know best and can be trusted to have access to all their data. the condensed idea Patient power timeline 2014 Apple introduce iMedic monitoring feature on iPhone 6 2018 Dunnhumby and Tesco put in charge of 25 percent of UK hospitals 2020 Launch of Medipedia, a crowd-sourced medical directory 2025 All medical records accessed via the “cloud” 2030 All hospitals rated eBay style by patients 2040 TripAdvisor launches hospital review spin-off 25 Medical data mining Medicine, like insurance, isn’t always that smart.

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom

agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, anthropic principle, Anthropocene, anti-communist, artificial general intelligence, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, Bayesian statistics, bioinformatics, brain emulation, cloud computing, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, cosmological constant, dark matter, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, epigenetics, fear of failure, Flash crash, Flynn Effect, friendly AI, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Gödel, Escher, Bach, hallucination problem, Hans Moravec, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, iterative process, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Large Hadron Collider, longitudinal study, machine translation, megaproject, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, mutually assured destruction, Nash equilibrium, Netflix Prize, new economy, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, NP-complete, nuclear winter, operational security, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, phenotype, prediction markets, price stability, principal–agent problem, race to the bottom, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, reversible computing, search costs, social graph, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, statistical model, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supervolcano, synthetic biology, technological singularity, technoutopianism, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Nature of the Firm, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trolley problem, Turing machine, Vernor Vinge, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, World Values Survey, zero-sum game

Genome-wide complex trait analysis, using studies with vast numbers of subjects, is just now starting to become feasible and will greatly increase our knowledge of the genetic architectures of human cognitive and behavioral traits.40 Any trait with a non-negligible heritability—including cognitive capacity—could then become susceptible to selection.41 Embryo selection does not require a deep understanding of the causal pathways by which genes, in complicated interplay with environments, produce phenotypes: it requires only (lots of) data on the genetic correlates of the traits of interest. It is possible to calculate some rough estimates of the magnitude of the gains obtainable in different selection scenarios.42 Table 5 shows expected increases in intelligence resulting from various amounts of selection, assuming complete information about the common additive genetic variants underlying the narrow-sense heritability of intelligence.

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If one wished to speak provocatively, one could say that individuals created from such proofread genomes might be “more human” than anybody currently alive, in that they would be less distorted expressions of human form. Such people would not all be carbon copies, because humans vary genetically in ways other than by carrying different deleterious mutations. But the phenotypical manifestation of a proofread genome may be an exceptional physical and mental constitution, with elevated functioning in polygenic trait dimensions like intelligence, health, hardiness, and appearance.58 (A loose analogy could be made with composite faces, in which the defects of the superimposed individuals are averaged out: see Figure 6.)

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A misplaced faith in the inherent beneficence of the evolutionary process can get in the way of a fair evaluation of the desirability of a multipolar outcome in which the future of intelligent life is determined by competitive dynamics. Any such evaluation must rest on some (at least implicit) opinion about the probability distribution of different phenotypes turning out to be adaptive in a post-transition digital life soup. It would be difficult in the best of circumstances to extract a clear and correct answer from the unavoidable goo of uncertainty that pervades these matters: more so, if we superadd a layer of Panglossian muck. A possible source for faith in freewheeling evolution is the apparent upward directionality exhibited by the evolutionary process in the past.

The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World by Pedro Domingos

Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Arthur Eddington, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Benoit Mandelbrot, bioinformatics, Black Swan, Brownian motion, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, combinatorial explosion, computer vision, constrained optimization, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, double helix, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, experimental subject, Filter Bubble, future of work, Geoffrey Hinton, global village, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, incognito mode, information retrieval, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, John Snow's cholera map, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, large language model, lone genius, machine translation, mandelbrot fractal, Mark Zuckerberg, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Narrative Science, Nate Silver, natural language processing, Netflix Prize, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, NP-complete, off grid, P = NP, PageRank, pattern recognition, phenotype, planetary scale, power law, pre–internet, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford marshmallow experiment, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, the long tail, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, Vernor Vinge, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, white flight, yottabyte, zero-sum game

But there is no necessary connection between intelligence and autonomous will; or rather, intelligence and will may not inhabit the same body, provided there is a line of control between them. In The Extended Phenotype, Richard Dawkins shows how nature is replete with examples of an animal’s genes controlling more than its own body, from cuckoo eggs to beaver dams. Technology is the extended phenotype of man. This means we can continue to control it even if it becomes far more complex than we can understand. Picture two strands of DNA going for a swim in their private pool, aka a bacterium’s cytoplasm, two billion years ago.

…

See also Cancer drugs Duhigg, Charles, 223 Dynamic programming, 220 Eastwood, Clint, 65 Echolocation, 26, 299 Eddington, Arthur, 75 Effect, law of, 218 eHarmony, 265 Eigenfaces, 215 80/20 rule, 43 Einstein, Albert, 75, 200 Eldredge, Niles, 127 Electronic circuits, genetic programming and, 133–134 Eliza (help desk), 198 EM (expectation maximization) algorithm, 209–210 Emotions, learning and, 218 Empathy-eliciting robots, 285 Empiricists, 57–58 Employment, effect of machine learning on, 276–279 Enlightenment, rationalism vs. empiricism, 58 Entropy, 87 Epinions, 231 Equations, 4, 50 Essay on Population (Malthus), 178, 235 Ethics, robot armies and, 280–281 Eugene Onegin (Pushkin), 153–154 “Explaining away” phenomenon, 163 Evaluation learning algorithms and, 283 Markov logic networks and, 249 Master Algorithm and, 239, 241, 243 Evolution, 28–29, 121–142 Baldwinian, 139 Darwin’s algorithm, 122–128 human-directed, 286–289, 311 Master Algorithm and, 28–29 of robots, 121–122, 137, 303 role of sex in, 134–137 technological, 136–137 See also Genetic algorithms Evolutionaries, 51, 52, 54 Alchemy and, 252–253 exploration-exploitation dilemma, 128–130, 221 further reading, 303–304 genetic programming and, 52 Holland and, 127 Master Algorithm and, 240–241 nature and, 137–139 Evolutionary computation, 121–142 Evolutionary robotics, 121–122, 303 Exclusive-OR function (XOR), 100–101, 112, 195 Exploration-exploitation dilemma, 128–130, 221 Exponential function, machine learning and, 73–74 The Extended Phenotype (Dawkins), 284 Facebook, 44, 291 data and, 14, 274 facial recognition technology, 179–180 machine learning and, 11 relational learning and, 230 sharing via, 271–272 Facial identification, 179–180, 182 False discovery rate, 77, 301 Farming, as analogy for machine learning, 6–7 Feature selection, 188–189 Feature template, 248 Feature weighting, 189 Ferret brain rewiring, 26, 299 Feynman, Richard, 4 Filter bubble, 270 Filtering spam, rule for, 125–127 First principal component of the data, 214 Fisher, Ronald, 122 Fitness Fisher on, 122 in genetic programming, 132 Master Algorithm and, 243 neural learning and, 138–139 sex and, 135 Fitness function, 123–124 Fitness maximum, genetic algorithms and, 127–128, 129 Fix, Evelyn, 178–179, 186 Fodor, Jerry, 38 Forecasting, S curves and, 106 Foundation Medicine, 41, 261 Foundation (Asimov), 232 Fractal geometry, 30, 300 Freakonomics (Dubner & Levitt), 275 Frequentist interpretation of probability, 149 Freund, Yoav, 238 Friedman, Milton, 151 Frontiers, 185, 187, 191, 196 “Funes the Memorious” (Borges), 71 Futility of bias-free learning, 64 FuturICT project, 258 Galileo, 14, 72 Galois, Évariste, 200 Game theory, machine learning and, 20 Gaming, reinforcement learning and, 222 Gates, Bill, 22, 55, 152 GECCO (Genetic and Evolutionary Computing Conference), 136 Gene expression microarrays, 84–85 Generalizations, choosing, 60, 61 Generative model, Bayesian network as, 159 Gene regulation, Bayesian networks and, 159 Genetic algorithms, 122–128 Alchemy and, 252 backpropagation vs., 128 building blocks and, 128–129, 134 schemas, 129 survival of the fittest programs, 131–134 The Genetical Theory of Natural Selection (Fisher), 122 Genetic programming, 52, 131–133, 240, 244, 245, 252, 303–304 sex and, 134–137 Genetic Programming (Koza), 136 Genetic search, 241, 243, 249 Genome, poverty of, 27 Gentner, Dedre, 199 Ghani, Rayid, 17 The Ghost Map (Johnson), 182–183 Gibson, William, 289 Gift economy, 279 Gleevec, 84 Global Alliance for Genomics and Health, 261 Gödel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter), 200 Good, I.

Singularity Sky by Stross, Charles

anthropic principle, cellular automata, Conway's Game of Life, cosmological constant, disinformation, Doomsday Clock, Extropian, Future Shock, gravity well, Higgs boson, Kuiper Belt, life extension, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, phenotype, prisoner's dilemma, quantum entanglement, skinny streets, technological singularity, uranium enrichment

They are Festival's antithesis, do you not feel this in your whiskers?" Sister Seventh blinked redly at She Who Observes, pawing for the control tree of the somatic bench. "Here we see a nestdrone." The scene slewed into an enclosed space, following the abducted cobbler into the walls of the castle, "Phenotypic dispersal leads to extended specialization, as ever, with the usual degree of free will found in human civilization. But this one is structured to prevent information surge, do you not see?" "Information surge? Prevented? Life is information!" Sister Seventh farted smugly. "I have been monitoring the Festival.

…

Trees and grass had exchanged leaves, so that now they walked on a field of spiny pine needles, while flat blades waved overhead; the leaves were piebald, black and green, with the glossy black spreading. Most disturbingly of all, the shrubbery seemed to be blurring at the edges, species exchanging phenotypic traits with unnatural promiscuous abandon. "What's responsible for this?" Burya asked Sister Seventh, during one of their hourly pauses. The Critic shrugged. "Is nothing. Lysenkoist forestry fringe, recombinant artwork. Beware the Jabberwocky, my son. Are there only Earth native derivations in this biome?"

…

"You asking me?" Rubenstein snorted. "I'm no gardener." "Guesstimation implausible," Sister Seventh replied archly. "In any event, some fringeworks are recombinant. Non human-centric manipulations of genome. Elegant structures, modified for nonpurpose. This forest is Lamarckian. Nodes exchange phenotype-determinant traits, acquire useful ones." "Who determines their usefulness?" "The Flower Show. Part of the Fringe." "What a surprise," Burya muttered. At the next stop, he approached the rabbit. "How far?" he demanded. The lagomorph sniffed at the breeze. "Fifty kilometers? Maybe more?"

Neurodiversity at Work: Drive Innovation, Performance and Productivity With a Neurodiverse Workforce by Amanda Kirby, Theo Smith

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, Automated Insights, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, call centre, commoditize, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, deep learning, digital divide, double empathy problem, epigenetics, fear of failure, future of work, gamification, global pandemic, iterative process, job automation, lockdown, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, Minecraft, neurotypical, phenotype, remote work: asynchronous communication, remote working, seminal paper, the built environment, traumatic brain injury, work culture

Two recent papers in the past few years have exemplified the need to consider how services are delivered and are really saying we need to move away from the strict categorization and medical model of psychiatry and paediatrics. The recent consensus paper on identification and treatment of ADHD and ASD5 and the seminal paper from Thapar, Cooper and Rutter6 both highlight the real clinical conundrum of ‘the complexity of clinical phenotypes and the importance of the social context’. A phenotype means the challenges or strengths that someone can observe in someone. They go on to argue ‘the importance of viewing neurodevelopmental disorders as traits but highlight that this is not the only approach to use’. Moving away from the medical model approach to a more social model produces real emotions in both parents and adults, with some people wanting to be known as autistic and being defined as such and others not wanting a diagnosis or to be defined by one label.

…

Access to Work scheme (DWP, UK) 15, 91, 93, 99, 114, 122, 163, 183, 193 acquired brain injury (ABI) 294 ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) 282–83, 294 access to support and services 41–42 hyperactive/impulsive type 70 inattentive (dreamy) type 70 male bias in diagnostic criteria 69–71 parenting style and 23 spiky profiles 45–54 adjustments see reasonable adjustments; workplace adjustments Admiral Insurance, inclusive culture (case study) 228–31 adversity, cumulative adversity over time 68–71, 84 affinity 224 AI assessment 57, 153 air traffic controllers, pre-selection testing 155 Amazon 57 Applied Behavioural Analysis (ABA) 261 apprenticeships 125–36 Argyris, Chris 263 ascertainment bias 69–70 ASD see autism spectrum disorder Asperger, Hans 32 Asperger’s syndrome (AS) 32, 128–29, 294 Aspire2inspire Dyslexia CIC 71–72 assessment (related to recruitment) 137 approach to assessments and skill tests 149–51 assessment paradigm 56–57 future developments 151–56 game-based assessments 152, 153–54, 155 use of work samples 146, 147, 149 validity of methods used 143–47 when hiring diverse talent 147–49 assessment, diagnostic see diagnosis attention deficit disorder (ADD) 294 auditory discrimination 294 Austin, Paul 193–95 autism-friendly companies, Autotrader (case study) 87–91 autism spectrum condition (ASC) 284–86 autism spectrum disorder (ASD) 32, 284–86, 294–95 male bias in diagnostic criteria 69–71 parenting style and 23 spiky profiles 45–54 stereotyping of people with 44 variability within the diagnosis 41 Autotrader (case study) 87–91 Bandura, Albert 50 Banji, Milimo 82, 237–39 Barrett, Lincoln (AKA High Contrast) 26–27, 63–66, 236 barriers to entry 62, 75, 79 Barron, Christopher 203 BBC, Cape neurodiversity initiative (case study) 203–07 Beetham, Janette 242–44 belonging and inclusion 224–25 bias awareness of developmental coordination disorder (dyspraxia) 70–71 in the recruitment process 114–15, 143–47 Billington, Paul 228–31 biopsychosocial model 33, 165–66, 295 Blau, Abram 30 blended working 114 Blume, Harvey 5, 298 Boorman, Bill 54–55, 81 brain scans 153 British Sign Language 214 Bronfenbrenner, Urie 33 Brookes vs the Government Legal Service (2017) 101 bullying in school 26, 198 Buro Harpold 249 CAI, Autism2Work (A2W) programme (case study) 128–29 camouflaging 70, 295 case studies becoming autism-inclusive at Microsoft 127 CAI Autism2Work programme 128–29 Dyllan Rafail 193–96 Elizabeth Takyi 71–72 Helen Arnold Richardson 75–77 Helen Needham (neurodiversity inclusion at work) 179–81 Hunter Hanson (perspective on interviews) 138–40 inclusive culture at Admiral Insurance 228–31 interviewing and selection methods (Kangas and Vlastelica) 143–45 Jenny McLaughlin 123–24 Leena and Sean at the BBC 203–07 Lincoln Barrett (AKA High Contrast) 63–66 Ravensbourne University 250–52 Shelley Winner 77–81 Umbrella Project, ADHD Foundation 123–24 untapped potential at IBM 193–96 categorization, implications of categorizing people 40–44 champions misuse of 261–62, 266 role of neurodiversity champions 239–42, 243–44 change management, MAD abilities and 52–53 Choudhury, Atif 268–71 chronic tic disorder (CTD) 295 Cleaton, Mary 23 Cockayne, Anne 141, 198–99, 201–02 communication, synchronous and asynchronous 134–35 communities, building and engaging with 236–39, 244 comorbidity 295 compensating 295 ComputerAid 116 conferences after the event 215 ask delegates for ideas about adjustments or specific support 212–13 break and lunch times 215 content and form of the day 214–15 data confidentiality 215 feedback from attendees after the event 215 guidance for presenters 213 key points 220 on the day 214 planning the conference 212 planning to be neuroinclusive 209–15 speakers and form of delivery 211–12 the space and the place 213 Universal Design 213 when you do not know anyone there 209–10 contract work 116 co-occurrence of medical conditions 43, 295 Cooper, Ross 254 Corrie, Clare 202–03 Covey, Stephen 28 Covid-19 pandemic, impacts of 13, 119–20, 153 creative industries, neurological diversity in 236–37 creative thinking, spiky profiles and 44, 52 Crenshaw, Kimberlé 84 criminal activity, loss of potential talents to 74–75 culture add 147–48 culture fit 147–48 Deficits in Attention, Motor Control and Perception (DAMP) 43 Delaney, Diane 195 Deloitte 12 developmental coordination disorder (DCD) 70–71, 288–89, 295 developmental dyscalculia see dyscalculia developmental dyslexia see dyslexia developmental language disorder (DLD) 73–74, 289–90, 295–96, 296–97 diagnosis access to support and services 31, 41–43 challenging the validity and usefulness of labels 29 cumulative lifetime effects of lack of identification 71–72 heterogeneity within labels 43 homeless people and rough sleepers 73 impact of a later diagnosis 34–36, 71–72 implications of categorizing people 40–44 male bias in diagnostic criteria 69–71 medical versus social model 22–23 positive and negative aspects of 32–34 reasons for missed diagnosis in childhood 72–74 reasons why people miss out on 68 uncertainty and diversity within categories 41 under-represented groups 72–73 undiagnosed people in prisons 73–74 waiting times for diagnostic assessments 42 why we like labels 28–29 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 31–32, 296 diagnostic classification systems 31–32 digital assessment technology 154–55 digital poverty 154–55 direct discrimination 100, 101–02 disability concept in the social model 95–96 definition in the Equality Act (2010) 97–98 disclosure of 98–99, 160–61, 197–98, 199 Disability Confident employers 121 Disability Discrimination Act (1995) 95 disability employment gap 12–13 disclosure of disability 98–99, 160–61, 197–98, 199 discrimination by association 102 direct discrimination 100, 101–02 Human Rights Act (1998) 104 indirect discrimination 101–02 key legislation against 95–99 diversity 225 business case for 225 business performance and 12 definition of 222–23 Diversity and Ability (D&A) 268–71 diversity policy 117 DNA assessments 153 Do-IT Neurodiversity Profiler 45–46, 56, 76–77 Doyle, Nancy 257–68 Drucker, Peter 16 DSM see Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders dyscalculia 176, 287–88, 296 dysgraphia 296 dyslexia 286–87, 296 assessment paradigms and 56–57 diagnostic uncertainties 41 Elizabeth Takyi (case study) 71–72 rates among people in prisons 48, 50 spiky profiles 45–54 stereotyping of people with 44 dyspraxia 296 see also developmental coordination disorder (DCD) Early Symptomatic Syndromes Eliciting Neurodevelopmental Clinical Examinations (ESSENCE) 43 education reasons for lack of educational progress 72 reasons why people miss out on 68–71 ‘school to prison’ pipeline 73–74 Education, Health and Care Plan (ECH) 296 Edwards, Rob 253–54 eliminating kryptonite (removing barriers to entry) 62 elitism 258–59, 263 emotional intelligence 224 empathy 114–15, 118, 224 employers ‘ban the box’ campaign 75 criminal record background checks 75, 79–80 duty under the Equality Act (2010) 96 equality provision legislation 13–14 ethical, moral and legal responsibilities 12–13 job adverts and attracting new talent 14 neuro-complementary teams 16 neurodiversity among your current employees 117–18 positive action 99 responsibility to make workplace adjustments 163 retaining the talent that you have 14–15 scenarios to test neurodiversity knowledge and actions 109–10 untapped potential of neurodiverse talent 15–16 why they should be more neuro-inclusive 12–16 see also reasonable adjustments; workplace adjustments employment see recruitment entrepreneurs, neurodiverse talent 15, 252–55 Equal Pay Act (1970) 95 equality definition of 158, 222 distinction from equity 158, 222 Equality Act (2010) UK 13, 92, 95–99, 160–61 disclosure of disability 98–99 duty of employers 96 harassment 102–03 main features of 96–97 protected characteristics 96–97 reasonable adjustments 96 victimization 103–04 what is included as a disability 97–98 equity 158, 222, 225 Evenbreak 116 Exceptional Individuals 116 executive function 296 executive function deficit 296 expressive language 296 expressive language disorder 296–97 eye contact 114–15, 141 Facebook 261 family life, strain of long waiting times for diagnostic assessments 42 Fitzgerald, F Scott 22 Fraser, Keith 34–36, 72 future of work 247–55 balancing out neurodivergent strengths and challenges 254–55 educational preparation for 250–52 entrepreneurship and neurodiversity 252–55 inclusive environments and accessibility 249–50 key points 255 Ravensbourne University (case study) 250–52 Gallup vs Newport City Council (2013) 92 game-based assessments 152, 153–54, 155 gender bias consequences for many undiagnosed adult females 71–72 diagnosis of neurodivergent traits 69–71 language used in job descriptions 118–19 perceived differences in neurodivergent traits 69–71 view of divergent behaviours in others 70 Genius Within CIC 257, 263–64 Google, Project Aristotle 228 Grant, Adam 156 Grayling, Chris 50 groupthink 148 Hacking, Ian 30 Hanson, Hunter, perspective on interviews (case study) 138–40 harassment 102–03 Health and Safety at Work etc Act (1974) 104–05 Heathrow Airport, Disability Network 123–24 Hewitt, Jean 249–50 Hewlett, Katherine 254 hidden disability sunflower scheme 90 High Contrast (electronic music producer and DJ) see Barrett, Lincoln Highhouse, Scott 144 hiring managers, supporting those with spiky profiles 55 hiring schemes 125–36 Hobbs, Lucy 236 homeless people and rough sleepers 73, 81 hot desking 120, 169 Human Rights Act (1998) 104 hyperactivity 297 IBM, untapped potential (case study) 193–96 ICD see International Classification of Diseases impulsive behaviours 297 inclusion Alan Kriss and inclusive talent management 271–73 Atif Choudhury and Diversity and Ability (D&A) 268–71 changing concept of neurodiversity 256–57 definition of 221–22 diversity and 222–23 diversity and inclusion champion Paul Sesay 273–78 Nancy Doyle on neurodiversity at work 257–68 Inclusive Companies 273, 274, 275 inclusive workplace 221–44 Admiral Insurance (case study) 228–31 all-inclusive approach 223–25 belonging and inclusion 224–25 big companies and small companies 242–44 bringing your whole self to work 228 building and engaging with communities 236–39, 244 business case for diversity 225 caring has currency 225 defining inclusion 221–23 future of 247–55 how to be inclusive 227 how to succeed as 225–28 influence on employee wellbeing 224–25 neurodiversity awareness training 242–44 neurodiversity champions 239–42, 243–44 neurodiversity networks 231–35, 243–44 recruitment and 224 support groups 227 valuing and respecting differences 223–25 indirect discrimination 101–02 individual development plan (IDP) 297 induction 183–96 Access to Work scheme 193 appropriate and timely support 183–85 changes over time 192 clarify what the job is and what the rules are 190–91 considerations when carrying out 190 finding your way around 191–92 getting started 190 getting support in place 192 integration into the workplace 188–89 key points 196 level of involvement of the new employee 193 mentoring support 192–93 neurodiversity awareness training 189–90 neurodiversity champions 192–93 ‘non-rules’ (unspoken rules) of the organization 191 preparation for the start of a new job 183–85 purpose of 185–88 see also onboarding induction meeting 167 intellectual disability (ID) 297 International Classification of Diseases (ICD), WHO 31, 297 International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF), WHO 33, 166 International Labour Organization 95 internships 125–36 intersectionality 29, 84 interviewers, check your internal dialogue 150–51 interviews 137–56 designing the interview process 137–38 future developments 151–56 hurdles faced by candidates 137–38 identifying the important skills for a role 142–45 myth of the perfect candidate 140–41 perspective of Hunter Hanson (case study) 138–40 remote interviewing 138 structured interviews 146 validity of interviewing and selection methods 143–47 IQ (intelligence quotient) 297 job adverts 118–20, 122 job crafting 202 Kangas, Mathea 142–45 Kanner, Leo 23 Kelly, Kirstie 1–2 kinaesthesia 297 Klass, James 274 Kriss, Alan 271–73 Kumulchew v Starbucks Coffee Company UK Ltd (2017) 101 labels 21–37 access to support and 22 biases relating to 23 challenging the terminology 27–28 challenging the validity and usefulness of 29 changes over time 31–32 changing perceptions of human variability 30–31 definition and scope of neurodiversity 24–27 diagnostic classification systems 31–32 enabling conversations about neurodiversity 22–24 getting the terminology right or wrong 23–24 impact of a later diagnosis 34–36 positive and negative aspects of diagnosis 32–34 social perceptions of 32–33 why we like them 28–29 see also categorization; diagnosis language changing perceptions of human variability 30–31 different meanings of words to different people 27–28 labels 21–37 learning disabilities and difficulties (LDD) 297 learning disability (LD) 297 left-handedness, changing perceptions of 30–31 legislation equality provision 13–14 importance that employers know about 96 workplace policies and procedures 86–111 Leonard, Jamie 1 line management BBC neurodiversity initiative (case study) 203–07 confidentiality issue 200–01 discussion with the wider team 200–01 employee decision about disclosure to 197–98 employee diagnosis disclosure and access to support 199 having good conversations with employees 197–207 key points 207 learning from shared experiences 203 making reasonable adjustments 201–02 role of HR in guiding the manager 200 starting a conversation and getting it right 198–207 support for managers 199–200 training in relation to neurodiversity 107, 201–03 LinkedIn 202–03 literacy difficulties, factors contributing to 50 MAD abilities (Moving Attitudes towards Diverse abilities) 46–53 managers see line management masking 70 McDowall, Almuth 264 McGrath, James 44 McLaughlin, Jenny (case study) 123–24 McLeod vs Royal Bank of Scotland plc (2016) 100 medical model 22–23, 31, 43, 298 meetings consider recording meetings 219 consider who has not participated and the reasons why 219 copies of meeting notes or presentations 219 face-to-face meetings 216–17 gain feedback about being inclusive 219 have a facilitator 218–19 key points 220 length of the meeting 218 offer closed captioning 219 offer different ways to ask questions 219 online meetings 217–19 planning to be neuroinclusive 209–10, 216–20 provide information before the meeting 218 set the ground rules at the start 218 webinars 217–19 mental health first aiders (MHFAs) 242, 266 mental retardation 298 Microsoft 91 becoming autism-inclusive (case study) 127 Milton, Damian 114 Minimal Brain Dysfunction 43 misophonia 298 mixed receptive-expressive language disorder 298 Muench, Nick, Autism2Work programme (case study) 128–29, 130 multiple tic disorder 290–92 music industry, neurological diversity in 236–37 National Autistic Society (NAS) 87–91 National Diversity Awards 273, 274–75 Needham, Helen (case study) 179–81 neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD) 298 neurodisability (ND) 298 neurodivergence 25, 298 neurodiversity 298–99 as variability of human brains 40 categorization and 40 changing concept of 256–57 definition and scope of the concept 24–27 diagnostic uncertainties 41 Judy Singer’s concept of 278 origin and meaning of the term 2–6 prospects for the future 279 scenarios to test employer knowledge and actions 109–10 strengths and challenges approach 42–44 understanding among university students 82–83 what the concept means to different people 16–19 why it is important for organizations 10–19 neurodiversity policy 117 neuroqueer 299 neurotypical 25 NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence), UK 164, 227 non-stimulant medicines 299 Nothing About Us Without Us 239 obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) 299 Offord, Jennifer 231–33 onboarding 133–34, 183–85, 196 see also induction parenting and neurodiversity in children 23 PAS 6463: ‘Design for the Mind: Neurodiversity and the built environment’ (BSI) 250 performance appraisals 105–08 adaptations for a dyslexic employee (possible scenario) 110 dealing with poor work performance (possible scenario) 109 person-centred approach 165–66 personality assessments 146 pervasive developmental disorder – not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS) 299 phenotypes 43 phoneme 299 phonology 299 pragmatics 299 pre-employment stage, loss of cognitively diverse demographics 68–84 prison population employment challenges after release 74–75, 79 Helen Arnold Richardson (case study) 75–77 levels of undiagnosed DLD 73–74 rates of neurodiverse traits 48, 50 ‘school to prison’ pipeline 73–74 Shelley Winner (case study) 77–81 Pritchard, Gary 250–52 proprioception 299 psychological safety 228 psychometric assessments 53–54, 101, 147 psychostimulant medicines 299 PwC 223 Race Relations Act (1976) 95 Rafail, Dyllan (case study) 193–96 Ravensbourne University (case study) 250–52 reasonable adjustments (made by employers) 15, 24–25, 100, 103, 116, 117, 121 duty of employers 96 individual situations 201–02 performance appraisals and 105–07, 110 see also workplace adjustments receptive language 299 Recruiting Toolbox 142–45, 148 recruitment process accessibility of the application process 120 alternative application process 120 alternative working arrangements 119–20 alternatives to a CV 121 assessment paradigms 56–57 attracting neurodiverse talent 113–24 bias in 114–15 bidirectional communication strategy 114–15 candidate experience 114–15 candidates’ confidence to sell their strengths and abilities 56 challenges for neurodiverse candidates 129–30 challenges for people with spiky profiles 53–58 challenges of looking for a job 113 check for inadvertent bias in job adverts 122 disability employment gap 12–13 general guidelines 117–22 impact of having a criminal record 74–75, 79 inclusion and 224 information about your company 122 job descriptions 113 key points 124 language used in job adverts 118–20, 122 language used relating to work 113 making workplaces more inclusive 1–2 means of disclosure of support needs 121 recognition of different strengths 54–58 rethinking how we recruit 151–56 supporting those with spiky profiles 55 technology to support recruitment and HR 122 Umbrella Project (case study) 123–24 untapped potential at IBM (case study) 193–96 use of consultants and advisory/support groups 118 validity of interviewing and selection methods 143–47 ways to encourage neurodiverse applicants 116 website accessibility 120 why some people are excluded 11–12 working from home 119–20 see also apprenticeships; hiring schemes; internships; interviews; work placements references, writing for an employee with disabilities (possible scenario) 109–10 referral, gender bias in 69–70 Richardson, Helen Arnold (case study) 75–77 Right Resources 242 Robbins, Mike 228 Robison, John Elder 114–15 rough sleepers 73 Saxon, Yvonne 92–94 Sayers, Dorothy L 40 self-confidence 26, 56 self-efficacy 50 self-stimulatory behaviour 300 semantics 300 seminars, neuroinclusive 209–10, 217–19, 220 Sesay, Paul 273–78 Sex Discrimination Act (1975) 95 Singer, Judy 5, 262, 278, 298 Skarsgård, Stellan 154 small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), entrepreneurship and neurodiversity 252–55 social identity, intersectionality and cumulative adversity 84 social media, building and engaging with communities 236–39, 244 social model 22–23, 43, 95–96, 300 Sonne, Thorkil 194 Specialisterne Foundation 116, 193–96, 271–73 specific communication and language needs (SCLN) 289, 296 specific language impairment (SLI) 289, 296, 300 specific learning disability/difficulty (SpLD) 300 spiky profiles 45–58 challenge of the traditional recruitment process 53–58 creative thinking and 44, 52 definition of 40, 45 Do-IT Neurodiversity Profiler 45–46 MAD abilities 46–53 recognition of different strengths 54–58 staff networks 231–35, 243–44 stereotyping 33, 44, 70 stigma 6–8 stimming 300 strengths and challenges, enabling strengths 62–66 see also spiky profiles Sun Tzu 3 sunflower lanyards 123 superheroes, enabling neurodiverse abilities 61–67 superpowers, view of neurodiversity 61–62 support, access to 41–43, 62–84 synesthesia 65–66, 300 Takyi, Elizabeth (case study) 71–72 TapIn organization 82, 237 team working 16, 113–14, 147–48, 228 technology assistive technology 162 IT support strategies 178 opportunities for workplace adjustments 161–62 tools to support recruitment and HR 122 terminology see labels Thompson, Ed 1–2 tic disorders 300 tic spectrum disorder 290–92 tics 301 tokenism 262–63, 264–65 Tourette’s syndrome (TS) 290–92, 301 training champions training 243–44 neurodiversity awareness training 189–90, 201–03, 242–44 staff networks training and support 243–44 traumatic brain injury (TBI) 301 TRUFeeds case study 81 Tsaprounis, Christos 87–91 Umbrella Project, ADHD Foundation 123–24 United Nations, Agenda for Sustainable Development 3–4 Universal 236–37 Universal Design principles 199, 213 universities, understanding of neurodiversity 82–83 van de Haterd, Bas 151–54 Vermeesch, Michael 127 Veulliet, Yves 195, 196 victimization 103–04 Vlastelica, John 142–45, 148 von Koëttlitz, Raphaele 268 webinars 217–19 websites, readability of 170–73 Welch, Florence 236 Wells v the Governing Body of Great Yarmouth High School (2017) 102 Whyte, William H 17 Williams, Andrew 193–95 Williams, Robin 48, 154 Winner, Shelley (case study) 77–81 Wolchin, Rachel 57, 164 work placements 122, 125–36 working from home, neurodiverse advantages and disadvantages 248–49 working memory 301 working memory deficit 301 working remotely 16, 119–20, 170, 247–48 workplace bidirectional communication strategy 114–15 in-work support, Access to Work scheme 122 onboarding processes 113–14 understanding the ‘social rules’ 113–14 see also inclusive workplace workplace adjustments 158–81, 260, 262 Access to Work scheme (UK) 163 arriving at work 168 aspects to consider 164–65 biopsychosocial approach 165–66 consider the individual context 166–67 determining what is reasonable 162–63 distinction between equality and equity 158 employer awareness of duty under the Equality Act (2010) 160–61 examples of 161–62 generic principles 167–81 getting started 163–64 Helen Needham (case study) 179–81 helpful apps and software 178 home working 170 induction meeting 167 IT support strategies 178 key points 181 neurodiversity inclusion at work (case study) 179–81 office working 169 opportunity for innovation and inclusion 159–60 person-centred approach 165–66 responsibility to make the adjustments 163 supporting someone with coordination challenges 176–77 supporting someone with literacy-related challenges 177–78 supporting someone with numeracy challenges 176 supporting someone with organizational challenges 174 supporting someone with social, language and communication challenges 174–76 thinking about accessibility in all that you do 170–73 timely placement of 173 travel to work 168 Universal Design principles 170 use of technology 161–62 websites and written materials 170–73 what they are 160–65 wider positive impacts of 159–60 wording of statements about 164 work environment 168–70 see also reasonable adjustments workplace policies and procedures approach to putting in place 100–05 Autotrader (case study) 87 focus on individual needs 91 key legislation 95–99 key points 110–11 legal issues 86–111 performance appraisals 105–08 putting the policies and procedures in place 92–94 written materials, readability of 170–73 YouTube, ‘The Life Autistic’ video diaries (Hunter Hanson) 138 Publisher’s note Every possible effort has been made to ensure that the information contained in this book is accurate at the time of going to press, and the publishers and authors cannot accept responsibility for any errors or omissions, however caused.

Glasshouse by Charles Stross

air gap, cognitive dissonance, experimental subject, gravity well, lateral thinking, loose coupling, military-industrial complex, operational security, peer-to-peer, phenotype, prisoner's dilemma, sensible shoes, theory of mind, white picket fence

There's a certain type of look some postrehab cases get while they're in the psychopathic dissociative stage, still reknitting the raveled threads of their personality and memories into a new identity. The insensate anger at the world, the existential hate—often directed at their previously whole self for putting them into this world, naked and stripped of memories—generates its own dynamic. Wild blackeyed hatred and the perfect musculature of the optimized phenotype combine to lend Blondie an intimidating, almost primal presence. Nevertheless, she's got enough self-control to issue a challenge before she attacks. Kay, shy and much further advanced in recovery than either of us, cowers in her seat as Blondie glares at me. That annoys me—Blondie's got no call to intimidate bystanders.

…

Reeve, are you having another fugue?" Things are going gray around me. He leans close, and I whisper, "* * *," in his ear. Then— DESPERATION is the engine of necessity. It's two hundred megs since that committee meeting with Al and Sanni and a lot of things have changed. Me, for example: I'm not in military phenotype anymore. Neither is Sanni. We're civilians now, corpuscles of military experience discharged into the circulating confusion of reconstruction that has become the future of Is. I'm not used to being human again, ortho or otherwise—bits of me are missing. When the war exploded, trapping me on the MASucker for almost a generation, I was reduced to what I was carrying on my person and in my head.

…

Her name's Andy—short for Andromeda. She swears she wants to be a boy when she grows up; she isn't going to hit puberty for another six years, and she may change her mind when her body starts changing. The important thing is we live in a society where she can be whatever she wants. She looks like a random phenotypic cross between Reeve and Sam, and sometimes when I see her in the right light, just catching her profile, my breath catches in my throat as I see him diving off that cliff. Did he know I was already pregnant when he carefully made sure I was out of harm's way, then jumped? It shouldn't be possible, but sometimes I wonder if he suspected.

Life at the Speed of Light: From the Double Helix to the Dawn of Digital Life by J. Craig Venter

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Apollo 11, Asilomar, Barry Marshall: ulcers, bioinformatics, borderless world, Brownian motion, clean water, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, epigenetics, experimental subject, global pandemic, Gregor Mendel, Helicobacter pylori, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John von Neumann, Louis Pasteur, Mars Rover, Mikhail Gorbachev, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stuart Kauffman, synthetic biology, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Turing machine

34 Artificial life as originally conceived has had a new virtual life in the form of games and movies, with the murderous Hal 9000 of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the genocidal Skynet of the Terminator films, and the malevolent machines of The Matrix. However, the reality still lags far behind. In computer-based artificial life there is no distinction between the genetic sequence or genotype of the manufactured organism and its phenotype, the physical expression of that sequence. In the case of a living cell, the DNA code is expressed in the form of RNA, proteins and cells, which form all of the physical substances of life. Artificial life systems quickly run out of steam, because genetic possibilities within a computer model are not open-ended but predefined.

…

The more DNA we added, the greater the number of transplant colonies that resulted. So what was it, exactly, that we now had? Was it M. capricolum cells that contained only the M. mycoides DNA, including the added lacZ and antibiotic-resistance tetracycline resistance tetM genes? What had changed in the wake of the genome transplant? What was the phenotype of cells derived from the transplanted DNA? We subjected the blue cells to a number of complex analytical procedures to find out what proteins were present. Using antibodies that were exquisitely sensitive to proteins in each parent-cell type, we investigated what the new transplant cells had on their cell surface.

Virus of the Mind by Richard Brodie

Abraham Maslow, cognitive dissonance, disinformation, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, Gödel, Escher, Bach, joint-stock company, multilevel marketing, New Journalism, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, publish or perish, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy

But we want to be clear that memes are internal representations, as in the psychological definition. And we want to look at memes as ideas— as our software, our own internal programming—that produce an effect on the outside world, as in the cognitive definition. The result is the definition I use in this book, a definition similar to the one Dawkins adopted in his 1982 book The Extended Phenotype: Definition of Meme A meme is a unit of information in a mind whose existence influences events such that more copies of itself get created in other minds. Now, with this definition, we can answer the questions I asked Charles Simonyi and Greg Kusnick back at Microsoft. Is a yawn a meme? No, a yawn is behavior and, as far as I know, has nothing to do with an internal representation of any information.

…

See gambling, psychology of 237 virus of the mind brains changing world and, 83–84 purposes of, 69–71 Bulgatz, Joseph, 197 Buss, David: Evolution of Desire, 99 Butler, Samuel, 17 button-pushing memes advertising and, 152–53 birds of a feather and, 116 cheap insurance and, 118–19, 121, 122, 181 crisis and, 146, 188 dominance and, 189 elitism and, 116 food and, 188 helping children and, 115–16, 120, 146, 160 problems and, 189 racism and, 116 security and, 188 sex and, 189 special interests and, 176–77 windows of opportunity and, 107, 130, 146, 172, 198 buttons, second-order, 77–79 approval and, 78 belonging and, 77–78, 189 caring and, 78 distinguishing yourself and, 78 obeying authority and, 78 Celestine Prophecy (Redfield), 208 chain letters, 85–87 children, 67 altruism and, 115–16 consciousness and, 228–29 education and, 223–29 mind viruses and, xix, 46, 145 operant conditioning and, 129 238 Index religion and, 128 See also under button-pushing memes Cleary, Thomas, 217 Coca-Cola, 21, 129, 153 cognitive dissonance, 126–27, 130–31, 143, 203 cognitive therapy, 8 communication, evolution of, 71–72 confidence games, 140–42 Congreve, William, 81 consciousness, 76–77, 228–29 conspiracy theories, 162–64 crisis meme, 72–73 Crossfire, 161 cults key elements of, 201 mission and, 202 cultural viruses conspiracy theories and, 162–64 government and, 170–79 institutions and, 147–48 journalism and, 159–61, 164–67 panhandling and, 169–70 pets and, 168–69 television and advertising and, 149–51 danger meme, 73 Darwin, Charles, xiii, xxi, 111 Dawkins, Richard, 47 Blind Watchmaker, 191 Extended Phenotype, 11 Selfish Gene, 4–5 selfish-gene theory and, 51 Dennett, Daniel, 8–9 Diet Pepsi, 153–54 distinction-memes, 19–21 money and, 27 239 virus of the mind perception and, 29–30 distinguishing yourself, 78 DNA genetic evolution and, 53–56, 58–59 viruses and, 40–41 drives, basic. See basic drives education, reinvention of, 225–29 Ellis, Albert, 8 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 147, 205 Self-Reliance, 81–82 est, 208–9 ethical questions, 211–12 evangelism, 80, 146, 183, 187, 200, 205 virus shells and, 207 evolution battle for sex and, 90–91 communication and, 71–72 concept of, xvi consciousness and, 76–77 definition of, 49 direction of, 56, 67, 85–86 engineering and, 57–59 entropy and, 48–49 fitness and, 50–51 general tendencies versus specific individuals and, 95 human eye and, 57, 58 memes and, 85–86 natural selection and, 48–49 replicators and, 49–50 selfish gene and, 51–53, 55, 62 selfish meme and, 67–68 sex characteristics and, 91–95 evolutionary psychology, 18, 88, 89 concept of, xvi exponential growth, 39 240 Index faith meme, 81 familiarity meme, 81 fear altruism and, 115–17 bad decisions and, 123 evolution and, 112–14 modern life and, 114–15 overcoming of, 123–24 revulsion and, 112 superstition and, 121–23 urban legends and, 120–21 Feynman, Richard, 89 fitness evolution and, 50–51 memes and, 71–74 Forum, The, 208–9 four F’s.

The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum by Temple Grandin, Richard Panek

Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, correlation does not imply causation, dark matter, David Brooks, deliberate practice, double helix, ghettoisation, Gregor Mendel, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, Khan Academy, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mouse model, neurotypical, pattern recognition, phenotype, Richard Feynman, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, The future is already here, theory of mind, traumatic brain injury, twin studies

One reason is that even when the genotype—the DNA at conception—is identical in both twins, the genes might work differently inside the cell. The other reason is that the genotypes might not be identical at birth, due to spontaneous mutations in the DNA of one or both of the twins. Both sets of genetic differences contribute to an individual’s phenotype—the person’s physical appearance, intellect, and personality. Knowing that genetics plays a role in autism, of course, is only a start. The next question is, Which gene or genes? Even into the early years of the twenty-first century, some researchers held out hope that autism might be the result of one or just a handful of gene deviations in an individual’s DNA.

…

See pervasive developmental disorders (PDD) pervasive developmental disorders (PDD), [>]–[>], [>]. See also Asperger syndrome; autism spectrum disorder (ASD) pervasive developmental disorders not otherwise specified (PDD-NOS), [>], [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>] pesticide exposure, [>] pharmacological treatment. See antidepressants; drugs phenotype, [>] Physical Therapy (journal), [>] picture thinking. See also pattern thinking; verbal (word-fact) thinking; visual (picture) thinking education and, [>]–[>] employment and, [>], [>], [>], [>]–[>] plasticity of brain, [>]–[>] Pollock, Jackson, [>] prefrontal cortex, [>] psychoanalytic approach to diagnosis, [>]–[>] public views of autism, [>], [>]–[>] Pythagorean theorem, 147–[>], [>] Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, Tito, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>] Raven’s Progressive Matrices, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] reading.

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin

4chan, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, end-to-end encryption, epigenetics, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, information security, Kevin Roose, lockdown, mass immigration, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Overton Window, phenotype, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, zero-sum game, éminence grise

A third posted six pictures of me, juxtaposed against a crude diagram of homo neanderthalus. They were mostly old Twitter profile pictures: one from a photo session I’d done for a small Brooklyn blog and another from a 2015 appearance on Jeopardy!, my awkward smile inches from Alex Trebek’s weathered, handsome face. “Neanderthal phenotype certainly isn’t defined by the skull shape alone,” wrote the anonymous user, below the photos of me. “Their body tended to be wide and broad and robust in comparison to more modern types such as Cro-Magnon.” I looked down at myself and wondered if this was the reason I’d had so little success dieting.

…

In a similar incident in June and July of 2018, students at Yeshiva University, an Orthodox Jewish university in New York City, were horrified to find that thousands of their photos had been harvested from YU’s Flickr page and other public sources and posted on the neo-Nazi site Vanguard News Network. In sprawling threads, commenters on the Vanguard News Network sought to determine the “phenotype” of the Jew, used racially disparaging terms like Juden, and added pictures of students from Yeshiva University–affiliated high schools. According to the YU Commentator, the university’s student paper, “There are countless photos of babies, couples and the elderly on the thread.” One female student at Stern College, Yeshiva University’s all-women sister school, told the Commentator that finding her photo being mocked by neo-Nazis made her feel targeted, unsafe, and small—a feeling I knew well.

The Pattern Seekers: How Autism Drives Human Invention by Simon Baron-Cohen

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Asperger Syndrome, assortative mating, autism spectrum disorder, bioinformatics, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, David Attenborough, discovery of penicillin, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Greta Thunberg, intentional community, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jim Simons, lateral thinking, longitudinal study, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, neurotypical, out of africa, pattern recognition, phenotype, Rubik’s Cube, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, theory of mind, twin studies, zero-sum game

,” Autism 1, 101–108; and R. Grove et al. (2015), “Exploring the quantitative nature of empathy, systemising, and autistic traits using factor mixture modelling,” British Journal of Psychiatry 207, 400–406. 3. See S. Baron-Cohen and J. Hammer (1997), “Parents of children with Asperger syndrome: What is the cognitive phenotype?,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 9, 548–554; G. Windham et al. (2009), “Autism spectrum disorders in relation to parental occupation in technical fields,” Autism Research 2(4), 183–191. 4. Jim Simons became chair of Stony Brook University’s math department at age thirty. He and Shiing-Shen Chern published the landmark Chern-Simons invariants, which have applications in quantum field theory, condensed-matter physics, and even string theory.

…

Note that all three of these explanations for assortative mating in autism could be correct and be happening simultaneously: hyper-systemizers of opposite sexes could be moving to the same location and find themselves in a smaller pool of possible mates because of social skills and be attracted to a like-minded person who loves details and if-and-then pattern seeking, just as they do. 17. See S. Baron-Cohen and J. Hammer (1997), “Parents of children with Asperger syndrome: What is the cognitive phenotype?,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 9, 548–554; T. Jolliffe and S. Baron-Cohen (1997), “Are people with autism or Asperger syndrome faster than normal on the Embedded Figures Task?,” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 38, 527–534. CHAPTER 9: NURTURING THE INVENTORS OF THE FUTURE 1.

The Cult of Smart: How Our Broken Education System Perpetuates Social Injustice by Fredrik Deboer

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, collective bargaining, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, fiat currency, Flynn Effect, full employment, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, helicopter parent, income inequality, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, Own Your Own Home, phenotype, positional goods, profit motive, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Richard Florida, school choice, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steven Pinker, survivorship bias, trade route, twin studies, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, winner-take-all economy, young professional, zero-sum game

Unfortunately for Palmer, he made a number of obvious errors and was forcefully rebutted in an open letter signed by a half-dozen eminent researchers in the relevant fields.11 Most importantly, if copy-number variation reduces the genetic similarity between identical twins, it suggests that genetic similarity is even more powerful, given the remarkable phenotypic similarity between such twins. Though committed hereditarians can be rather strident, especially online, established researchers arguing for the power of genetic influence tend to be quite forthcoming about legitimate methodological issues. In the same article in which he coined the Three Laws, Turkheimer expresses the basic challenge succinctly: Human developmental social science is difficult—equally so for the genetically and environmentally inclined—because of the (methodologically vexing, humanistically pleasing) confluence of two conditions: (a) Behavior emerges out of complex, nonlinear developmental processes, and (b) ethical considerations prevent us from bringing most human developmental processes under effective experimental control.

…

A major study utilizing a data set of thousands of test subjects revealed 52 variations in genotype that were associated with differences in intelligence.12 The actual effect sizes of the identified variations are tiny, accounting for fractions of IQ points. This lends further evidence to the notion that intelligence is a polygenic trait, with probably thousands upon thousands of variations contributing to observed differences in phenotype, and makes it even less likely that we will have a genetic test for (a predisposition toward) intelligence anytime soon. But the mere existence of statistically significant relationships between genotype and intelligence lends powerful validating evidence to kinship studies. In light of this study and others like it, Turkheimer, Kathryn Paige Harden, and Richard E.

Stamping Butterflies by Jon Courtenay Grimwood

affirmative action, Brownian motion, Burning Man, carbon-based life, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, dark matter, PalmPilot, phenotype

Tapping the nearest, Chuang watched it open, waiting while the semiAI ran a self test. "Functioning," the pod announced as a glass square lit red. "Preparing for Koebe process." Slots opened on the inside of the pod to reveal simple claws; attached to those claws were clear tubes already filled with oily liquid. "Please enter phenotype." "What?" "Enter phenotype." "Human," Chuang Tzu said. The animals were long since dead. The glass square turned orange. "Enter seven-digit genotype," demanded the pod. "Shit." Chuang Tzu ripped open the front of the Doctor's blue uniform, looking for dog tags. "I don't know it," he said. "It's not for me."

…

Slicing the monofilament which bound Dr. Yuan's hands, he spun her round and sliced between her ankles. "Prepare to receive the body," he said. On the side of the pod the orange square reverted to red as the semiAI reset itself. "Functioning," the pod announced. "Preparing for Koebe process. Please enter phenotype." "Stupid fucking--" Chuang began but stopped himself. "Promote me," he said loudly, simultaneously reopening his comms channel. "What?" "Promote me," Navigator Chuang said fiercely, "while there's still time to save the Doctor." Two decks above, Colonel Commissar Lan Kuei sighed. Sleeping with junior officers always produced these kinds of problems.

Thinking in Bets by Annie Duke

banking crisis, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, Cass Sunstein, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, cognitive load, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, Demis Hassabis, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, en.wikipedia.org, endowment effect, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Filter Bubble, Herman Kahn, hindsight bias, Jean Tirole, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, loss aversion, market design, mutually assured destruction, Nate Silver, p-value, phenotype, prediction markets, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, systematic bias, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, urban planning, Walter Mischel, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

But this comparison of our results to others isn’t confined to zero-sum games where one player directly loses to the other (or where one lawyer loses to opposing counsel, or where one salesperson loses a sale to a competitor, etc.). We are really in competition for resources with everyone. Our genes are competitive. As Richard Dawkins points out, natural selection proceeds by competition among the phenotypes of genes so we literally evolved to compete, a drive that allowed our species to survive. Engaging the world through the lens of competition is deeply embedded in our animal brains. It’s not enough to boost our self-image solely by our own successes. If someone we view as a peer is winning, we feel like we’re losing by comparison.

…

Published information about the Bartman play and its aftermath is plentiful, and the game and the play are available on YouTube. The behavior of the fans at Wrigley Field and the quotes appear in Alex Gibney’s 2014 ESPN Films documentary, Catching Hell. Other people’s outcomes reflect on us: For some of the places in which Dawkins has written about natural selection proceeding by competition among the phenotypes of genes, see Current Problems in Sociobiology and The Greatest Show on Earth, cited in the Selected Bibliography and Recommendations for Further Reading. For an examination of whether people would choose to earn $70,000 in 1900 or in 2010, see (and listen to) “Would You Rather Be Rich in 1900, or Middle-Class Now?

The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality by Oded Galor

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Andrei Shleifer, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, bioinformatics, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, conceptual framework, COVID-19, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francisco Pizarro, general purpose technology, germ theory of disease, income per capita, intermodal, invention of agriculture, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, invention of the telegraph, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Louis Pasteur, means of production, out of africa, phenotype, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Robert Solow, Scramble for Africa, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Walter Mischel, Washington Consensus, wikimedia commons, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey

Lycett, ‘Global geometric morphometric analyses of the human pelvis reveal substantial neutral population history effects, even across sexes’, PloS One 8, no. 2 (2013): e55909. Betti, Lia, François Balloux, William Amos, Tsunehiko Hanihara and Andrea Manica, ‘Distance from Africa, not climate, explains within-population phenotypic diversity in humans’, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 276, no. 1658 (2009): 809–14. Bignon, Vincent, and Cecilia García-Peñalosa, ‘Protectionism and the education-fertility trade-off in late 19th century France’ (2016). Bisin, Alberto, and Thierry Verdier, ‘The economics of cultural transmission and the dynamics of preferences’, Journal of Economic Theory 97, no. 2 (2001): 298–319.

…

Magga, Ole Henrik, ‘Diversity in Saami terminology for reindeer, snow, and ice’, International Social Science Journal 58, no. 187 (2006): 25–34. Maloney, William, and Felipe Valencia Caicedo, ‘Engineering Growth: Innovative Capacity and Development in the Americas’, no. 6339, CESifo Group Munich (2017). Manica, Andrea, William Amos, François Balloux and Tsunehiko Hanihara, ‘The Effect of Ancient Population Bottlenecks on Human Phenotypic Variation’, Nature 448, no. 7151 (2007): 346–8. Murtin, Fabrice, and Romain Wacziarg, ‘The democratic transition’, Journal of Economic Growth 19, no. 2 (2014): 141–81. Mathieson, Iain, Iosif Lazaridis, Nadin Rohland, Swapan Mallick, Nick Patterson, Songül Alpaslan Roodenberg, Eadaoin Harney et al., ‘Genome-Wide Patterns of Selection in 230 Ancient Eurasians’, Nature 528, no. 7583 (2015): 499–503.

Immigration and Ethnic Formation in a Deeply Divided Society: The Case of the 1990s Immigrants From the Former Soviet Union in Israel by Majid Al Haj

demographic transition, ghettoisation, job satisfaction, mass immigration, phenotype, profit motive, zero-sum game

One of the most widely cited definitions of ethnic group is that of Schermerhorn (1970: 12): An ethnic group is defined here as a collectivity within a larger society having real or putative common ancestry, memories of a shared historical past, and a cultural focus on one or more symbolic elements   15 defined as the epitome of their peoplehood. Examples of such symbolic elements are: kinship patterns, physical contiguity (as in localism or sectionalism), religious affiliation, language or dialect forms, tribal affiliation, nationality, phenotypic features, or any combination of these. A necessary accompaniment is some consciousness of kind among members of the group (also cited by Hutchinson and Smith 1996: 6). This definition involves both objective elements (shared historical memories, cultural focus, and group affiliation) and subjective feeling, as reflected in ethnic consciousness.

…

Hence assimilation is largely the outcome of costbenefit considerations by the members of the group (ibid.: 257). Van den Berghe offers a model for assimilation that delineates the conditions favoring ethnic assimilation, based mainly on cost-benefit considerations. According to this model, the greater the phenotypic and cultural resemblance between groups, the more likely is assimilation to take place. Likewise, smaller groups and those that are territorially dispersed are more likely to assimilate, because they have fewer resources relative to the rest of society and because territorial dis-   19 persion reduces the benefits of nepotism.

Sex Power Money by Sara Pascoe

Albert Einstein, call centre, Donald Trump, fake news, Firefox, gender pay gap, invention of movable type, Louis Daguerre, meta-analysis, Neil Kinnock, Ocado, phenotype, Russell Brand, TED Talk, telemarketer, twin studies, zero-sum game

By the time I started secondary school I’d also heard some confusing stuff about ‘penis envy’, because my dad was studying Freud, and ‘bleeding from the site of a torn-off organ’, because my mum liked quoting Germaine Greer. I was informed, explicitly and implicitly, that there were two kinds of human: the haves and have-nots. And unless you’re reading this in a distant genderless future, so were you. In the broadest sense Homo sapiens is composed of two phenotypes, two biological sexes. There are arguably many more sexes: people with extra chromosomes, solo chromosomes, intersex genitalia, etc. But for most intents and purposes humans are divided in two, and this is due to how we reproduce. We’re split into As and Bs because that’s how Cs are made. A + B = C.

…

It’d be like a very long, very creepy episode of Quantum Leap, which is why I’ve decided against having kids via hermaphrodite gene replication. Also, did you know mushrooms have thirty-six thousand sexes? It’s incredible but, as this book isn’t about the interrelation of economics, autonomy and sex in mushrooms, not especially relevant. The reason most animals are As and Bs is because having two phenotypes ensures the jumbling of DNA with each coupling. Asexual reproduction makes evolution much, much slower. In Ikea terms, dual-sexed breeding gives the possibility of moving around the bits and pieces; you can make mutant tables with legs on the top or with doors and drawers attached to them. Being asexual means following the instructions very closely every time.

The Perfect Police State: An Undercover Odyssey Into China's Terrifying Surveillance Dystopia of the Future by Geoffrey Cain

airport security, Alan Greenspan, AlphaGo, anti-communist, Bellingcat, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Citizen Lab, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, coronavirus, COVID-19, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, Edward Snowden, European colonialism, fake news, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, ghettoisation, global supply chain, Kickstarter, land reform, lockdown, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, phenotype, pirate software, post-truth, purchasing power parity, QR code, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Right to Buy, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart cities, South China Sea, speech recognition, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, trade liberalization, trade route, undersea cable, WikiLeaks

“But it came back in the 1990s with the rise of forensic genetics.” For fifteen years, Munsterhjelm had followed the work of one researcher, Kenneth Kidd, a genetics professor at the Yale School of Medicine. “After 9/11, there was something called the President’s DNA Initiative. It identified genetic research on ethnicity, phenotype and ancestry. The idea was to distinguish friend from enemy, or the airplane hijackers from the victims.” Kidd emerged as a global leader in the field of using ancestry markers to figure out the ancestral origins of a person’s genetic sample. He ran a genetic database at Yale, and was on the initiative’s Kinship and Data Analysis Panel.13 “I noticed some of the genetic research that was going on in China,” Munsterhjelm told me.

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After their collaboration ended, Kidd says he asked the Chinese ministry of public security to stop using the genetic samples he had provided to them. “I’ve gotten no reply,” he admitted. In June 2020, after the controversy calmed down, I loaded the online genetic database at Yale to check whether the questionable Uyghur phenotype had been removed. Kidd had indeed taken out the samples provided to him by the Chinese ministry of public security. Yale University, however, had many other Uyghur samples not obtained by Kidd. “This sample of Uyghur individuals were [sic] collected from Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region,” read one entry.

2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, clean tech, double helix, full employment, higher-order functions, hive mind, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, Jevons paradox, Kim Stanley Robinson, Kuiper Belt, late capitalism, Late Heavy Bombardment, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, Neolithic agricultural revolution, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, pattern recognition, phenotype, post scarcity, precariat, quantum entanglement, retrograde motion, rewilding, Skinner box, stem cell, strong AI, synthetic biology, the built environment, the High Line, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing machine, Turing test, Winter of Discontent

But Swan could tell he was distracted. Extracts (17) As many people have significant lifelong quantities of male and female hormones and phenotypically are bisexual, intersex, or indeterminate, the pronouns “he” and “she” are often avoided, or when used are a matter of self-designation, sometimes changing according to situation. Referring to someone else with such pronouns is the equivalent of using “tu” rather than “vous” in French, indicating familiarity with the person deepest phenotypic signals of gender appear to be waist-to-hip ratio, and waist height relative to total height, usually a matter of proportionately longer female femurs and wider female pelvic bones such as French, Turkish, or Chinese.

…

Clearly, a new kind of psychic exposure distinctions can be pretty fine, with some claiming that gynandromorphs do not look quite like androgyns, nor like hermaphrodites, nor eunuchs, and certainly not like bisexuals—that androgyns and wombmen are quite different—and so on. Some people like to tell that part of their story; others never mention it at all. Some dress across gender and otherwise mix semiotic gender signals to express how they are feeling in that moment. Outrageous macho and fem behaviors, either matched with phenotype and semiotic indicators or not, create performance art ranging from the kitschy to the beautiful as there are now people close to three meters tall, and others less than a meter tall, gender may no longer be the greatest divide in human even approaching the size of spider monkeys, a modification that was severely censured by larger people, until longevity statistics kept reaffirming the association between smaller sizes and longer lifetimes, especially in light gravities.

Beyond: Our Future in Space by Chris Impey

3D printing, Admiral Zheng, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, AltaVista, Apollo 11, Apollo 13, Berlin Wall, Biosphere 2, Buckminster Fuller, built by the lowest bidder, butterfly effect, California gold rush, carbon-based life, Charles Lindbergh, Colonization of Mars, cosmic abundance, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, dark matter, Dennis Tito, discovery of DNA, Doomsday Clock, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Eratosthenes, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Hans Moravec, Hyperloop, I think there is a world market for maybe five computers, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, John von Neumann, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, Late Heavy Bombardment, life extension, low earth orbit, Mahatma Gandhi, Marc Andreessen, Mars Rover, Mars Society, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, Nick Bostrom, ocean acidification, Oculus Rift, operation paperclip, out of africa, Peter H. Diamandis: Planetary Resources, phenotype, private spaceflight, purchasing power parity, quantum entanglement, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Feynman, Richard Feynman: Challenger O-ring, risk tolerance, Rubik’s Cube, Scaled Composites, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, Searching for Interstellar Communications, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, skunkworks, Skype, Snow Crash, space junk, SpaceShipOne, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, supervolcano, technological singularity, telepresence, telerobotics, the medium is the message, the scientific method, theory of mind, There's no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home - Ken Olsen, Virgin Galactic, VTOL, wikimedia commons, world market for maybe five computers, X Prize, Yogi Berra

If the genetic code were perfectly transcribed and expressed, there would be no evolution and life would be, well, boring. It would also be a dead end, since it couldn’t adapt and survive over time. One type of variation occurs when the genetic blueprint, the genotype, is expressed in a particular environment, the phenotype. Two cloned seedlings will develop quite differently when one grows in loamy soil and the other grows on a windswept mountain. A second type of variation occurs over time when the genetic material is altered by mutation or imperfect copying. Biodiversity cascades as variations grow over time and are culled by natural selection.

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., 239 Los Angeles Times, 71 Losing My Virginity (Branson), 86, 87 Louis IX, king of France, 23 Louis XVI, king of France, 68 Lovelock, James, 286 Lowell, Percival, 163–64 Lucian of Samosata, 20 Lucretius, 18–19 Luna program, 50–51 Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, 156 Lunokhod rover, 143 Lynx rocket plane, 101 M5 fiber, 161 McAuliffe, Christa, 55, 74 Mack 3 Blackbird, 69 McKay, Chris, 173 McLellan, William, 283 magnetic implants, 207 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 190 magnetic sails, 186, 223 magnitude of time, 248–50, 249 Manhattan Project, 36, 221 Manifest Destiny, applied to space, 146–47, 199 Manned Habitat Unit, 169 many worlds concept, 17–20, 17, 49, 267 Mao Zedong, 141 Marconi, Guglielmo, 237 Mariner 2, 51 Mariner 4, 164 Marino, Lori, 190 Marriott hotels, 145 Mars, 28, 237, 270 challenges of travel to, 166–70 distance from Earth to, 50, 148, 166 Earth compared to, 171–72, 216 establishing a colony on, 166–71, 169, 192, 195, 200–201, 203, 214, 248 evidence of water on, 124–25, 163–66, 165, 173 fly-bys of, 51, 170 imaginative perceptions of, 163–65 latency on, 178 map of, 163 obstacles to exploration of, 66–67, 148 one-way journey to, 166, 170–71, 200 as potentially habitable, 124–25, 163, 165–66, 171, 172–74, 234, 278 privately funded missions to, 170–71 probes to, 40, 51, 52, 164–65, 176, 246 projected exploration of, 94–98, 101, 104, 115, 119, 157, 161, 163–74, 178, 181, 182 property rights on, 145, 198–99 sex and reproduction on, 200 simulated journey to, 169–70 soil of, 170 staging points for, 161 terraforming of, 172–74, 182, 216, 227 tests for life on, 52 Mars Direct, 169 Mars500 mission, 169 Mars One, 170–71, 198–201 Mars Society, 166 Mars 3 lander, 51 Masai people, 120 Massachusetts General Hospital, 250 Masson-Zwaan, Tanja, 199 mathematics, 19 as universal language, 236–37 Matrix, The, 260 matter, manipulation of, 258 matter-antimatter annihilation, 220, 220, 221–22 Mavroidis, Constantinos, 182 Max-Q (maximum aerodynamic stress), 46 Maxwell, James Clerk, 183 Mayor, Michel, 126–28, 133 medicine: challenges and innovation in, 92–93, 263 cyborgs in, 205 medicine (continued) as lacking in space, 200 in life extension, 259 nanotechnology in, 225, 259 robots in, 180, 181, 182, 205 mediocrity, principle of, 261 Mendez, Abel, 278 mental models, 13–17, 18–19 Mercury: orbit of, 126, 215 property rights on, 145 as uninhabitable, 124 mercury poisoning, 118 Mercury program, 41, 42, 71, 74, 272 meta-intelligence, 94 meteorites, 152, 160, 160, 164, 195 methane, 52–53, 125, 132, 278 as biomarker, 217–18 methanogens, 217 “Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, A” (Goddard), 30, 31 Methuselah, 131 mice, in scientific research, 48–49, 250–51 microbes, microbial life, 97–98, 173, 174, 217, 241, 246, 286 habitable environments for, 122–25, 165–66, 186 microcephaly, 203 microgravity, 115 microsatellites, 90 Microsoft, 84, 188 microwaves: beaming of, 223–24 signals, 187 Microwave Sciences, 223 Middle East, population dispersion into, 8, 118 migration: early human population dispersion through, 5–9, 9, 15, 19 motivation for, 9–12, 11 military: covert projects of, 69–72 Eisenhower’s caveat about, 79 in Internet development, 77, 78–79 nanotechnology in, 180–81, 225 in rocket development, 30, 32–39, 55–56, 71 in space programs, 73, 76, 79, 144, 153 Milky Way galaxy, 227, 240, 253, 263, 270 ancient Greek concept of, 18 Drake equation for detectable life in, 188, 233–35 Earth-like exoplanets in, 129–33, 233, 291 formation and age of, 235 size of, 242 Millis, Marc, 290 mind control, 245 mind uploading, 259 miniaturization, see nanotechnology minimum viable population, 201, 251 mining: of asteroids, 155–56, 182, 214 of Enceladus, 227 on Moon, 214 by robots, 178, 182 Minsky, Marvin, 177, 179 MirCorp, 75 mirrors, 173 Mir Space Station, 75, 115, 167–68 Miss Baker (monkey), 47–48, 48 Mission Control, 43, 100, 158, 269 MIT, 38, 77, 90, 141, 226, 257 mitochondrial DNA, 6, 9 Mittelwerk factory, 33, 35 Mojave Desert, 71, 82, 83 population adaptation to heat in, 118–19 molecules, in nanotechnology, 151 Mongols, 23, 24 monkeys, in space research, 47–48, 48 Montgolfier brothers, 68 Moon: age of, 50 ancient Greek concept of, 18 in asteroid capture, 156 distance from Earth to, 49–50, 150, 166, 267 first animals on, 49 first man on, 71, 158 latency on, 178 lunar base proposed for, 157–63, 158, 160, 195, 214, 248 manned landings on, 44–45, 49–50, 54, 56, 63, 71, 84, 99, 104, 108, 143, 157, 158, 176, 219, 270, 272 obstacles to exploration of, 66 orbit of, 25 probes to, 40, 51, 129, 140, 143 projected missions to, 92, 143, 157–63, 166, 214, 275 property rights on, 145–47, 198–99 proposed commercial flights to, 102 in science fiction, 20, 26 soil of, 159, 160, 162 as staging point for Mars, 161 staging points for, 148 telescopic views of, 31, 49–50 as uninhabitable, 124, 166 US commitment to reach, 41–45 Moon Treaty (1979), 146 Moon Treaty, UN (1984), 279 Moore, John, 203 Moravec, 259–60 Morgan, Barbara, 74 Morrison, Philip, 187, 239 Mosaic web browser, 79 Moses, 148 motion, Newton’s laws of, 25, 67–68 multistage rockets, 29 multiverse, 252–57, 255 Musk, Elon, 94–98, 97, 100–101, 112–13, 148, 205 mutation, 6–7 cosmic rays and, 204 7R, 10–12, 11, 15 mutually assured destruction, 42 Mylar, 184, 225 N1/L3 rocket, 44, 54 nanobots, 179–82, 181, 224–28 NanoSail-D, 184, 185 nanosponges, 180 nanotechnology, 151–52, 179–82, 208, 214, 245, 280, 283 projected future of, 257–59 see also nanobots National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 83, 90, 96, 97–98, 114, 116–17, 128, 144, 153, 156, 176, 178, 182, 184–85, 185, 195, 200, 205, 206, 216, 224, 226, 271, 275, 280, 290 and Air Force, 71 artistic depiction of space colonies by, 196, 196 budget of, 39, 42, 43, 49, 54, 64, 75, 99, 104, 140, 144, 158, 166, 188, 238, 270, 272, 284 cut back of, 45, 49, 54, 188 formation of, 38–39, 145, 269 private and commercial collaboration with, 99–102, 104 revival of, 103–5 space program of, 51, 55–56, 71–76, 92, 157–58, 285–86 stagnation of, 63–67, 141, 147, 166 National Geographic Society, 7, 265 National Radio Astronomy Observatory, 187–88 National Science Foundation (NSF), 78–79 Native Americans, 118 naturalness, 256 natural selection, 6, 16, 123, 164, 251, 291 Nature, 187 Naval Research lab, 37 Navy, US: Bureau of Aeronautics, 30 in rocket development, 36–37 Nayr, Ernst, 238 Nazis, 48 Propaganda Ministry of, 32 von Braun and, 32–34, 141, 269 NBC, 75 Nedelin, Mitrofan, 43 “needle in a haystack” problem, 188–89, 242–43 “Nell” (rocket), 29 Neptune, 127, 131, 225 as uninhabitable, 125 Nergal, 163 Netscape, 80 New Mexico, 88, 88, 105 Newton, Isaac, 24–25, 25, 30, 67–68, 110, 262, 267 New York Times, 30, 94 Nicholas, Henry, 214 Niven, Larry, 198, 253 Nixon, Richard, 108, 167 Nobel Prize, 126, 180, 214 nomad planets, 128 Noonan, James, 266 nuclear fission, 220, 220, 221 nuclear fusion, 110, 161–62, 220, 221, 221, 222 nuclear reactors, 224 nuclear weapons, 36, 42, 78, 129, 146, 197–98, 222, 234–35, 244, 245, 246, 286 Nuremberg Chronicles, 17 Nyberg, Karen, 200 Obama, Barack, 104 Oberth, Hermann, 28, 31–32, 36, 268 oceans: acidification of, 195 sealed ecosystem proposed for, 197 Oculus Rift, 176 Ohio, astronauts from, 74 Okuda, Michael, 228 Olsen, Ken, 213 100 Year Starship project, 224 100 Year Starship Symposium, 229 101955 Bennu (asteroid), 156 O’Neill, Gerard, 196, 251–52 Opportunity rover, 165 optical SETI, 190, 243 Orbital Sciences Corporation, 100–101, 275 orbits: concept of, 25 geostationary, 149–50, 150 legislation on, 146 low Earth, 49, 54, 63, 70–71, 70, 74–75, 97, 100, 110, 113–14, 151, 155, 184 manned, 40–41, 141–42 staging points from, 148 orcas, 190 Orion spacecraft, 104 Orteig, Raymond, 90 Orteig Prize, 90–91 Orwell, George, 35 OSIRIS-REx, 156 Outer Space Treaty (1967), 145–47, 198–99 “Out of the Cradle, Endlessly Rocking” (Clarke), 201 oxygen, 156, 159, 161, 170, 172, 173–74, 182, 193–95, 214 Oymyakon, Siberia, population adaptation to cold in, 119–20 ozone, as biomarker, 217 Pacific Ocean, 9, 224 Pac-Man, 175 Page, Larry, 92 Paine, Thomas, 167 Pale Blue Dot (Sagan), 121 “Pale Blue Dot,” Earth as, 53, 118–22, 121, 130 Paperclip, Operation, 141 parabolic flight, 93 paradox, as term, 241 Paratrechina longicornis (crazy ant), 193 Parkinson’s disease, 202–3 particle physics, standard model of, 256 Pascal, Blaise, 120 Pauley, Phil, 196–97 PayPal, 95, 97 Pensées (Pascal), 120 People’s Daily, 162 People’s Liberation Army, 144 Pericles, 18 Pettit, Don, 100, 273 phenotype, 6 philanthropy, 95 PhoneSat, 185 photons, 183, 186 in teleportation, 229, 230, 231 photosynthesis, as biomarker, 217 pigs, 250 Pinker, Steven, 16 Pioneer probes, 50, 51–52 piracy, 24 Pitcairn Island, 202 planetary engineering, 172 Planetary Resources, 156 planetary science, 51–52, 176 Planetary Society, 184 planets: exploration of, 49–53 formation of, 156 plate techtonics, 132, 241 play, imagination in, 10, 14 pluralism, 17–20, 17, 49 plutonium, 66 poetry, space, 272–73 politics, space exploration and, 63–64, 104, 141, 214, 238 Polyakov, Valeri, 115, 167–68 population bottleneck, 201–2, 287 Poynter, Jane, 193 Princess of Mars, A (Burroughs), 164 Principia (Newton), 25 Project Orion, 221, 221 Project Ozma, 187–88, 237, 253 prokaryotes, 172 property rights, in space, 145–47, 198 Proton rockets, 65, 113 proton scoop, 222–23 Proxmire, William, 238 Puerto Rico, 239, 243 pulsar, 131 Pythagorean Theorem, 238 Qian Xuesen, 141 Qi Jiguang, 24 Qualcomm Tricorder X Prize, 92 quantum entanglement, 230–32, 230 quantum genesis, 255 quantum mechanics, 258 quantum teleportation, 230–32, 230 quantum theory, 189 qubits, 230 Queloz, Didier, 126–28, 133 R-7 rocket, 37 R-16 rocket, 43 radiation, infrared, 109, 253–54, 254 radioactivity, as energy source, 124, 181 radio waves, 66, 187, 189, 242 ramjets, 222–23 RAND Corporation, 222 Rare Earth hypothesis, 241 RCS Energia, 106 RD-180 engine, 72 Reagan, Ronald, administration of, 167, 271 reality TV, 75, 171, 214, 282 “Realm of Fear,” 229 reasoning, human capacity for, 13–17, 18–19 red dwarfs, 131 Red Mars (Stanley), 174 Red Scare, 141 Redstone rocket, 36–37, 71 reindeer, 119–20 remote sensing, 175–91, 224 RepRap Project, 227 reproduction, sexual, 6, 172 Ride, Sally, 74 “Right Stuff,” as term, 71, 114 Right Stuff, The (Wolfe), 272 Ringworld series (Niven), 253 risk: as basic to human nature, 9, 262 genetic factor in, 10–12 of living on Mars, 167–70 in pushing human limits, 120 of space tourism, 102, 105–9, 155 of space travel, 42–43, 55–56, 56, 106–9, 152–53 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 174 robonaut project, 179 robots, robotics: as aids to humans, 249, 250 in asteroid redirection, 104 commercial, 178 ethical issues of, 179 nanotechnology in, 179–82, 181 remote control of, 177–78 remote sensing through, 176 self-assembly and self-replication by, 226–28, 258, 259 in spacecraft, 50, 100, 100 space exploration by, 53–57, 66, 98, 133, 161, 177–79, 179, 208, 224–28 see also cyborgs; nanobots Rocketdyne, 112 rocket equation, 27, 53, 72–73, 110–11, 111, 148, 220, 268 rocket fuel, 110–13, 148, 156, 159, 161 comparison of efficiency of, 219–24 Rocket Performance Calculator, 222 rockets: alternatives to, 148–53 “bible” of, 267 challenges in launching of, 43–44, 46–49, 106, 107, 111–12, 148 comparison of US and Soviet, 44 cost of, 112–13, 113 developing technology of, 21–39, 43, 101, 103, 112–13, 183, 262 fuel for, 110–13, 148, 156, 159, 161, 220–21 launched from planes, 84 liquid-fueled, 28–29, 29 physics and function of, 110–14 proposed energy technologies for, 220–24 reusable, 101, 103, 111, 112, 113 solar sails compared to, 183 as term, 23 visionaries in development of, 26–30, 94 in warfare, 22–24, 30, 32–34 see also specific rockets “Rockets to the Planets in Space, The” (Oberth), 28 Rogers Commission, 271 Rohrabacher, Dana, 284 Rome, ancient, 18, 67, 163 Rovekamp, Roger, 207 rovers, 66–67, 92, 125, 140, 143, 158, 165, 167 nanotechnology in, 181–82 remote sensing through, 176 Rozier, Jean-François de, 68 RP-1 kerosine, 110 RS-25 rocket, 112 Russia, 23, 26–27, 149, 178 space program of, 37, 65–66, 72, 75, 84, 91, 104, 106, 107–8, 113, 114, 140, 143, 168, 184, 195, 200, 271 space tourism by, 75, 102 tensions between US and, 72 see also Soviet Union Russian Revolution, 27, 47 Russian Space Agency, 102 Rutan, Burt, 72, 82–86, 85, 88, 88, 89, 91, 97–98, 105–6, 214 Rutan, Dick, 83–84 Rutan Aircraft Factory, 83 Saberhagen, Fred, 177, 259 Sagan, Carl, 53, 121–22, 121, 176–77, 184, 198, 234–35, 238, 240 Sahakian, Barbara, 98 Sahara Desert, 238 sails: solar, 183–86, 185 wind-driven, 67–68, 183, 262 Salyut space station, 54, 108 satellites: artificial Earth, 36–39, 37, 40, 65, 71, 106 commercial, 96, 105 communications, 101, 142, 153 in energy capture, 253 geostationary, 149 GPS, 144 launching of, 154, 154 miniature, 90, 184–85 Saturn: moon of, 125, 227 probes to, 52–53 as uninhabitable, 125 Saturn V rocket, 43, 44, 46, 54, 83, 104, 111, 113, 113, 166 Scaled Composites, 83, 89 science fiction, 192, 196, 222, 223, 239, 250, 253 aliens in, 186–87 in film, 28, 204 Mars in, 164, 174 roots of, 20 technologies of, 228–32, 259 see also specific authors and works scientific method, 213 Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI), 187–90, 234, 239, 254 evolution and technology of, 237–39, 242–43, 242 lack of signals detected by, 236–37, 240–44 new paradigms for, 258 “Searching for Interstellar Communications” (Cocconi and Morrison), 187 sea travel: early human migration through, 8, 9 exploration by, 109, 262 propulsion in, 67–68 self-replication, 226–28, 258, 259 Senate, US, Armed Services Preparedness Committee of, 39 SETI Institute, 188 78–6 (pig), 250 sex: promiscuous, 12 in reproduction, 6, 172 in space, 200, 214 Shackleton Energy Company, 161 Shane, Scott, 98 Shatner, William, 88–89 Shelley, Mary, 206 Shenlong (“Divine Dragon”), 145 Shenzhou 10, 142–43 Shepard, Alan, 41, 84 Shostak, Seth, 243 Siberia, 65, 119–20, 238 population dispersion into, 8, 118, 218 Sidereal Messenger, The (Galileo), 270 Siemienowicz, Kazimierz, 267 Simonyi, Charles, 75 Sims, 175 simulation: infinite regression in, 261 living in, 257–62 simulation hypothesis, 261 Sinatra, Frank, 45 singularity, 207 in origin of cosmos, 255 and simulation, 257–62 technological, 258–59 Singularity University, 94, 259 Skylab space station, 54, 116 Skype video, 176 smart motes, 181, 225 smartphones, 92, 185 Smithsonian Institution, 30, 81 Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, 85, 91, 271 Snow Crash (Stephenson), 103 Snowden, Edward, 178 social media, 195 Sojourner rover, 165 SolarCity, 96–97 solar flares, 167 solar power, 96, 181, 183–86 solar sails, solar sailing, 183–86, 185, 223, 225, 227 Solar System: discovery of first planet beyond, 126–27 edge of, 50, 53, 121 formation of, 156 habitability potential in, 122, 124–26 latency variations in, 178 probes into, 51–52, 66, 177, 185–86, 208, 270 projected travel within, 248–49, 263 property rights in, 145–47, 198 worlds beyond, 126–29, 156, 208, 215, 250, 263 solar wind, 162, 223 sound barrier, breaking of, 69, 71 South America, 11, 202, 218 Soviet Union, 30, 34, 37, 141 fall of, 47, 65, 75, 197, 271–72 rocket development in, 35–39 space program failures and losses of, 43, 47, 50–51, 54, 269 space program of, 37–39, 40–43, 141, 149, 237, 271 Soyuz spacecraft, 43, 55, 75, 84, 91, 102, 106, 113, 143 crash of, 107–8 space: civilians in, 55, 74 civilian vs. military control of, 37–39, 69–71, 79, 153 commercialization of, 55, 63, 73–76, 79–80, 88–89, 92, 97, 99–109, 100, 110, 147, 153–56, 154, 199, 214, 249, 275 debris in, 144, 152 first American in, 41 first man in, 40–41, 41 first women in, 40, 74 as infinite, 18, 19, 22 as inhospitable to human beings, 53–54, 114–17, 121 legislation on, 39, 78, 90, 144, 145–47, 198–200 living in, 192–208 “living off the land” in, 166, 200 peaceful exploration of, 39 potential for human habitabilty in, 123 prototype for sealed ecosystem in, 192–97 Space Act (1958), 39, 90 Space Adventures, 102, 275 space colonization: challenges of, 197–201 cyborgs in, 204–8 evolutionary diversion in, 201–4 legal issues in, 198–200 of Mars, 166–71, 169, 192, 195, 203 off-Earth human beings in, 215, 250–51 prototype experiments for, 192–97 space elevators, 27, 148–53, 150, 160–61, 185, 280 “Space Exploration via Telepresence,” 178 Spaceflight Society, 28 space hotels, 102–3 Space Launch System (SLS), 104 space mining, 155–56, 161–62 “Space Oddity,” 142 spaceplanes, 71–72, 85, 144 Spaceport America, 1–6, 105 Space Race, 35–39, 37, 40–43, 50, 55, 139 SpaceShipOne, 72, 85, 85, 88–89, 88, 91 SpaceShipTwo, 88, 101, 105 Space Shuttle, 45, 46, 49, 64, 72, 84, 85, 111–13, 112, 159, 167, 194, 219–20, 222, 275 disasters of, 55–56, 56, 74–75, 107, 111–13 final flight of, 271 limitations of, 55–56, 64–65 as reusable vehicle, 54–55 space sickness, 114 spacesuits, 89, 182, 195–96 space-time, 255, 255 manipulation of, 258 space tourism, 63, 73, 75–76, 79–80, 88–89, 91, 101–3, 154, 170, 214 celebrities in, 88, 101–2 revenue from, 154–55, 155 risks of, 102, 105–9, 155 rules for, 105 space travel: beyond Solar System, see interstellar travel bureaucracy of, 105–10, 271 cost of, 39, 42, 45, 49, 54, 55, 66, 75, 81–82, 91, 112–14, 113, 139–49, 153, 155–56, 158–59, 161, 166, 179, 183, 198, 214, 217, 222, 224–26, 252, 270, 275, 284 early attempts at, 21–22, 22 effect of rocket equation in, see rocket equation entrepreneurs of, 81–98 erroneous predictions about, 214 failures and disasters in, 21–22, 22, 38, 43, 47, 50–51, 54–56, 56, 63–64, 68, 72, 74–75, 101, 102, 107, 142, 184, 269, 271, 275 fatality rate of, 107–9 fictional vignettes of, 1–4, 59–62, 135–38, 209–12 Internet compared to, 76–80, 77, 80 life extension for, 250–51 lifetimes lived in, 251 living conditions in, 114–17 new business model for, 99–105 Newton’s theories as basis of, 25 obstacles to, 21, 63, 66–67, 105–109 space travel (continued) as part of simulation, 261–62 public engagement in, 45, 73, 85, 93, 162, 177, 217 remote sensing vs., 175–91 risks of, 43–44, 83, 89, 93, 105–9 speculation on future of, 76–80, 133, 213–32, 248–52 suborbital, 84 telescopic observation vs., 49–50 visionaries of, 26–39, 80, 94, 109 SpaceX, 96, 97, 100–103, 113–14, 275 SpaceX Dragon spacecraft, 96, 100, 100, 102, 170 special theory of relativity, 228, 231 specific impulse, 220 spectroscopy, 127, 165, 176 spectrum analyzer, 237 Speer, Albert, 34 Spielberg, Steven, 238 Spirit of St.

The Four Horsemen by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Daniel Dennett

3D printing, Andrew Wiles, cognitive dissonance, cosmological constant, dark matter, Desert Island Discs, en.wikipedia.org, phenotype, Richard Feynman, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steven Pinker

As the first holder of Oxford University’s Simonyi Professorship for the Public Understanding of Science, he acquired a worldwide reputation as a sceptic, ‘passionate rationalist’, ‘proud atheist’, and witty exposer of charlatanism and fakery couched in pseudoscientific language. In all that time, he has pursued an academic career as a leading ethologist and biologist. He gave our language the word ‘meme’, and in his work as a scientist has hugely expanded our understanding not just of the genotype but of the whole evolutionary package that makes life, the phenotype. His Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science stands as a global cynosure for free thought. CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS (Porthos) was – and how it will always grieve me to have to use the past tense – a journalist, essayist, polemicist, contrarian, debater, political historian, author and thinker.

Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past by David Reich

23andMe, agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, carbon credits, Easter island, European colonialism, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, invention of agriculture, invention of the wheel, invention of writing, mass immigration, meta-analysis, new economy, out of africa, phenotype, Scientific racism, sparse data, supervolcano, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade

Stephens, “Interpreting Principal Component Analyses of Spatial Population Genetic Variation,” Nature Genetics 40 (2008): 646–49. 7. O. François et al., “Principal Component Analysis Under Population Genetic Models of Range Expansion and Admixture,” Molecular Biology and Evolution 27 (2010): 1257–68. 8. A. Keller et al., “New Insights into the Tyrolean Iceman’s Origin and Phenotype as Inferred by Whole-Genome Sequencing,” Nature Communications 3 (2012): 698; P. Skoglund et al., “Origins and Genetic Legacy of Neolithic Farmers and Hunter-Gatherers in Europe,” Science 336 (2012): 466–69; I. Lazaridis et al., “Ancient Human Genomes Suggest Three Ancestral Populations for Present-Day Europeans,” Nature 513 (2014): 409–13. 9.

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., “Population Genomics of Bronze Age Eurasia,” Nature 522 (2015): 167–72. 37. Templeton, “Biological Races.” 5 The Making of Modern Europe 1. B. Bramanti et al., “Genetic Discontinuity Between Local Hunter-Gatherers and Central Europe’s First Farmers,” Science 326 (2009): 137–40. 2. A. Keller et al., “New Insights into the Tyrolean Iceman’s Origin and Phenotype as Inferred by Whole-Genome Sequencing,” Nature Communications 3 (2012): 698. 3. W. Muller et al., “Origin and Migration of the Alpine Iceman,” Science 302 (2003): 862–66. 4. P. Skoglund et al., “Origins and Genetic Legacy of Neolithic Farmers and Hunter-Gatherers in Europe,” Science 336 (2012): 466–69. 5.

The Telomere Effect: A Revolutionary Approach to Living Younger, Healthier, Longer by Dr. Elizabeth Blackburn, Dr. Elissa Epel

Albert Einstein, autism spectrum disorder, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, cognitive load, epigenetics, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, meta-analysis, mouse model, persistent metabolic adaptation, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), stem cell, survivorship bias, The Spirit Level, twin studies

One other common cause of inflamm-aging involves telomere damage. When a cell’s genes are damaged or its telomeres are too short, that cell knows its precious DNA is in danger. The cell reprograms itself so that it emits molecules that can travel to other cells and call for help. These molecules, together called senescence-associated secretory phenotype, or SASP, can be useful. If a cell has become senescent because it’s been wounded, it can send signals to neighboring immune cells and other cells with repair functions, to call in the squads that can get the healing process going. And here’s where things go terribly wrong. Telomeres have an abnormal response to DNA damage.

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Wang, “The Effects of Mind-Body Therapies on the Immune System: Meta-analysis,” PLOS ONE 9, no. 7 (2014): e100903, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0100903. 2. Conklin, Q., et al., “Telomere Lengthening After Three Weeks of an Intensive Insight Meditation Retreat,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 61 (November 2015): 26–27, doi:10.1016/j.psyneuen.2015.07.462. 3. Epel, E., et al. “Meditation and Vacation Effects Impact Disease-Associated Molecular Phenotypes,” Translational Psychiatry (August 2016): 6, e880, doi: 10.1038/tp.2016.164. 4. Kabat-Zinn, J., Full Catastrophe Living: Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness, rev. ed. (New York: Bantam Books, 2013). 5. Lengacher, C. A., et al., “Influence of Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) on Telomerase Activity in Women with Breast Cancer (BC),” Biological Research for Nursing 16, no. 4 (October 2014): 438–47, doi:10.1177/1099800413519495. 6.

Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything About Race, Gender, and Identity―and Why This Harms Everybody by Helen Pluckrose, James A. Lindsay

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", affirmative action, Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, centre right, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, critical race theory, deplatforming, desegregation, Donald Trump, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, fake news, feminist movement, gentrification, germ theory of disease, Isaac Newton, late capitalism, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, neurotypical, phenotype, sexual politics, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, the scientific method, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight, women in the workforce

: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis,” Annals of Internal Medicine 159 no. 11 (December 03, 2013), annals.org/aim/article-abstract/1784291/metabolically-healthy-overweight-obesity-benign-conditions-systematic-review-meta-analysis?doi=10.7326/0003-4819-159-11-201312030-00008; Lara L. Roberson et al., “Beyond BMI: The ‘Metabolically Healthy Obese’ Phenotype and Its Association with Clinical/Subclinical Cardiovascular Disease and All-Cause Mortality—A Systematic Review,” BMC Public Health 14, no. 1 (2014): article 14. 33.The ASDAH website states that its commitment to inclusion encompasses diversity based on ethnicity, race, nationality, immigration status, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, spirituality, abilities, education, economic class, social class, body shape and size, and others.

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Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Rich, Adrienne. Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence. Denver, CO: Antelope Publications, 1982. Riley, Donna. Engineering and Social Justice. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2008. Roberson, Lara L., et al. “Beyond BMI: The ‘Metabolically Healthy Obese’ Phenotype and Its Association with Clinical/Subclinical Cardiovascular Disease and All-Cause Mortality—A Systematic Review.” BMC Public Health 14, no. 1 (2014): Article 14. Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979. ———. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity.

CRISPR People by Henry T. Greely

Albert Einstein, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autism spectrum disorder, bitcoin, clean water, CRISPR, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of DNA, double helix, dual-use technology, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Gregor Mendel, Ian Bogost, Isaac Newton, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, mouse model, New Journalism, phenotype, precautionary principle, Recombinant DNA, special economic zone, stem cell, synthetic biology, traumatic brain injury, Xiaogang Anhui farmers

(It may also make some nongenetic methods of enhancement relatively more attractive, like hair dye, colored contact lenses, or intensive Scrabble training.) Knowledge of some sets of genomic variations that enhance traits may ultimately come from the simple availability of more genotypic and associated phenotypic data. If we had the genomes of the world’s 1,000 top Scrabble players, maybe some genomic associations would be found. Knowledge of other causal factors may, or may not, come from research into diseases or conditions that cause well below average performance, which may provide some clues about DNA locations that might be associated with better performance.

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Still, if one wants to use that definition, it might well be possible for a clever scientist to engineer human embryos genetically so that they could only have children (without resorting again to gene editing) with similarly modified humans, perhaps by changing some of the characteristics of eggs and sperm or, as Lee Silver suggested over 20 years ago, by changing in the number of their chromosomes.32 Such people could be, in every respect except their potential reproductive partners, exactly the same as the rest of humanity, but, by the interbreeding definition, this would be a speciation event. That said, why would anyone want to do it? One might instead mean by a speciation event a change that produced living people who were substantially different from contemporary Homo sapiens in phenotype or in genotype—as different, or more, as Neanderthals were from us. That is also plausible, sometime, but no time soon. Just as we know next to nothing about genetic variations that cause more limited enhancement, we know even less about variants with such great effect as to make an entirely new species.

The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet by Nina Teicholz

Albert Einstein, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, confounding variable, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, Gary Taubes, Indoor air pollution, meta-analysis, phenotype, placebo effect, randomized controlled trial, Robert Gordon, selection bias, TED Talk, the scientific method, Upton Sinclair

., “High Density Lipoprotein as a Protective Factor Against Coronary Heart Disease: The Framingham Study,” American Journal of Medicine 62, no. 5 (1977): 707. The correlation was “striking”: Ibid., 707. “most important finding”: William P. Castelli et al., “HDL Cholesterol and Other Lipids in Coronary Heart Disease: The Cooperative Lipoprotein Phenotyping Study,” Circulation 55, no. 5 (1977): 771. By 2002, the NCEP was calling: National Cholesterol Education Program, Third Report of the National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP). Expert Panel on Detection, Evaluation, and Treatment of High Blood Cholesterol in Adults: (Adult Treatment Panel III) Final Report.

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., “Statins and All-Cause Mortality in High-Risk Primary Prevention: A Meta-Analysis of 11 Randomized Controlled Trials Involving 65,229 Participants,” Archives of Internal Medicine 170 (2010): 1024–1031; Castelli et al., “HDL Cholesterol and Other Lipids,” in “Coronary Heart Disease: The Cooperative Lipoprotein Phenotyping Study,” Circulation 55, no. 5 (1977): 771. the AHA journal Circulation: Rodney A. Hayward and Harlan M. Krumholz, “Three Reasons to Abandon Low-Density Lipoprotein Targets: An Open Letter to the Adult Treatment Panel IV of the National Institute of Health,” Circulation 5 (2012): 2–5. See also Harlan M.

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Nutrition & Metabolism 4, no. 23 (October 31, 2007). doi:10.1186/1743-7075-4-23. Castelli, William P. “Concerning the Possibility of a Nut . . .” Archives of Internal Medicine 152, no. 7 (July 1992): 1371–1372. Castelli, William P., Joseph T. Doyle, Tavia Gordon, et al. “HDL Cholesterol and Other Lipids in Coronary Heart Disease: The Cooperative Lipoprotein Phenotyping Study.” Circulation 55, no. 5 (May 1977): 767–772. Center for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, US Food and Drug Administration. “FDA Issues Draft Guidance for Industry on How to Reduce Acrylamide in Certain Foods.” CFSAN Constituent Update, November 14, 2013, http://www.fda.gov/Food/NewsEvents/ConstituentUpdates/ucm374601.htm.

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett

affirmative action, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, cognitive load, delayed gratification, demographic transition, Easter island, eurozone crisis, George Santayana, glass ceiling, Howard Rheingold, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Kevin Kelly, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey

On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. London: John Murray. . 1871. The Descent of Man. London: John Murray. . 1872. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. London: John Murray. Davis G. 2009. Vikings in America. Edinburgh: Berlinn Ltd. Dawkins R. 1982. The Extended Phenotype. San Francisco: WH Freeman. Dawson J. 1881. Australian Aborigines: The Languages and Customs of Several Tribes of Aborigines in the Western District of Victoria. Melbourne: George Robertson. DeCasien AR, et al. 2017. Primate brain size is predicted by diet but not sociality. Nature Ecol Evol 1:112.

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Vocal, gestural and locomotor responses of wild chimpanzees to familiar and unfamiliar intruders: A playback study. Anim Behav 78:1389–1396. Hernandez-Aguilar RA, J Moore, TR Pickering. 2007. Savanna chimpanzees use tools to harvest the underground storage organs of plants. Proc Nat Acad Sci 104:19210–19213. Heth G, J Todrank, RE Johnston. 1998. Kin recognition in golden hamsters: Evidence for phenotype matching. Anim Behav 56:409–417. Hewlett BS. 1991. Intimate Fathers: The Nature and Context of Aka Pygmy Paterna Infant Care. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hewlett BS, JMH van de Koppel, LL Cavalli-Sforza. 1986. Exploration and mating range of Aka Pygmies of the Central African Republic.

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Synonyms for “marker” include words like “label” and “tag.” 4 de Waal & Tyack (2003); Fiske & Neuberg (1990); Machalek (1992). 5 For details on different levels of human social connections, see Buys & Larson (1979); Dunbar (1993); Granovetter (1983); Moffett (2013); Roberts (2010). 6 This is the cultural version of the idea of an extended phenotype proposed by Dawkins (1982). 7 Wobst (1977). 8 Alessia Ranciaro, pers. comm.; Tishkoff et al. (2007). 9 Simoons (1994). 10 Wurgaft (2006). 11 Baumard (2010); Ensminger & Henrich (2014). 12 Poggi (2002). 13 Iverson & Goldin-Meadow (1998). 14 Darwin (1872). 15 Marsh et al. (2003). People in prolonged social contact can converge in facial appearance as well, perhaps through repeated similar use of the same facial muscles (Zajonc et al. 1987). 16 Marsh et al. (2007). 17 Sperber (1974). 18 Eagleman (2011). 19 Bates et al. (2007). 20 Allport (1954), 21. 21 Watanabe et al. (1995). 22 Nettle (1999). 23 Pagel (2009), 406. 24 Larson (1996). 25 Tajfel et al. (1970). 26 Dixon (2010), 79. 27 Sometimes the language spoken by a Pygmy group does not correspond to the farmers to which they are currently connected, suggesting the Pygmies sometimes migrate (Bahuchet 2012 & 2014).

Robot Futures by Illah Reza Nourbakhsh

3D printing, autonomous vehicles, Burning Man, business logic, commoditize, computer vision, digital divide, Mars Rover, Menlo Park, phenotype, Skype, social intelligence, software as a service, stealth mode startup, strong AI, telepresence, telepresence robot, Therac-25, Turing test, Vernor Vinge

Kanji?” She smiles—he could see this from behind, just from the movement of her cheekbone—and shakes her head. “Have you heard of symbox? This is the character I designed for it.” “Very cool. I read something in the New Yorker—this is a classification for species, right?” “No, it’s a description for phenotypes. You know biology? I proposed this for Rhesus monkeys and it was accepted.” “And, but, you’re a botanist too—I’m guessing. Sorry—I don’t see any leaf sketchers at the other tables . . .” Katy takes another sip of mint tea and tries to reason with her mother again. “All I am saying is, you can’t mark the message as urgent if it’s not urgent.

Permafrost by Alastair Reynolds

mass immigration, phenotype

He means a different kind of upset. I gathered. “It was getting harder for the time-probes to get a positive lock,” Antti went on. “Even when we managed to inject, the telemetry was much too noisy to be sure who we were in. We couldn’t analyse the biochemical environment properly, couldn’t get a clear phenotypic signature. With you, Cho knew you were going to mesh with a female host subject. With me, it was more a question of taking our chances.” He paused. “I’m all right. I got used to this body pretty quickly. It works for me.” “Who are you? Downstream, I mean.” “Tibor’s my host.” “And this . . . Tibor.

Wireless by Charles Stross

air gap, anthropic principle, back-to-the-land, Benoit Mandelbrot, Buckminster Fuller, Cepheid variable, cognitive dissonance, colonial exploitation, cosmic microwave background, Easter island, epigenetics, finite state, Georg Cantor, gravity well, hive mind, hydroponic farming, jitney, Khyber Pass, Late Heavy Bombardment, launch on warning, lifelogging, Magellanic Cloud, mandelbrot fractal, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Neil Armstrong, peak oil, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, security theater, sensible shoes, Turing machine, undersea cable

At the same time we got the NOAA to increase their mapping-launch frequency, and pointed the increased level of Soviet activity out to our sources in SAC. It doesn’t take much to get the human hives buzzing with positive feedback.” Of course, Brundle and Gregor aren’t using words for this incriminating exchange. Their phenotypically human bodies conceal some useful modifications, knobby encapsulated tumors of neuroecto derm that shield the delicate tissues of their designers, neural circuits that have capabilities human geneticists haven’t even imagined. A visitor from a more advanced human society might start chattering excitedly about wet-phase nanomachines and neural-directed broadband packet radio, but nobody in New York on a sunny day in 1979 plus one million is thinking in those terms.

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Like Wei, and the other Stasis agents who had silently liquidated the camp guards and stolen their identities three nights before, Pierce was disguised as a Benzin warrior. He wore the war paint and beaten-aluminum armbands, bore the combat scars. He carried a spear tipped with a shard of synthetic diamond, mined from a deep seam of prehistoric automobile windshields. He even wore a Benzin face: the epicanthic folds and dark skin conferred by the phenotypic patches had given him food for thought, an unfamiliar departure from his white-bread origins. Gramps (he shied from the memory) would have died rather than wear this face. Pierce was not yet even a twelve-year trainee: he’d been in the service for barely four years-subjective. But he was ready to be sent out under supervision, and this particular operation called for warm bodies rather than retrocausal subtlety.

Saturn's Children by Charles Stross

augmented reality, British Empire, business process, false flag, gravity well, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Kuiper Belt, loose coupling, phenotype, Pluto: dwarf planet, plutocrats, theory of mind

“I’d be very happy to offer any advice I can,” I agree cautiously. “Yes.” Ichiban nods thoughtfully. “You are very big.” He looks up at me. It’s true: I’m almost a hundred and seventy centimeters tall. An idealized replica of our Creators’ kind, in fact, unlike the super-deformed midgets who are the commonest phenotype of the nouveau riche these days. “Good thermal inertia,” adds Ichiban, unexpectedly. “And you were designed for Earth, before the emancipation.” Good thermal inertia? I smile as my biomimetic reflexes cut in: my cheeks flush delicately, signaling mild embarrassment or confusion. Emancipation? What’s he talking about?

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And so I emerged blinking into the steamy overcast haze of a world I never asked for, indentured to a performing troupe of jongleurs. I played helplessly with the orchestra for my first five years, but there was no future in it for them, or for me. The musical fad was already fading, and besides, phenotypic drift was becoming a political issue. The race to pick up the pieces in the wake of our Creators’ death was won by those who were least attached to the past—and they tend to dislike reminders of their former servitude. Folks such as I, molded in the near-perfect shape of our Creators, are distasteful to some, and I was eventually bought out of my servitude by my sisters, who had made a minor fetish of tracking down their lost orphan sibs.

T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us by Carole Hooven

British Empire, classic study, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, experimental subject, impulse control, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, moral panic, occupational segregation, phenotype, placebo effect, stem cell, Steven Pinker, zero-sum game

The writer Andrew Sullivan told readers of New York Magazine that he got “a real sense of what being a man is … [with] the rush of energy, strength, clarity, ambition, drive, impatience, and, above all, horniness” from his biweekly testosterone injections. A Psychology Today article suggests that “women are attracted to toxic masculine male phenotypes that correlate with testosterone … and who exhibit patterns of behavior that will allow them to ascend the social hierarchy and defend their positions from encroachers.” According to the left-wing Huffington Post, Trump’s presidency is “testosterone-fueled,” making it “an extremely dangerous one” that could lead to war.

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“good numbers”: Danielle Kurtzleben, “Trump and the Testosterone Takeover of 2016,” National Public Radio, October 1, 2016, https://www.npr.org/2016/10/01/494249104/trump-and-the-testosterone-takeover-of-2016. “rush of energy, strength, clarity, ambition, drive, impatience and, above all, horniness”: Andrew Sullivan, “#MeToo and the Taboo Topic of Nature,” New York Magazine, January 19, 2018. “women are attracted to toxic masculine male phenotypes”: Gad Saad, “Is Toxic Masculinity a Valid Concept?,” Psychology Today blog, March 8, 2018, https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/homo-consumericus/201803/is-toxic-masculinity-valid-concept. Trump’s presidency is “testosterone-fueled”: Neal Gabler, “The Testosterone Fueled Presidency,” Huffington Post, August 16, 2017, https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-testosterone-fueled-presidency_b_59949cd3e4b056a2b0ef029c.

Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns, and Abstractions by Temple Grandin, Ph.D.

2013 Report for America's Infrastructure - American Society of Civil Engineers - 19 March 2013, 3D printing, a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, air gap, Albert Einstein, American Society of Civil Engineers: Report Card, Apollo 11, Apple II, ASML, Asperger Syndrome, autism spectrum disorder, autonomous vehicles, Black Lives Matter, Boeing 737 MAX, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, clean water, cloud computing, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, defense in depth, Drosophila, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, GPT-3, Gregor Mendel, Greta Thunberg, hallucination problem, helicopter parent, income inequality, industrial robot, invention of movable type, Isaac Newton, James Webb Space Telescope, John Nash: game theory, John von Neumann, Jony Ive, language acquisition, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, meta-analysis, Neil Armstrong, neurotypical, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, ransomware, replication crisis, Report Card for America’s Infrastructure, Robert X Cringely, Saturday Night Live, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skinner box, space junk, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Tacoma Narrows Bridge, TaskRabbit, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, US Airways Flight 1549, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, web application, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator

“Brain Activities of Visual and Verbal Thinkers: A MEG Study.” Neuroscience Letters 594 (2015): 155–60. Nishimura, K., et al. “Individual Differences in Mental Imagery Tasks: A Study of Visual Thinkers and Verbal Thinkers.” Neuroscience Communications (2016). Pant, R., S. Kanjlia, and M. Bedny. “A Sensitive Period in the Neural Phenotype of Language in Blind Individuals.” Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience 41 (2020). https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1878929319303317#sec0010. Park, C. C. Exiting Nirvana: A Daughter’s Life with Autism. New York: Little, Brown, 2001. Pashler, H., et al. “Learning Styles: Concepts and Evidence.”

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British Journal of Psychiatry 199, no. 5 (2011): 373–79. doi: 10.1192/bjp.bp.110.085316. Larsen, S. A. “Identical Genes, Unique Environments: A Qualitative Exploration of Persistent Monozygotic Twin Discordance in Literacy and Numeracy.” Frontiers in Education (2019). doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2019.00021. Le Couteur, A, et al. “A Broader Phenotype of Autism: The Clinical Spectrum in Twins.” Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry 37, no. 7 (1996). doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1996.tb01475.x. Lehman, C. “Interview with a Software Engineer.” Quillette.com. January 5, 2018. Leibowitz, G. “Steve Jobs Might Have Never Started Apple If He Didn’t Do This 1 Thing.”

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

I don’t think evolutionary psychology on its own can tell us much about why group boundaries take the form they do. True, certain physical characteristics, such as white skin and blue eyes, co-occur together more often than black skin and blue eyes. But this clustering comes in the form of gradations from North to South, or East to West. Blood types and other genetic traits cut across these phenotypical traits, and there has been considerable gene flow since the Dawn of Man some 100,000 years ago. Cultural tradition, not genes, tells us which markers matter and which don’t. On the other hand, the view that groups like the antebellum Irish ‘became white’ when they served political purposes such as the interests of the southern Democrats is, in my opinion, overstated.42 The Irish or Jews in America, though outside the Anglo-Protestant ethnic core, were distinguished from African-Americans or Chinese in daily social interactions.

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More problematic were Catholics, who represented a seemingly indigestible element. Catholicism represented what the Czech-British sociologist of nationalism, Ernest Gellner, calls a ‘counter-entropic’ trait.7 That is, retained through generations and resisting decomposition over time. Whereas language or accent tends to fade in the second generation, religion and phenotype are often inherited and therefore endure. The share of foreign-born in the United States has fluctuated, but, apart from the earliest years of British and Scotch–Irish colonization in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, never exceeded 15 per cent of the total. Immigration slowed during the early years of the American republic between 1776 and 1820, contributing just 3 per cent of population growth in 1810.

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Humans have mapped the genome, have cloned animals and are selecting against embryos with genetic errors that produce cystic fibrosis, sickle-cell anaemia, and early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. The next stage, which may be no more than a decade or two away, is to use biotechnology to design our offspring. This has implications for ethnic movements because ethnicity concerns ancestry, which has a basis in genetic traits that manifest themselves as phenotypical markers. The genetic frequencies of ethnic groups have been extensively mapped.27 Like many, I’ve done a cheek swab to find out more about my ancestors. While some of the ones I expected – South American Indian, Chinese, Jewish – appeared, many others, such as Swedish, Hungarian and Lowland Scots, surprised me.

Beggars in Spain by Nancy Kress

bread and circuses, Cepheid variable, Charles Lindbergh, double helix, gravity well, index card, indoor plumbing, job automation, phenotype, union organizing

Her lab rats, their brains confused by what was supposed to be the answer to Miri’s experiment, stood irresolutely in their brain-scan stalls. The smallest of the three gave up: He lay down and went to sleep. “T-t-t-terrific,” Miri muttered. What ever made her think she was a biochemical researcher? “Super”—yeah. Sure. Super-incompetent. Strings of genetic code, phenotypes, enzymes, receptor sites formed and reformed in her head. None of it was any good. Waste, waste. She threw a calibration instrument clear across the lab, guaranteeing it would have to be recalibrated. “Miri!” Joan Lucas stood in the doorway, her pretty face twisted as rope. She and Miri had not talked in years.

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Nikos then created a string in his own program and converted it to Miri’s, still the format most accessible to the group as a whole. The twenty-seven children crowded near. Sharifi Labs had developed and synthesized an instantly fatal, airborne, highly communicable genemod organism, built from the code of a virus but highly different in important phenotypes. Packets of the organism, in a frozen state that could be unfrozen and dispersed by remote control from Sanctuary, had been installed in the United States by selected Sleepless graduate students studying on Earth. There were packets secreted in New York, Washington, Chicago, Los Angeles, and on Kagura orbital, which Sharifi Labs now owned.

Wilding: The Return of Nature to a British Farm by Isabella Tree

agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, British Empire, carbon footprint, clean water, dark matter, illegal immigration, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, mass immigration, meta-analysis, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, rewilding

Though still a good eight to twelve inches shorter than the massive aurochs of old, and, with a Heck bull typically weighing in at 1,300lb, at least 220lb lighter than a bull aurochs, they are, nevertheless, imposing animals. Konik ponies, a short, stocky breed with dun coats and a dorsal stripe, originally from the Biłgoraj region of Poland, were chosen for the Oostvaardersplassen experiment for their hardiness and their supposed phenotypical resemblance to the extinct tarpan. They, too, had been the subject of a ‘breed-back’ experiment, started by a Polish count in 1936. Roe deer were already naturally present in the Oostvaardersplassen in small numbers, and red deer were added to the mix. ‘We wanted to introduce the kind of grazing variation you find in Africa and that would once have prevailed in Europe.

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Whether or not these claims are valid (Joep is dubious), he feels there is a strong genetic and ecological argument for using more than one breed in conservation grazing projects as a replacement for the extinct wild horse – Hucul horses in the Carpathians, for example; Norwegian Fjord ponies or Swedish Gotlandruss ponies in Northern Europe, Koniks in lowland Eastern Europe; and Exmoors in Western Europe. There is little doubt about the Exmoor’s credentials as an equine aboriginal. Fossil remains have been found in the area of Exmoor dating back to around 50,000 BC . Roman carvings in Somerset depict ponies phenotypically similar to Exmoors, and the Domesday Book records ponies on Exmoor in 1086. Whether Exmoors have been pure-bred since the ice age remains a subject of debate. The DNA evidence is inconclusive and there are stories of domesticated stallions over the centuries breaking out onto the moor to breed with wild Exmoor mares – one is said to have been an Arab, Katerfelto, who swam ashore after the wrecking of the Spanish Armada.

The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality by Katharina Pistor

Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big Tech, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, business cycle, business process, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, Gregor Mendel, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, initial coin offering, intangible asset, investor state dispute settlement, invisible hand, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, land reform, land tenure, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, means of production, money market fund, moral hazard, offshore financial centre, phenotype, Ponzi scheme, power law, price mechanism, price stability, profit maximization, railway mania, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Satoshi Nakamoto, secular stagnation, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, software patent, sovereign wealth fund, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, time value of money, too big to fail, trade route, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Wolfgang Streeck

A few years later, he suggested linking the Utah Mormon Genealogy to the Utah Cancer Registry to facilitate the process of identifying genes.64 After Myriad had identified the BRCA sequence and patented it, the company did not just offer the test, but it collected detailed data from every patient, including her specific variation of the defective gene, the manifestation or phenotype of the cancer, her family history, and the gene pool to which she belonged. This database became Myriad’s greatest asset. In 2005, the company stopped contributing information to public databases and stopped sharing its own data with others.65 As Simon and Sichelman observed, “[w]hat began with patent protection over genetic information now includes trade secret protection for Myriad’s databases of 128 c h a P te r 5 patients’ full genetic sequences and phenotypic information, as well as correlations and algorithms resulting from access to that wealth of data.”66 In essence, “data-generating patents” give the patentee a head start over others in building a huge, private database that will be enforced through trade secrecy law long after the patent itself has expired.

Overcoming Adrenal Fatigue: How to Restore Hormonal Balance and Feel Renewed, Energized, and Stress Free by Kathryn Simpson

impulse control, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), meta-analysis, phenotype, randomized controlled trial

Chronic insomnia and activity of the stress system: A preliminary study. Journal of Psychosomatic Research 45(1):21-31. Vicennati, V., L. Ceroni, L. Gagliardi, A. Gambineri, and R. Pasquali. 2002. Response of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis to high-protein/fat and high-carbohydrate meals in women with different obesity phenotypes. Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism 87(8):3984-3988, Virchow, R. 1860. Cellular Pathology as Based upon Physiological and Pathological Histology. London: Churchill. Weill, S., D. Chesneau, and L. Safraou. 2002. Effects of introducing linseed in livestock diet on blood fatty acid composition of consumers of animal products.

The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion by Jonathan Haidt

affirmative action, Black Swan, classic study, cognitive bias, cognitive load, illegal immigration, impulse control, income inequality, index card, invisible hand, lateral thinking, meta-analysis, mirror neurons, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Necker cube, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, Philippa Foot, Plato's cave, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, social intelligence, social web, stem cell, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, tech billionaire, The Spirit Level, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Timothy McVeigh, Tony Hsieh, Tragedy of the Commons, ultimatum game

Sanford. 1950. The Authoritarian Personality. New York: Harper and Row. Alford, J. R., C. L. Funk, and J. R. Hibbing. 2005. “Are Political Orientations Genetically Transmitted?” American Political Science Review 99:153–67. ______. 2008. “Beyond Liberals and Conservatives to Political Genotypes and Phenotypes.” Perspectives on Politics 6:321–28. Allen, E., et al. 1975. “Against ‘Sociobiology.’ ” New York Review of Books 22:43–44. Almas, I., A. W. Cappelen, E. O. Sorensen, and B. Tungodden. 2010. “Fairness and the Development of Inequality Acceptance.” Science 328:1176–8. Ambrose, S. H. 1998. “Late Pleistocene Human Population Bottlenecks, Volcanic-Winter, and the Differentiation of Modern Humans.”

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Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam. ______. 2003. Looking for Spinoza. Orlando, FL: Harcourt. Darwin, C. 1998/1871. The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books. Dawkins, R. 1976. The Selfish Gene. New York: Oxford University Press. ______. 1999/1982. The Extended Phenotype: The Long Reach of the Gene. New York: Oxford University Press. ______. 2006. The God Delusion. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Decety, J. 2011. “The Neuroevolution of Empathy.” Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 1231:35–45. De Dreu, C. K., L. L. Greer, M. J. Handgraaf, S. Shalvi, G. A. Van Kleef, M.

The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley

affirmative action, Alfred Russel Wallace, assortative mating, Atahualpa, Boeing 747, Bonfire of the Vanities, demographic transition, double helix, Drosophila, feminist movement, Gregor Mendel, invention of agriculture, language acquisition, Menlo Park, phenotype, rent control, the long tail, theory of mind, Tragedy of the Commons, twin studies, University of East Anglia, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Johnson, London Davison, G. W. H., 1983, ‘The Eyes Have It: Ocelli in a Rainforest Pheasant’, Animal Behaviour, 31:1037–42 Dawkins, M. and Guilford, T., 1991, ‘The Corruption of Honest Signalling’, Animal Behaviour, 41:865–73 Dawkins, R., 1976, The Selfish Gene, Oxford University Press, Oxford —1982, The Extended Phenotype, Oxford University Press, Oxford —1986, The Blind Watchmaker, Longman, London —1990, ‘Parasites, Desiderata Lists and the Paradox of the Organism’, Parasitology, 100: S63–S73 —1991, ‘Darwin Triumphant: Darwinism as a Universal Truth’, Man and Beast Revisited, ed. M. H. Robinson and L. Tiger, Smithsonian, Washington, DC, pp. 23–39 —and Krebs, J.

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., 1979, ‘Female Infanticide and Reproductive Strategies of Stratified Human Societies’, Evolutionary Biology and Human Social Behavior, ed. N. Chagnon and W. Irons, Duxbury, North Scituate, Massachusetts, pp. 321–67 —1992, ‘Phylogenetic Fallacies and Sexual Oppression’, Human Nature, 3:71–87 Doolittle, W. F. and Sapienza, C., 1980, ‘Selfish Genes, the Phenotype Paradigm and Genome Evolution’, Nature, 284:601–3 Dörner, G., 1985, ‘Sex-specific Gonadotrophin Secretion, Sexual Orientation and Gender Role Behaviour’, Endokrinologie, 86:1–6 Dörner, G., 1989, ‘Hormone-dependent Brain Development and Neuroendocrine Prophylaxis’, Experimental and Clinical Endocrinology 94:4–22 Dugatkin, L., 1992, ‘Sexual Selection and Imitation: Females Copy the Mate Choice of Others’, American Naturalist, 139:1384–9 Dunbar, R.

The Goodness Paradox: The Strange Relationship Between Virtue and Violence in Human Evolution by Richard Wrangham

agricultural Revolution, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anthropocene, dark triade / dark tetrad, Defenestration of Prague, domesticated silver fox, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, impulse control, income inequality, meta-analysis, out of africa, phenotype, Ronald Reagan, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Strategic Defense Initiative, twin studies, ultimatum game

Preventing Deadly Conflict: Final Report. Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict. Carneiro, Miguel, Carl-Johan Rubin, Federica Di Palma, Frank W. Albert, Jessica Alföldi, Alvaro Martinez Barrio, Gerli Pielberg, et al. 2014. “Rabbit genome analysis reveals a polygenic basis for phenotypic change during domestication.” Science 345: 1074–79. Carré, Justin M., and Cheryl M. McCormick. 2008. “In your face: Facial metrics predict aggressive behavior in the laboratory and in varsity and professional hockey players.” Proceeding of the Royal Society B 275: 2651–56. Carré, Justin M., Cheryl M.

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Larson. 2000. “Dysfunction in the neural circuitry of emotion regulation—a possible prelude to violence.” Science 289: 591–94. Davie, Maurice R. 1929. The Evolution of War: A Study of Its Role in Early Societies. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. Dawkins, Richard. 1982. The Extended Phenotype. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press. de Almeida, Rosa Maria Martins, João Carlos Centurion Cabral, and Rodrigo Narvaes. 2015. “Behavioural, hormonal and neurobiological mechanisms of aggressive behaviour in human and nonhuman primates.” Physiology & Behavior 143: 121–35. de Boer, S. F., B.

The Fabric of Reality by David Deutsch

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Arthur Eddington, Boeing 747, butterfly effect, coherent worldview, complexity theory, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, cosmological principle, different worldview, Donald Knuth, Douglas Hofstadter, Eddington experiment, Georg Cantor, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Johannes Kepler, Occam's razor, phenotype, quantum cryptography, Richard Feynman, scientific worldview, Stephen Hawking, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, time dilation, Turing machine

This gene-based understanding of life - regarding organisms as part of the environment of genes - has implicitly been the basis ol biology since Darwin, but it was overlooked until at least the 1960s, and not fully understood until Richard Dawkins published The Selfish Gene (1976) and The Extended Phenotype (1982). I now return to the question whether life is a fundamental phenomenon of nature. I have warned against the reductionist assumption that emergent phenomena, such as life, are necessarily less fundamental than microscopic physical ones. Nevertheless, everything I have just been saying about what life is seems to poini to its being a mere side-effect at the end of a long chain of side-effects.

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Ekert, 'Quantum Cryptography', Scientific American, October 1992. {367} Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man, BBC Publications, 1981, Little Brown, 1976. Julian Brown, 'A Quantum Revolution for Computing', New Scientist, 24 September 1994. Paul Davies and Julian Brown, The Ghost in the Atom, Cambridge University Press, 1986. Richard Dawkins, The Extended Phenotype, Oxford University Press, 1982. Daniel C. Dennett, Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, Allen Lane, 1995; Penguin Books, 1996. Bryce S. DeWitt and Neill Graham (eds), The Many-Worlds Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics, Princeton University Press, 1973. Artur K. Ekert, 'Quantum Keys for Keeping Secrets', New Scientist, 16 January 1993.

Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth by Stuart Ritchie

Albert Einstein, anesthesia awareness, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, Black Lives Matter, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, Charles Babbage, citation needed, Climatic Research Unit, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data science, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, double helix, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Estimating the Reproducibility of Psychological Science, fake news, Goodhart's law, Growth in a Time of Debt, Helicobacter pylori, Higgs boson, hype cycle, Kenneth Rogoff, l'esprit de l'escalier, Large Hadron Collider, meta-analysis, microbiome, Milgram experiment, mouse model, New Journalism, ocean acidification, p-value, phenotype, placebo effect, profit motive, publication bias, publish or perish, quantum entanglement, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, recommendation engine, rent-seeking, replication crisis, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, Stanford prison experiment, statistical model, stem cell, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Bayes, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine

., (Frontiers Research Topics: Frontiers Media SA, 2018); https://doi.org/10.3389/978-2-88945-434-1 104.  Jill B. Becker et al, ‘Female Rats Are Not More Variable than Male Rats: A Meta-Analysis of Neuroscience Studies’, Biology of Sex Differences 7, no. 1 (Dec. 2016): 34; https://doi.org/10.1186/s13293-016-0087-5 105.  International Mouse Phenotyping Consortium, Natasha A. Karp, et al., ‘Prevalence of Sexual Dimorphism in Mammalian Phenotypic Traits’, Nature Communications 8, no. 1 (Aug. 2017): 15475; https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms15475 106.  Rebecca M. Shansky, ‘Are Hormones a “emale Problem” for Animal Research?’, Science 364, no. 6443 (31 May 2019): pp. 825–6; https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aaw7570, p. 826.

Clock of the Long Now by Stewart Brand

Albert Einstein, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Charles Babbage, Colonization of Mars, complexity theory, Danny Hillis, Eratosthenes, Extropian, fault tolerance, George Santayana, Herman Kahn, Internet Archive, Jaron Lanier, Kevin Kelly, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, low earth orbit, Metcalfe’s law, Mitch Kapor, nuclear winter, pensions crisis, phenotype, Ray Kurzweil, Robert Metcalfe, Stephen Hawking, Stewart Brand, technological singularity, Ted Kaczynski, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Vernor Vinge, Whole Earth Catalog

It would take centuries of imaginative curating and uses for a Millennial Library to acquire unique value. The value could lie in providing civilizations with a wisdom line: slow, robust, apparently inefficient. In this respect it might be like a species’ genotype, which contains much more hidden diversity (in recessive genes, mutations, etc.) than what is expressed in the current bodily phenotypes. By its very inefficiency the genotype preserves tremendous adaptivity in the species. Dark ages come to everyone’s mind when thinking about very long-term libraries—at least everyone in the West, because Europe had one. After the fall of Rome formal learning disappeared for half a millennium.

The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature by Steven Pinker

affirmative action, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, behavioural economics, belling the cat, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Columbine, conceptual framework, correlation coefficient, correlation does not imply causation, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Defenestration of Prague, desegregation, disinformation, Dutch auction, epigenetics, Exxon Valdez, George Akerlof, germ theory of disease, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Gregor Mendel, Hobbesian trap, income inequality, invention of agriculture, invisible hand, Joan Didion, language acquisition, long peace, meta-analysis, More Guns, Less Crime, Murray Gell-Mann, mutually assured destruction, Norman Mailer, Oklahoma City bombing, PalmPilot, Peter Singer: altruism, phenotype, plutocrats, Potemkin village, prisoner's dilemma, profit motive, public intellectual, QWERTY keyboard, Richard Feynman, Richard Thaler, risk tolerance, Robert Bork, Rodney Brooks, Saturday Night Live, Skinner box, social intelligence, speech recognition, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, Steven Pinker, tacit knowledge, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the new new thing, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, ultimatum game, urban renewal, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The things children experience while they are growing up are just as important as the things they are born with. Even when a behavior is heritable, an individual’s behavior is still a product of development, and thus it has a causal environmental component…. The modern understanding of how phenotypes are inherited through the replication of both genetic and environmental conditions suggests that…cultural traditions—behaviors copied by children from their parents—are likely to be crucial. If you think these are innocuous compromises that show that everyone has outgrown the nature-nurture debate, think again.

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Now that I have tried to convince you that the slate is not blank, it is time to put culture back into the picture. That will complete the consilience that runs from the life sciences through the sciences of human nature to the social sciences, humanities, and arts. In this chapter I will lay out an alternative to the belief that culture is like a lottery. Culture can be seen instead as a part of the human phenotype: the distinctive design that allows us to survive, prosper, and perpetuate our line-ages. Humans are a knowledge-using, cooperative species, and culture emerges naturally from that lifestyle. To preview: The phenomena we call “culture” arise as people pool and accumulate their discoveries, and as they institute conventions to coordinate their labors and adjudicate their conflicts.

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.), Handbook of evolutionary psychology: Ideas, issues, and applications. Mahwah, N.J.: Erlbaum. Krech, S. 1994. Genocide in tribal society. Nature, 371, 14–15. Krech, S. 1999. The ecological Indian: Myth and history. New York: Norton. Krubitzer, L., & Huffman, K. J. 2000. A realization of the neocortex in mammals: Genetic and epi-genetic contributions to the phenotype. Brain, Behavior, and Evolution, 55, 322–335. Krueger, R. F., Hicks, B. M., & McGue, M. 2001. Altruism and antisocial behavior: Independent tendencies, unique personality correlates, distinct etiologies. Psychological Science, 12, 397–402. Kubovy, M. 1981. Concurrent pitch segregation and the theory of indispensable attributes.

Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson

company town, double helix, escalation ladder, gravity well, Herman Kahn, Kim Stanley Robinson, means of production, oil shale / tar sands, phenotype, scientific management, skunkworks, the scientific method, Tragedy of the Commons

That was analogy rather than homology. What in the humanities they would call a heroic simile, if he understood the term, or a metaphor, or some other kind of literary analogy. And analogies were mostly meaningless— a matter of phenotype rather than genotype (to use another analogy). Most of poetry and literature, really all the humanities, not to mention the social sciences, were phenotypic as far as Sax could tell. They added up to a huge compendium of meaningless analogies, which did not help to explain things, but only distorted perception of them. A kind of continuous conceptual drunkenness, one might say.

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They were huge people, and yet still very light on their feet, doing a kind of boulder ballet over the scattered rocks of this empty shore. Maya watched them, marveling again at the new species. Behind her Sax and Spencer were coming along, and she even said something about it over the old First Hundred band. But Spencer only said something about phenotype and genotype, and Sax ignored the remark, and took off down the slope of the plain. Spencer went with him, and Maya followed them, moving slowly over all the other new species: there were grass tufts dotting the sand between the rocks of the rubble, also low flowering plants, weeds, cacti, shrubs, even some very small gnarled trees, tucked into the sides of rocks.

The Driver in the Driverless Car: How Our Technology Choices Will Create the Future by Vivek Wadhwa, Alex Salkever

23andMe, 3D printing, Airbnb, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, blockchain, clean water, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, deep learning, DeepMind, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, double helix, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Erik Brynjolfsson, gigafactory, Google bus, Hyperloop, income inequality, information security, Internet of things, job automation, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, life extension, longitudinal study, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mary Meeker, Menlo Park, microbiome, military-industrial complex, mobile money, new economy, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), personalized medicine, phenotype, precision agriculture, radical life extension, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Wozniak, Stuxnet, supercomputer in your pocket, synthetic biology, Tesla Model S, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, Thomas Davenport, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, uranium enrichment, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, zero day

Lamar Parker, Jeffrey Wentworth, et al., “DNA sequencing versus standard aneuploidy screening,” New England Journal of Medicine 2014;370:799– 808, http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa1311037 (accessed 21 October 2016). 2. Jessica X. Chong, Kati J. Buckingham, Shalini N. Jhangiani, et al., “The genetic basis of Mendelian phenotypes: Discoveries, challenges, and opportunities,” American Journal of Human Genetics 2015;97(2):199– 215, http://www.cell.com/ajhg/abstract/S0002-9297%2815%2900245-1 (accessed 21 October 2016). 3. Aleksandar D. Kostic, Dirk Gevers, Heli Siljander, et al., “The Dynamics of the Human Infant Gut Microbiome in Development and in Progression toward Type 1 Diabetes,” Cell Host & Microbe 2015;17(2):260– 273, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.chom.2015.01.001 (accessed 21 October 2016). 4.

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction by Gabor Mate, Peter A. Levine

addicted to oil, Albert Einstein, Anton Chekhov, corporate governance, drug harm reduction, epigenetics, gentrification, ghettoisation, impulse control, longitudinal study, mass immigration, megaproject, meta-analysis, Naomi Klein, PalmPilot, phenotype, placebo effect, Rat Park, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), source of truth, twin studies, Yogi Berra

., “Reward Deficiency Syndrome,” American Scientist, 1 March 1996, 132–46. 3. K. Blum, “Allelic Association of Human Dopamine D2 Receptor Gene in Alcoholism,” JAMA 263(15) (18 April 1990): 2055–60. 4. J. Gelernter and H. Kranzler, “D2 Dopamine Receptor Gene (DRD2) Allele and Haplotype Frequencies and Control Subjects: No Association with Phenotype or Severity of Phenotype,” Neurospsychopharmacology 20(6) (1999): 642–49. 5. L. Dodes, The Heart of Addiction (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 81. 6. R.E. Tarter and M. Vanyukov, “Alcoholism, a Developmental Disorder,” Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 62, No. 6 (1994): 1096–1107. 7. M.A.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To by David A. Sinclair, Matthew D. Laplante

Albert Einstein, Albert Michelson, Anthropocene, anti-communist, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, Atul Gawande, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, biofilm, Biosphere 2, blockchain, British Empire, caloric restriction, caloric restriction, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, creative destruction, CRISPR, dark matter, dematerialisation, discovery of DNA, double helix, Drosophila, Easter island, Edward Jenner, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, helicopter parent, income inequality, invention of the telephone, Isaac Newton, John Snow's cholera map, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, labor-force participation, life extension, Louis Pasteur, McMansion, Menlo Park, meta-analysis, microbiome, mouse model, mutually assured destruction, Paul Samuelson, personalized medicine, phenotype, Philippa Foot, placebo effect, plutocrats, power law, quantum entanglement, randomized controlled trial, Richard Feynman, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, seminal paper, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, the scientific method, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Tim Cook: Apple, Tragedy of the Commons, trolley problem, union organizing, universal basic income, WeWork, women in the workforce, zero-sum game