The June issue of The Atlantic includes a deep profile of the accomplished but not-very-well-known comedian Albert Brooks. Here's a glimpse of his view of writing: I found a few interesting nuggets in that paragraph. His vision of writing as something you don't stop once you've started seems odd at first. The architect metaphor is funny, sure, but I wonder if his view is rare among writers.

Today begins Blaugust 2024, an annual blogging festival that is fun and challenging. Last year I made it halfway through August with a post every day—this year I'm aiming for 20 posts for the month. The festival aims to create and maintain a community, and so the main theme this year is for everyone to write an "introduction to me and my blog" post.

A few days ago I wrote about scientific thinking as an antidote to intuition. Not just an alternative to it, but something like the opposite of intuition. The intentional, energy-consuming move to a systematic deliberative mode of thought is utterly different from the easy and instantaneous nature of intuition.

As I work on a book that will claim that evolution is easy, I have a parallel task of exploring the reasons we sense that it is hard or even impossible. Some of those influences are the result of efforts by religions to maintain dependence on supernaturalism or to defend ancient sacred writings. Some are the result of antipathy to science itself, framed in terms of culture war.

A few years ago, I somehow realized that I wanted to read more stories. My work as a journal editor involved hours of intense scientific reading every day, and my insatiable interest in biology meant that my recreational reading was almost exclusively about science. But I could remember how much I loved stories as a kid: Tom Sawyer , The Black Stallion , all the Roald Dahl things.

This week in the Blaugust 2023 blogging festival, the broad theme is "Introduce yourself." Yesterday I alluded to my bardolatry and its place in the cornerstone of Quintessence of Dust , but that's not really an introduction. So here is a bit more about me: I love the Star Wars universe and I'm into evolution, and both of those things are deeply connected to my main tendency—I'm a rebel.

This blog's name captures my longstanding interest in human nature: humans are apes, and animals, and yet somehow able to create music and gods, and sometimes plays like Hamlet . But what's that strange word at the beginning, 'quintessence'? Here's the context from Hamlet : The word's history suggests that Shakespeare was (as usual) playing games with words and his audience (all quotes from the OED): So, it seems Hamlet is

Let's think of places on Earth where scientists have done great big natural "experiments" on evolution. Looking east from near the top of Mount Lemmon, January 2021 Here are some that ought to come to mind (in no particular order other than the first): 1. The Galapagos Islands, with their famous finches and their less-famous tomatoes and all their otherworldly animals, probably belong at the top of the list.

What is a library? If you ask a biologist (especially a molecular biologist) this question, they are likely to ask for clarification. In their work, they are likely to make regular use of two very different kinds of libraries. The first is the kind that we've had for millenia: a collection of books, journals, and media that is ordered and curated by people. These are the OG libraries, with 'book' at the very root of the word.

One of the most effective metaphors for evolutionary change is the image of an exploration of a space, perhaps a map that shows "fitness peaks" or, better, a library of possibilities. The philosopher Daniel Dennett, writing in Darwin's Dangerous Idea , suggested The Library of Mendel as a way of thinking about the total set of possible gene sequences.