genomeboy.com

The awesome Susan Orlean on mules (subscription):

The mule’s commitment to survival is interesting in a Darwinian context, because mules–the hybrid result of mating a male donkey with a female horse–have an uneven number of chromosomes and are therefore sterile. Every mule, then, is sui generis; it leaves no legacy beyond itself, no radiating gene pool to mark its visit to this world…Even the sheer persistence of the breed seems a stroke of genius. Since a horse and a donkey rarely mate on their own, mules are essentially man-made. It has been a successful invention–in fact, mules are probably the most successful and enduring animal hybrid, with beefalo coming in a distant second.

Will Saletan:

We shouldn’t overstate the case. Genes don’t determine everything, and most genes don’t vary significantly between populations. But research is constantly finding new gene-trait correlations and group differences. If your faith in equality depends on an ethnically or racially even distribution of all ability-influencing genes, you’re in trouble.

That’s why the framing question matters. People of your race may be on average faster, smarter, or more volatile than people of my race. But the opposite pattern may turn up if you and I are classified in some other way. My dad was black, my mom was white, I was born in Hawaii, I was raised in a broken home, I grew up in Indonesia, I went to private school, I played basketball, I used drugs, my grades were unspectacular, and I went to Harvard Law. Guess my IQ.

The distribution question doesn’t settle the framing question, because race is just one way in which ability can be unevenly distributed. To answer the framing question in the affirmative, you have to show something more. You have to show that classifying and comparing by race, rather than using some other classification system or judging each person as an individual, does more good than harm.

I’m having trouble getting my head around the idea that this happened 50 years ago.

How will the poem be encoded?

The poem can be most easily encoded by assigning a short, unique sequence of nucleotides to each letter of the alphabet, as Wong has done. But I want my poem to cause the organism to make a protein in response — a protein that also encodes a poem. I am striving to engineer a life form that becomes a durable archive for storing a poem, and a machine for writing a poem — a poem that can survive forever.

Despite my snarky title,  I love that the poet Christian Bök is doing this (subscription only). Anything that defies people’s deterministic ideas about DNA and serves as a bridge between the two cultures is something we should be open to. That said, once this microorganism mutates for a few zillion generations, Bök’s poem could become gobbledygook…or worse.