Matt Will
Matt Will
dna four recipes
Genes are biochemical recipes written in a four-letter alphabet called DNA.
giving-up rain writing
Note even Jonathan Swift would dare to write a satire in which politicians argued that - in a world where species are vanishing and more than a billion people are barely able to afford to eat - it would somehow be good for the planet to clear rain-forests to grow palm oil, or give up food-crop land to grow biofuels, solely so that people could burn fuel derived from carbohydrate rather than hydrocarbons in their cars, thus driving up the price of food for the poor. Ludicrous is too weak a word for this heinous crime.
depressing simple environmental
Simple determinism, whether of the genetic or environmental kind, is a depressing prospect for those with a fondness for free will.
real ocean pressure-groups
Ocean acidification looks suspiciously like a back-up plan by the environmental pressure groups in case the climate fails to warm: another try at condemning fossil fuels. [...] Even if the world warms as much as the consensus expects, the net harm still looks small alongside the real harm now being done by preventable causes; and if it does warm this much, it will be because more people are rich enough to afford to do something about it.
ice growing ends
A cumulative change of less than 2°C by the end of this century will do no net harm. It will actually do net good [...] rainfall will increase slightly, growing seasons will lengthen, Greenland's ice cap will melt only very slowly, and so on.
brain body patterns
Every minute, every second, the pattern of genes being expressed in your brain changes, often in direct or indirect response to events outside the body. Genes are the mechanisms of experience.
selfish mind evolution
Our minds have been built by selfish genes, but they have been built to be social, trustworthy and cooperative.
motivation inspiration farming
Trade is 10 times as old as farming.
order innovation collaboration
Intelligence will become more and more collective; innovation and order will become more and more bottom up.
running race lines
Life is a Sisyphean race, run ever faster toward a finish line that is merely the start of the next race
book years four
The genome is a book that wrote itself, continually adding, deleting and amending over four billion years.
commodity uniqueness
Uniqueness is the commodity of glut.
falling-in-love people complicated
We consciously decide whether to consider people; we fall in love despite ourselves; we entirely fail to fall in love with people who fall in love with us. It is a mightily complicated business.
animal way collectives
At some point, human intelligence became collective and cumulative in a way that happened to no other animal.