This six-minute TED video by Janet Iwasa inspires me. It's a story about what goes on inside of you and me. Iwasa is a bio-molecular animator. She creates animations of the processes within our cells. Her workspace is an extraordinarily beautiful but disorienting mini-universe.
The molecules Iwasa studies function as the support team within cells. Even though these many non-living things that are clearly not alive, they seem to be alive and even purposeful in these animations. They appear as tiny magical robots. Iwasa offers many examples of her animations in this video, including molecules that allow DNA to function. DNA is not an intricate code that simply sits there. DNA allows your body to be alive via the synthesis of proteins.
That this highly coordinated activity can happen at this scale is mind-boggling, especially given that the DNA is so incredibly complex and so tightly folded. It is mind-boggling that the DNA from one microscopic human cell, completely unfolded, would stretch six feet in length. I hope you as amazed as I was when you see Iwasa's animations.
Donald Trump, meet Biology. I don’t believe you’ve ever met anyone quite like Biology before.
Biology doesn’t care about your threats or your bombast. Your lawyers can’t sue Biology out of existence. You can’t sway Biology by dangling your hush money. You can’t grab Biology by the pussy. Biology doesn’t care if you pound the podium and yell at it. Biology doesn’t care if you accuse it of being stupid. Biology doesn’t care that you are Commander in Chief. Your bombs and missiles mean nothing to Biology. Temporarily propping up the stock market with funny money means nothing to Biology. Biology didn’t care when you blame Coronavirus on Chinese people. Biology doesn’t care about your fantasies that national borders are somehow relevant to Coronavirus. Biology doesn’t care about fake news. Biology doesn’t care that you think you are smarter than career scientists and health care professionals. Biology doesn’t care when you assure the nation that you have an amazing brain trust consisting of people like Mike, Jared and Ivanka.
It appears that you’ve shown up to a gunfight with a pocketknife.
You can stand up to your podium and deny how Biology operates, but Biology will eventually have its own day at its own podium and Biology won’t respond using cheap words. Biology will speak in terms of hundreds of thousands of dead bodies. Biology will speak in terms of thousands of people who could have been saved had you taken this situation seriously earlier, when you had the opportunity to act. If thousands of people needlessly die, this should upset Americans, because we get upset even if one airplane crashes, killing 200. Instead of sounding the alarm to protect thousands of people, however, you denied facts and wasted time. Here’s a sampling of your pronouncements:
Jan. 22: “We have it totally under control.” Feb. 2: “Well, we pretty much shut it down coming in from China.” Feb. 10: “By April, you know, in theory, when it gets a little warmer, it miraculously goes away.” Feb. 24: “The Coronavirus very much under control in the USA. … Stock Market starting to look very good to me!” Feb. 26: “The risk to the American people remains very low.” At the same time, The Post reported, “Trump’s advisers struggled to get him to take the virus seriously,” despite telling him that “the virus was likely to dominate life in the United States for many months.”
Instead of immediately putting resources where they were needed, testing and ventilators, you told the nation that everything was fine. Everything was OK. And then you told Americans that they should pack the churches on Easter because (you have claimed) that day is somehow important to you. Perhaps you chose this date to pack churches because you and your evangelical friends are planning to roll out a faith-healing cure to the Coronavirus.
You won’t need to spend the upcoming days figuring out how to argue that this mess is not your fault, because you are already really good at deflecting blame. You are always well prepared to tell the world how smart you are and how other people are idiots. Spewing self-enhancing lies is clearly your main priority.
I admit that it’s possible that the Coronavirus might simply melt away with the spring warmth and that it might not kill a million Americans. This is possible, even though it looks highly unlikely given the deaths in Italy, Iran and Spain. Rather than argue about those numbers now, let’s check back in two months to see how things turned out for you and Biology. Truly, let’s check back in a couple months and then we’ll see how your amazingly brilliant plan is working.
If things don’t turn out well, you can always embrace that idea often attributed to Joseph Stalin: “A Single Death is a Tragedy; a Million Deaths is a Statistic.” And maybe you can stir in some social darwinism, drawing from your campaign attack on John McCain. To paraphrase: “I like people who don’t die of Coronavirus.”
Coronavirus is not an excuse to be racist. We all know that. Nonetheless, as we struggle to deal with the Coronavirus crisis, significant numbers of Americans are dusting off their favorite go-to tactic, racism, and aiming it toward the Far East. This time, it’s racism against Chinese people. For many examples, see the attached clip from Samantha Bee’s show (begin at 3:05 min for many examples where Fox Commentators follow Donald Trump’s xenophobic lead).
I struggle to find words to express my disappointment at this celebration of bigotry, and it’s not simply because I have many acquaintances and friends who are Chinese. It’s not simply because my daughters are Chinese. It’s because engaging in bigotry is a cruel thing to do to any another human being. We need to stop painting hundreds of millions of people with this broad brush. Have we learned NOTHING from the civil rights movement? For those who are tempted to push back at me and continue to blame “the Chinese” for our current struggle, which particular people are you angry at? You know it’s not all the Chinese people. You know that viruses don’t respect national borders. If you know anything about the evolution of viruses, you know that the next pandemic might originate in your own hometown.
Making this even more irritating for me, many of these racists claim to be Christians. Here’s my advice for those of you who are working hard to rename Coronavirus as “Chinese Coronavirus” or “Chinese Virus”: Take a deep breath, look in the mirror, take seriously your own commandment to love your enemy and put your fucking dog whistles away.
PS. This entire episode in hyper-nationalism is predictable by “Terror Management Theory.” (TMT). It’s well documented that people do this kind of shit when they are scared. See, here and here. Also see "The Worm at the Core," an excellent book on TMT by Sheldon Solomon.
That said, we can work harder to become better versions of ourselves in this crisis. We need to do a better job of keeping the focus on saving lives.
Lions have often been spotted only a few miles from my house.
I live in St. Louis, Missouri, where we have a rather excellent zoo that offers free admission to everyone. Today my daughter and I took our cameras to the St. Louis Zoo, which is only about four miles from my home. Here's one of the lions that is often spotted:
We also enjoyed watching apes interacting with sea lions:
Here are some of my chimpanzee pics. Whenever I see the chimps grooming, I think of Robin Dunbar's (persuasive) arguments that human gossip serves the same purpose as chimpanzee grooming.
If you click on the title, you will be taken to the full post, where you can view a gallery of these and other photos from today, Zoofari.
This morning I pretended I lived in a world without any plants. I pretended I was an inventor.
My first client asked me to invent something she called “plants.” She was entirely concerned with function, not aesthetics. She had some very demanding requirements. Each of these living things would be rooted to one position for their entire lives. They would not be able to move. I said, “Oh, like sponges . . . ” She corrected me: “No, sponges are animals like you!” She handed me information showing how plants differ from animals, though there are many similarities too, since all plants and all animals have common eukaryote ancestors.
At first, I was relieved that my task was to design only plants, not animals, because this would save me a lot of work. There will be no need to design locomotion, vision, migration or hunting behaviors. There would not be a need for any sort of biologically expensive brain that would offer neural plasticity, the ability for an individual plants to learn. A bit more thinking made me realize that this was going to be incredibly difficult. How does one design the ability for organisms to survive day to day when they are stuck in one place? The more I thought about this project, the more daunting it seemed.
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