Albert Brooks on writing: "it's one of the last things you can do without permission"

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:

This is partly his pragmatism but also his attitude as a writer—writing, he once said, is just a series of solving one problem after the next. He doesn’t believe in writer’s block, not really. “Writing is like building a house,” he told me. “Once you start, you have to finish. It’s a funny concept that there’d be a block in other professions. If you hired an architect and a year later you said, ‘What happened?’ And he said, ‘I don’t know, I was blocked.’ You’d say, ‘What?!’ ” Also, when you write, you’re fully in control. “It’s one of the last things, except maybe painting, that you can do without permission,” he said.

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. It's easy for me to picture an accomplished writer with one or a few unfinished projects—not just unfinished but indefinitely on hold, with poor prospects for ever being finished. And I know of at least one very famous example of a brilliant author who reports an affliction with writer's block. But actually I relate to Brooks' vision. Once I start to write something, I finish it. Or perhaps more accurately, I intend to finish it. It is very rare for me to start to write then get "blocked" and stop the project. Whether this is a helpful or useful practice/view is not clear to me. There are times when killing an unfinished project is the best plan, but this is not one of my superpowers.

The essence of Quintessence of Dust: welcome to Blaugust 2024

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. (Actual quote from the organizer: "While I am not going to make you wear nametags to orientation, it would be lovely if you spent some time with that very first blog post to introduce yourself and the kind of content that you create.")

About me:

Professionally, I'm a biologist and a writer, with deep experience as an editor (the curating kind). I like to work in intense scientific environments, alongside people doing the kind of research that intends to change the world. I haven't worked in a lab for more than 10 years but I sometimes daydream about going back somehow.

I like to write and think about all aspects of biology, especially about evolution, genetics, and neuroscience.

Protein Space and the Protein Universe: Introduction

Evolution is easier than we think, and one great way to see why is to look at what we know about protein evolution.

Proteins have been evolving on our planet for about 4 billion years. Their appearance almost certainly precedes the beginning of life itself. We still don't know how the whole thing got off the ground, but once the stage was set (in living cells), evolution began exploring Protein Space. As it did so, it slowly created the Protein Universe. Since these two concepts — Protein Space and the Protein Universe — are so central to understanding and picturing protein evolution, we should carefully define what they mean.

"I put the ways of childhood behind me" — my remembrance of Dan Dennett

For five years through 2018, our humanist community, the Humanist Hub*, met every Sunday afternoon at our suite in Harvard Square for fellowship, music, and a speaker. Our advisory board included luminaries of humanism such as Rebecca Goldstein, Steven Pinker, and Dan Dennett. These friends of the organization regularly spoke at Humanist Hub events. One of the most memorable, for me, was Dan Dennett's talk in November 2017, "The Science of the Soul (and where to go from here)."

I was lucky enough to be asked to introduce Dan, and shared thoughts about what his work had meant to me. I've included my lightly edited script below. The video on Facebook includes more jokes (and laughs) and shows a typical Sunday program at the Hub. The program starts at 13:30, with music at 20:30, my remarks starting at 27:30, and Dan's talk starting at 37:20.

Science, intuition and the "strange inversion of reasoning"

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.

Some of our intuitions are clearly built-in. Many of the famous failings of our intuitive System 1, described by Daniel Kahneman in Thinking, Fast and Slow, seem to be hard-wired. Some are perhaps the unavoidable result of trade-offs that buy speed and decisiveness at the expense of accuracy and completeness. Others might be adaptive despite being occasionally delusional: I'm thinking here of optimism bias. Some days we just need some good old optimism bias!

But some of our most famous intuitions are more complex and a bit harder to attribute to brain wiring or adaptive tricks. These are intuitions that seem to affect how we see the whole world, all of existence, all day. I think it's intuition (and nothing else) that makes us feel that something complex, that shows design, must have come from a designer. That a universe has to have a beginning, and therefore a "beginner." That a mind like ours must somehow come from a bigger mind somewhere else. That seemingly uncaused events must have had a cause. Which are all probably related to a sense that the universe is haunted.

I'm not sure that these intuitions are all universally human—some are likely to be deeply cultural. But the point is that well beyond our intution that the sun moves through the sky or that the earth can't be a spinning ball, there are intuitions about the very fabric of existence.

Scientific thinking as the antidote to 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. But others are less clearly related—at least directly—to religions or tribes. Our brains are wondrous indeed but are known to be prone to various kinds of error. To be brutally frank: there are things that can seem obvious to us but that are false.

Daniel Kahneman's 2011 book Thinking, Fast and Slow was a life-changer for me. As soon as I read it in 2013, I urged colleagues to read it, even convening a book club at work. (The job of a journal editor is fundamentally about making decisions and judgments, and that's what the book is about.) One of the key messages of the book is that our fast thinking system (Kahneman calls it System 1) is both speedy and utterly important for survival. It's not about reflexes—it's still a kind of thought. But it's quick and dirty, often making guesses or approximations, and is prone to error. "Intuition" is a function of System 1.

What I learned about me when I started reading novels again

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. I read almost no fiction at all as a high schooler, then as a young Christian adult I read The Lord of the Rings trilogy and (urp) the Chronicles of Narnia. As a dad, I read (aloud with the family) all of the Harry Potter books, and that was great memorable fun. Somehow about 15 years ago I decided to read The Poisonwood Bible. (Unforgettable.) But my extensive reading habits were largely focused on science and Shakespeare.

To be sure, I derive both enjoyment and inspiration from science and from Shakespeare, but in retrospect it seems I needed to feed a part of me that finds inspiration in stories. In novels. And so I started collecting novels, specifically from female authors. I put a few on my Christmas list, and my loved ones obliged, and there they were on my shelves. Unread.

Then for some reason, not even two years ago, I decided to do it. I had a trip coming up: my annual journey to New York to co-lead the Scientific Writing Retreat at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. We had moved to Arizona, so the journey had evolved from a 4-hour ride on Amtrak to an all-day trip across the continent. I don't remember why, but I picked The Ten Thousand Doors of January by Alix Harrow, and started reading on the plane.

The known unknowns of biology: welcome to the unknome

'Genome' is now a pretty standard word in our social vocabulary. We have to put up with overloaded metaphors like "blueprint" and reverent talk like "language of god" but it does seem to me that the word is reasonably well understood by laypeople—not as jargony as "gene expression" or as inscrutable as "chromatin." The word was born in 1920 when someone blended 'gene' with 'chromosome'. (The -some in 'chromosome' is from a root that means 'body' as in 'somatic' or 'psychosomatic'.)

So, a genome is a "body" of genetic material, and specifically the whole body of genetic material in an organism (or a cell or a species). For decades now, science has been regularly adding more -omes. The proteome is the full body of proteins. The transcriptome the full body of transcripts. It gets a bit weirder: the phenome is the full body of phenotypes. There's even the spliceome, the full body of splice variants. Many of those are pretty jargony; the point is that -ome is a suffix that's being used a lot like -gate is used in political news (to indicate a kind of scandal, as in Watergate or Gamergate). Among the -omes (let's call it the omeome, ha ha!), the best by far is the unknome: the set of all genes of unknown function.

How big is the unknome? In other words, how many of the 20,000 or so genes in the human genome are unknown (in function)? Is there a gradient of unknown-ness? A new paper in PLOS Biology by Rocha and colleagues introduces us to the unknome and then adds some good stuff, which is the least the authors can do after telling us how little we know about human gene function.

Rebel scum

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.

That might sound romantic and all, but I'm actually being somewhat precise and referring to some useful counsel I got in the past few years as I considered Gretchen Rubin's Four Tendencies. The Rebel tendency describes me all too well. I hate being told what to do. I hate being controlled. I hate even suspecting that I'm being controlled. Here's how Rubin captures much of my life: "Telling a Rebel what to do makes them less likely to do it, even if it’s something they want to do."

There are advantages to being a Rebel but big weaknesses as well. Another tagline of the Rebel tendency is this LOLsob-inducing truism: "You can’t make me, and neither can I." So, the perhaps obvious disadvantage is that it can be extra difficult to get tasks done whenever there is a sense that someone or something is ordering it to be done. I'm not lazy; in fact, I work too much. But whenever I sense that someone is telling me what to do, I have to work around my natural instinct to resist their brazen attempt to control me. (Heh.) Otherwise, I'll find ways to not do the task (or meet the obligation, or whatever).

What are the advantages of that tendency? Are there any?

Thoughts on quintessence, mutation, and evolution

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:

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god: the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals — and yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?

—Hamlet, Act II, Scene II (Arden Shakespeare)

The word's history suggests that Shakespeare was (as usual) playing games with words and his audience (all quotes from the OED):

a quintessence can be a pure or perfect example of something and/or "The most essential part or feature of some non-material thing" as in "This seems to us the very quintessence of penny wisdom and pound folly in management"

and quintessence used to refer to a "In classical and medieval philosophy: a fifth essence existing in addition to the four elements, supposed to be the substance of which the celestial bodies were composed and to be latent in all things."

So, it seems Hamlet is saying that a human is a pure example of a blob of dust, but perhaps stardust. Either way (or both), he is commenting on what a human is at their core. Not just essence, but quintessence.

I don't know if this is a Western thing (I suspect it is), but essentialism like Hamlet's, in which we assume that a thing (a person, a gender, a gene, a protein, a species) has a definable essence, is a big hindrance to thinking about evolution.