One motivation for relaunching Quintessence of Dust was my desire to write about things I'm reading, whether books or articles. So here is this month's entry in my new series, What I'm reading, posted at the start of every month.
I bought this book in March at the Tucson Festival of Books after a fascinating event called "She persisted". Even got my copy signed! WBUR loved it. I asked the author whether it would matter that I (unlike, I think, everyone else at the event) have never read The Scarlet Letter and was assured that it would not. I'm a little more than halfway through and I love the book. I think I've read actual accounts of the Salem Witch Delusions (I haven't looked up the history to compare with the book's narrative), and I like the cadence of switching between centuries. A recurring theme is synesthesia, which the central character refers to as "the colors," and there are detailed descriptions of needlework that are a bit challenging.
Non-fiction
I wrote about this book and my experiment (before and after reading). The first chapter was harrowing and introduced me to the term "complicitor" and outlines Bazerman's approach, which is case-based and more "practical" than what philosophers do. I should have known that Aquinas was an original source of instruction on complicity, but I didn't. I'm about halfway through.
This book was strongly recommended to me by a friend here in Tucson. My friend has studied with the author, who was partly Tucson-based (and perhaps still is). I'm excited to finally experience the wisdom of these ancient teachers. The publisher's page has a little more information.
You know the ancient struggle between chance and contingency vs. design/structuralism (aka necessity) in evolutionary explanation? How's this for a provocative title of a research paper: "Contingency and chance erase necessity in the experimental evolution of ancestral proteins."
The abstract:The roles of chance, contingency, and necessity in evolution are unresolved because they have never been assessed in a single system or on timescales relevant to historical evolution. We combined ancestral protein reconstruction and a new continuous evolution technology to mutate and select proteins in the B-cell lymphoma-2 (BCL-2) family to acquire protein–protein interaction specificities that occurred during animal evolution. By replicating evolutionary trajectories from multiple ancestral proteins, we found that contingency generated over long historical timescales steadily erased necessity and overwhelmed chance as the primary cause of acquired sequence variation; trajectories launched from phylogenetically distant proteins yielded virtually no common mutations, even under strong and identical selection pressures. Chance arose because many sets of mutations could alter specificity at any timepoint; contingency arose because historical substitutions changed these sets. Our results suggest that patterns of variation in BCL-2 sequences – and likely other proteins, too – are idiosyncratic products of a particular and unpredictable course of historical events.
This brilliant paragraph comes from the Introduction (emphasis is mine):
The ideal experiment to determine the relative roles of chance, contingency, and necessity in historical evolution would be to travel back in time, re-launch evolution multiple times from each of various starting points that existed during history, and allow these trajectories to play out under historical environmental conditions (Gould, 1989). By comparing outcomes among replicates launched from the same starting point, we could estimate the effects of chance; by comparing those from different starting points, we could quantify the effects of contingency that was generated along historical evolutionary paths (Figure 1). Necessity would be apparent if the same outcome recurred in every replicate, irrespective of the point from which evolutionary trajectories were launched and changes that occurred subsequently: in that case, evolution would be both deterministic (free of chance) and insensitive to initial and intervening conditions (noncontingent). Although time travel is currently impossible, we can approximate this ideal design by reconstructing ancestral proteins as they existed in the deep past (Thornton, 2004) and using them to launch replicated evolutionary trajectories in the laboratory under selection to acquire the same molecular functions that evolved during history.
No comments:
Post a Comment