Link Salad, the What We're Made Of Edition
-- How to Get Another Thorax - Steven Rose, London Review of Books, Sept. 8, 2016
"Epigenetics seeks to explain how, starting from an identical set of genes, the contingencies of development can lead to different outcomes. To illustrate this, Waddington imagined what he called an ‘epigenetic landscape’ of rolling hills and valleys. Place a ball at the top of the hill and give it a little push. Which valley it rolls down depends on chance fluctuations; some valleys may converge on the same endpoint, others on different ones. Waddington called this process ‘canalisation’, though the material basis for the metaphor was, at the time, unknowable. He imagined the hills and valleys as held in place by strings stretching from nodes (genes) located below the surface landscape."
-- Body and Soul - Noga Arikha, Lapham's Quarterly, Fall 2016
"Over centuries, the status of nature itself became a problem. The status of flesh shifted along with views about the relation of nature to the created realm. Where in Greco-Roman paganism all aspects of nature had harbored a divine essence and were associated with a god, for the three Mosaic religions nature was the creation of one god. The question that then arose, and that for centuries would be disputed by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers-often theologians, philosophers, physicians, and natural philosophers all in one-concerned the limit beyond which nature acts of its own accord, without God’s impetus. The issue of how things moved and transformed was at the forefront of speculation. Magic, which could easily tilt into heresy, never disappeared from the realm of serious investigation into the nature of things. That fluctuating border between nature and God was also the border between flesh and soul. Once it was posited, its position became hard to determine because one realm necessarily determined the other. The most self-evident aspect of our being, our fleshy embodiment, became endlessly confounding. To what extent do humans partake of nature? To what extent is nature a morally acceptable part of humans? To what extent do we differ from beasts?"
-- Can Quantum Physics Explain Consciousness? - Jennifer Ouellette, The Atlantic, Nov. 7, 2016
"The mere mention of “quantum consciousness” makes most physicists cringe, as the phrase seems to evoke the vague, insipid musings of a New Age guru. But if a new hypothesis proves to be correct, quantum effects might indeed play some role in human cognition. Matthew Fisher, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, raised eyebrows late last year when he published a paper in Annals of Physics proposing that the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms could serve as rudimentary “qubits” in the brain-which would essentially enable the brain to function like a quantum computer."
"Epigenetics seeks to explain how, starting from an identical set of genes, the contingencies of development can lead to different outcomes. To illustrate this, Waddington imagined what he called an ‘epigenetic landscape’ of rolling hills and valleys. Place a ball at the top of the hill and give it a little push. Which valley it rolls down depends on chance fluctuations; some valleys may converge on the same endpoint, others on different ones. Waddington called this process ‘canalisation’, though the material basis for the metaphor was, at the time, unknowable. He imagined the hills and valleys as held in place by strings stretching from nodes (genes) located below the surface landscape."
-- Body and Soul - Noga Arikha, Lapham's Quarterly, Fall 2016
"Over centuries, the status of nature itself became a problem. The status of flesh shifted along with views about the relation of nature to the created realm. Where in Greco-Roman paganism all aspects of nature had harbored a divine essence and were associated with a god, for the three Mosaic religions nature was the creation of one god. The question that then arose, and that for centuries would be disputed by Jewish, Christian, and Muslim thinkers-often theologians, philosophers, physicians, and natural philosophers all in one-concerned the limit beyond which nature acts of its own accord, without God’s impetus. The issue of how things moved and transformed was at the forefront of speculation. Magic, which could easily tilt into heresy, never disappeared from the realm of serious investigation into the nature of things. That fluctuating border between nature and God was also the border between flesh and soul. Once it was posited, its position became hard to determine because one realm necessarily determined the other. The most self-evident aspect of our being, our fleshy embodiment, became endlessly confounding. To what extent do humans partake of nature? To what extent is nature a morally acceptable part of humans? To what extent do we differ from beasts?"
-- Can Quantum Physics Explain Consciousness? - Jennifer Ouellette, The Atlantic, Nov. 7, 2016
"The mere mention of “quantum consciousness” makes most physicists cringe, as the phrase seems to evoke the vague, insipid musings of a New Age guru. But if a new hypothesis proves to be correct, quantum effects might indeed play some role in human cognition. Matthew Fisher, a physicist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, raised eyebrows late last year when he published a paper in Annals of Physics proposing that the nuclear spins of phosphorus atoms could serve as rudimentary “qubits” in the brain-which would essentially enable the brain to function like a quantum computer."