SCALES #81: Paradox poetic
Data, biology, muppets
Hello!
I’m back at a new platform, having outlasted dearly departed Tinyletter. It’s been an awfully long time since the last SCALES, so let’s get, uh, right back to it.
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I was looking back at SCALES #1 (you don’t need to — like this issue, a bit of an exercise in throat-clearing) and one thing that has definitely changed since then: I am far, far removed from being the person making actual lab measurements. And yet! They’re hardly something I can ignore in my day-to-day work. Working with data you haven’t made yourself requires, at least to me, some poking and prodding to understand its outlines, its limits, its hidden surprises.
If anything, rather than taking measurements for granted, it makes me appreciate a broader range of lab data: not only the virtuosic studies that require special skill and new techniques to pull them off, but also quotidian measures that extend over years. Their reliability allows the method to fade into the background and the landscape of systems under study come into focus. That said, I’m excited to have a toe in a project where new experimental design and data collection techniques are once again part of the game. I’m more than happy not to be the one actually running the experiments, though!
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The role of new experimental techniques is mostly confined to subtext in Philip Ball’s book How Life Works, which I read recently. There’s some discussion of how the onset of methods, like single-cell sequencing, complicated the picture of molecular and cellular biology, but in Ball’s interest is mostly in the theoretical over the experimental.
Ball, drawing on his background as a decades-long editor for Nature, marshals ideas and observations, some from recent work but also looking back to earlier eras (including a surprising-to-me cameo by Alan Turing), to argue that the messy redundancies and emergent properties of life mean that metaphors such as machines and computers only have limited utility. In Ball’s telling, “[m]aybe the only way to truly understand life is with reference to itself.” In the book he travels up ~scales~ of organization, from genes up to organisms, tracing how new behaviors emerge at each level that require systems thinking as much as an understanding of all the underlying complexity. For instance,
With so much detail at the molecular level, it’s tempting to suppose that all of it is crucial to what happens at higher levels. But as gene knockout experiments show, often it isn’t. Again, what matters is not how each member of a molecular committee made its deliberations, but the collective decision that emerges. The apparent chaos of interacting components is in fact a sophisticated system that can process and extract information reliably and efficiently from complicated and contingent cocktails of signaling molecules.
As a non-biologist, I could only take his evaluation of the studies at face value, but what I appreciated was his sensitivity to the power of metaphor. Throughout the book Ball calls out the limiting powers of metaphor to explain biological systems, while at the same time inevitably advancing others to try to make his point (biology as multivalent language, cell differentiation as water over a terrain). Those contradictions didn’t bother me so much; instead, it made the project of the book, despite its sometimes dry recounting of individual discoveries, feel if not poetic, at least aligned with poetry in its interest in metaphor and meaning, reaching to describe what we don’t quite have the language to describe.
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So I was listening to this podcast…
…except, what even is a podcast nowadays? I had sort of dimly wondered why YouTube was becoming a home for what I had always thought of as an audio-only medium and John Herrman explains it gets back to discoverability:
[Video clips are] genuinely effective marketing for real podcasts, provided casual social-media users can easily find and listen to the shows they’re sourced from. (Edison’s report on young podcast listeners notes that, in 2023, a majority of listeners were finding new podcasts through social media, mostly through apps with short-video functions.) This might mean tapping over to Spotify, where you can listen to or watch full episodes of a show or subscribe for future installments. Maybe it means opening up a conventional podcast app, searching for a show, subscribing to the show, and then finding and downloading the episode you were looking for. But the shortest path to a full podcast from TikTok or Instagram — or, obviously, from Shorts — runs through YouTube, an open platform that everyone already uses, which is perfectly positioned to recapture some of this new and abundant attentional by-product.
Anyway, I listened to a good Big Biology recently about Pacific field crickets evolving their chirp away from the evocative “ancestral song” on the islands of Hawaiʻi. (Philip Ball talks about his book on one, too.)
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“However, unlike Bert's books (generally fictitious works centered on pigeons and oatmeal), Prairie's choices of literature were primarily real books, particularly those with a feminist motif.”
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