The Super Ape: date change!

 

...Is Us. Reggae, Dub & performance poetry below

Last post, I’d just been asked to give a talk for International Darwin Day at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, Quadram Institute on 13^th Feb (date change from 10th due to INDUSTRIAL ACTION). This free event has now been posted (LINK SHOWS INCORRECT DATE, but booking site will be fine) as one of seventeen events from Brazil, Mexico (US x 8), through Germany and Novosibirsk, Russia (more on this excellent group later). I’ll be giving a talk inspired by the cult classic Gödel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter, 1979) - about codes in music and how DNA can be represented, drawing on other composers’ efforts and using a useful trick from my biochemical past! A fair amount of genetics with a bit of music-theory added. I’ll be posting a new music video on Soundcloud to mark the occasion.

The event, organised by Profs. Tracey Chapman & Mark Pallen, will feature talks on “The ghost in the garden: in search of Darwin’s lost garden” (Dr Jude Piesse) and “The Call of the Wild: the genomic history of wolves and dogs” (Dr Anders Bergstrom). Mark is an international expert on high-throughput sequencing to problems in microbiology and ancient DNA research, and old hand at giving popular lectures on Darwin & Evolution. Here’s a saucy one from the Institute’s 2020 Darwin Day events, giving all the scuttlebutt (lovely American term) you’ll ever need on C.D. He’s also the author of the Rough Guide to Evolution (2008) which contains a section on music related to Darwin. A lot has happened since 2008 (stimulated by the 150^th anniversary of ‘Origin’ in 2009) so probably will need an update; but in the meantime it’s a main theme of this blog so keep on reading!

One delight of finding all this science-arts-culture fostered by Tracey & Mark at Quadram was discovering performance poet (& science-writer, &&&…) Peter Bickerton, the Juggling Doctor. Peter gave a great reading of his piece Super Ape at Quadram in 2019, a video of it here. Wow, in a grand sweep (see my blog entry Arthur C. Clarke for comparison), he arcs our story from big-bang to extinction. Millenial-millenarianism?  Why not? Of course it’s painted in topical concerns, images and thought-patterns of our age (whadja want? Biblical style?), but that’s what gives it colour and fun; oh, and the really cool Jamaican Reggae / Dub from The Upsetters (1976). In a blog whose twin themes are evolution and music this was a great find. I’ll post at a later date about more Evolution-Dub!

Un-Darwin Day – today 17th Jan 2023?

 

Small Families, Hou Hai Lake Park Beijing 2018, DG 

It’s less than a month before International Darwin Day – his birthday on 12^th February.  I’ve been asked to give a talk at the Qaudram Institute on 10^th February entitled ‘The EyenigmaVariations: Darwin, DNA and Music’ and am planning a whole series of musical posts around that.

But (uniting both themes of this blog) today, 17^th January 2023, has a good claim to be ‘Un-Darwin-Day’. Natural Selection as defined by Darwin (his words) requires “Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection…” Today marks continued confirmation that “Ratio of Increase so high…” is functionally over in this phase of our species - with the expected news of numerical fall in that byword for population enormity, China.  All countries will follow, in time. Take a look at the chart of  births per 1,000 people since the one-child policy ended in 2016: down, down, down. This is a social phenomenon, not a legal one, which is why everywhere else will follow. In fact, my ‘no-worries’ projection of the (temporary)extinction date of the human race, 5,400 C.E. (A.D.) assumes an increase of China’s current TFR (total fertility rate) of 1.45 to a world average of 1.6 (the current average for OECD countries). But, no worries! Still thousands of years of culture to go and maybe some big adventures.

Darwin of course anticipated that the human race had departed from fully Natural Selection, whatever its explanatory powers for how we’d got here (including his charming explanation of different skin colourations via the part which sexual selection plays in many species, itself an adaptive trait). The main force was another adaptive trait: that of caring for weaker members of society - the protective urge which he had observed in other social animals. A far cry from the winner-takes-all mentality that lesser minds took as a lesson from the simple mathematical ‘Special Theory’ of Natural Selection - a nicer ‘General Theory’.

And maybe we’ll need fewer humans, even in the cultural spaces we hope will be our preserve after the ‘end of work’. Here’s a scary story (same date, 17^th Jan 2023) that could narrow the evolutionary niche of song-writers, composers etc, and the rest of us.

I’ll write further about Un-Darwin-Day with other candidate dates, and reasons to celebrate it, on a later occasion!

Picture credit: DG, at a popular park in Beijing for family outings, business trip 2018 (Semiconductor equipment business).