Darwin Day in Norwich – Pictures‘n’Posts

David explaining the dangers of 'going ape' in 1860's Oxford 

A fun day at the Quadram Institute in Norwich to celebrate Darwin Day a week ago today, just after the great man’s birthday (12^th). 

A good sized audience heard a historical/literary talk from Dr Jude Piesse (Liverpool John Moores University, Liverpool, UK) “The ghost in the garden: in search of Darwin’s lost garden” and Dr Anders Bergstrom (School of Biological Sciences, UEA, Norwich, UK) with the talk “The Call of the Wild: the Genetic History of Wolves & Dogs” before listening to my “The Eyenigma Variations: Darwin, DNA & Music. Eyenigma is a recreation of the famous ‘Huxley Debate’ of 1860 at the newly constructed Oxford Museum of Natural History (see above), a building intended to present Science as “Facts, Connected, Illuminated, Interpreted, so as to become the Intelligible Embodied Expression to his Creatures of the Will of God” (Acland). The debate became one of the most celebrated punch-ups in science, which I hope I conveyed in the music (first performed in the Museum in 2015). I finished the talk with three minutes of the finale of the quartet accompanied by a slide-video depicting the journey from “one very simple and imperfect” (Origin, Chapter 6) to a perfect and complex eye, and ending with the audience shouting "STOP" at the STOP codon (the last bar). Nice to have audience participation in a string quartet. My thanks to professor Dan-Eric Nilsson of Lund University for allowing me to use images from his lecture on the subject. You can here the last three minutes of Eyenigma here and see Dan’s full lecture here.

No space to describe the full talk here, and the genetic basis of the music, but it was fun to digress into Douglas Hofstadter’s (birthday: yesterday 19^th Feb!) first proposal of DNA music in 1979 which inspired so many, including Dave Deamer whom I used as the first example of published DNA music. Check out his composition and video of the Insulin gene here.

Eyenigma Intro video - codes

'One very simple' - melatonin, then rhodopsin, the first light sensors

Picture credits:  David Gahan & Mark Pallen

Video credits: Dave & Nick Deamer (follow link, used with permission) and David Gahan 

33-and-Me, Darwin Day, Suzi Quatro – and good luck in Novosibirsk!

Suzi Quatro - godmother of Rock and Charles Darwin fan

Happy Darwin Day – what a good time of year for the Great Man to be born, just two days before that festival of the reproductive urge, Valentine’s Day – a happy time of year with snowdrops and daffodils beautifying our Northern Hemisphere spring. 

At the last count, I was pleased to see 33 events posted on the International Darwin Day website, plus the one I’m speaking at, and playing some music, at the University of East Anglia Quadram Institute in Norwich, England on Monday 13^th (couldn’t resist the 33andMe ‘genetic’ pun, but I believe I don’t have more than the usual 23 pairs of chromosomes). As part of the talk on Darwin, DNA & Music, I’ll be playing Dave Deamer’s transcription of the gene coding for the two chains of the Insulin protein, you can listen to that here. This was featured in Dave’s amazing Wonderfest talk and he’s the grand-daddy of DNA music.

The value of international cultural efforts around Darwin and Evolution in our modern liberal, science-respecting culture is pretty high, and what wonderful opportunities and linkages can arise from them. How else would a 1991 tribute to Charles Darwin via ‘godmother of Rock’ Suzi Quatro, via Darwin Day celebrations in Novosibirsk, Russia have led to a a good chance to share Darwin-music in Norwich?

This is funny. One of the first two events posted for IDD was from the Institute of Cytology and Genetics in Novosibirsk – well known stop on the Trans-Siberian railway and a university town. Professor Borodin (no relation to the great composer and chemist whose chain-lengthening reaction pathway is an essential tool in organic synthesis) has been a champion of civilised celebration of IDD for years. We had a nice email exchange and he sent some links of the amazing Darwin tributes and mocumentaries his students have produced some years. Three cheers for civilised science students everywhere, especially musically engaged. 

If you want tears of laughter to flow down your cheeks, get a load of this biopic. I never knew he had so much trouble with those finches! And some very subtle jokes – I’m on your wavelength guys. But imagine my surprise at the opening musical number – Queen Suzi!

Hey Charley, Hey Charley
Did your mind tell your heart what to do
Hey Charley, Hey Charley
Did you know that the world would be looking at you
Ooooh, the way that they do

Where did they find that? I had to know, went googling – but someone had been on the trail before me. Step forward Professor Pallen, microbial geneticist and ruck’n’dubfan. Wow! Someone else on the Darwin music trail. If you want the full low-down on how Suzi Q came to be ‘Number 1 in the Darwin Charts’, read Mark’s entry from his Rough Guide to Evolution. So that’s how I come to be speaking at his Uni for this year’s Darwin Day. 

Picture Credit Suzi Quatro website 

Good Luck: In This Brief Moment, Darwin cantata by Brett Dean

 

Counter-tenor Patrick Terry giving it everything, with CBSO

In a blog dedicated to Evolution & Music, it’s good to note a new substantial work adding to the growing canon of Darwin related music. Today, 02/02/2023 (proximal to InternationalDarwin Day ~ 12^th Feb, now up to 34 events) sees the second performance of In ThisBrief Moment, following its worldwide première in Birmingham on 24/09/2022. I only found out about it from Mark Pallen while arranging the talk I’m due to give on Monday 13^th Feb in Norwich on ‘Darwin, DNA & Music’ (for free registration, if you can make it, book here). So maybe there is a need for a blog on Darwin/Evolution Music!

So, lucky few who attended at Birmingham and tonight’s concert in Hamburg! (including Prague Philharmonic Choir / NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester). An enthusiastic review in the Guardian made the piece sound fun, with a good mix of ingredients as one would expect from a modern synthesis. Dean, based in Germany and also wielding a mean viola and conductor’s baton is (maybe!) Australia’s leading composer; he certainly knows what an orchestra is for, as a few moments listening to any of his available clips will show. It’s perhaps unfortunate that for this subject with potentially wide appeal, it isn’t yet ‘for sharing’, so we’re left with only the reviews and a list of ingredients. I’ll try and find out more.

But it seems like a lot was packed into 45 minutes: “moments of extreme beauty”in the intertwining of the soloists lines, zany cabaret sequence, recorded voiceover and “extraordinary chirruping” sounds made by 24 specially created whirlytubes, and the choir donning black masks, presumably in an ecological connection. I’m all in favour of serious artistic works using visuals, props and even audience participation (just you wait…).

And a nod to that greatest, so far, of all the stories of our Origin told in music, Haydn’s Creation. I sang this with a Parisian choir in 1996, somewhere on the Left Bank. Oh for a Darwin-based work to hold a candle to that… I look forward to hearing Brett’s work and hearing how it holds up.

Picture credit: Guardian Newspapers

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).

Bridge of a Million Starships – for Arthur C. Clarke’s birthday

 

Needs another thousand years development but recent advances in fusion seem promising

I posted on 1^st December on just about the only definable (and safe!) point in space that all our intelligent neighbours - of ~1.4Trillion star systems - could be expected to agree on: the mid-point between the Andromeda and Milky Way galaxies, the ‘AMiTe point’ (see the post for where to find this in the sky).

The inhuman, monstrous-awful distances and timescales to get there recalls Blaise Pascal:

“Nature is an infinite sphere whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere…  I feel engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me.”

The great science-fiction authors weren’t daunted by such difficulties. One of them, Olaf Stapledon, even gave us the adjective ‘Stapledonic’ for concepts on the very largest scale (the word is now practically ungoogleable, returning one broken link and one unsafe site). But the greatest of all, and a good engineer to boot, was Arthur C. Clarke, inventor of the geo-synchronous orbit for communication satellites, whose 105^th birthday it would be today. Boy, did he do immensity.

The journey of an intelligent species – all the way “from Apes to Angels” – is the background to 2001: A Space Odyssey, perhaps the grandest of all journeys. I’m not sure we’ll ever get to the Angel stage, but we’ve come such a long way and have further to go. A vast time dimension is the backdrop to The City and the Stars which takes place “two and a half billion years from the present - ten rotations of the Galaxy”. Humanity has, sort of, reached an end-point but could there be a chance for ‘rebirth’? (a cyclic view similar to mine). There’s a good jaunt to the Centre of the Galaxy, needing a faster-than-light space-drive, which adds distance (and emptiness…) to the picture but in the end it’s the renewal of the human race which will be the imperative. But the real immensities of distance and time – for spaceships obeying the unbreakable, unshakeable velocity limit of c – are best conveyed in Rendezvous with Rama (ignoring sequels). The mystery, “that chilling touch of the alien, the not-quite-knowable*,” of the apparently uninhabited ‘worldship’ of Rama passing through the Solar System remains unbroken at the end - but one conclusion that protagonists and readers can make with certainty is that Rama is one of a chain of similar ships, at least three! Another will follow in seventy years’ time.

I like this vision of chains of ships. If you are going the immense distance to the AMiTe point (see post of 1^st Dec and the AMiTe page on this blog), then being part of a chain means you can get the signal back. A million starships, spaced at 4 light-years apart, would give you a very good chance of interacting with a similar chain coming the other way ‘antiparallel’, or parallel - originating from somewhere else in the Milky Way. See the paper for the maths and rationale of 4.19 light year and 59 year launch separation. Is a million a big number? Not when you consider the >200 million SUVs in the world, and especially if you have several 10’s of millions of years – short by Clarke’s timescale in The City and the Stars. Clarke lived a long time (1917-2008) but didn’t expect to see things like a Space Elevator with his own eyes; he wouldn’t mind taking the long view.

But I think he would like to look up to that fuzzy blob of M31, the right-hand edge (edge closest to Sagittarius) and wonder just how many lines-of-a-million-starships, each originating from a different solar system, are threading their way to, and through, that ‘empty’ region of space. Could be quite a buzz there.

Picture credit IMDb under ‘non-commercial’ license.

*John Leonard, New York Times

Other Composers do DNA Music (2)!

Back to music! Following the performance of my quartet Eyenigma Variations (extract here) where one of the principal themes is a melody derived from the DNA of the most basic Eye (receptor) protein, I’d like to do a post about other composers doing DNA & other codes in music. Please comment if you'd like to highlight others!

In the beginning was the Book: Gödel, Escher, Bach (Hofstadter, 1979), “A metaphorical fugue on minds and machines in the spirit of Lewis Carroll”; you can tell that there are devious codes in there right from the start! Although really about the mind emerging from self-referencing in brain circuits, there are beautiful digressions about self-referencing in maths and music. Enter B-A-C-H, both the composer and his musical self-reference in The Art of Fugue. The BACH code pervades Eyenigma, as well.

H? What’s H in music? At the time in Germany, H was just ordinary B – so what was B then? why B ♭ of course! Just shows you can make any rule, as long as you stick with it. But Bach has started a trend to code names in music. Dmitri SCHostakovich stretched a point by coding the bolded letters as D-E♭ -C-B (there’s that H = B thing again, and a weird letter sound eSS becoming E♭). So I bunged that one in as well, Eyenigma bars 192/3. (One day, I’ll do myself as DFG(AHA)^N (the ‘to the N’ would be a trill).

Douglas Hofstadter couldn’t resist the idea that ‘DNA makes DNA’, referencing itself with the letters GATC (Guanine, Adenine, Thymine, Cytosine) - and makes all living things as part of that loop (the phenotype provides the energy and materials).  Give-or-take a ‘T’, that looks musical, similar to the BACH code. DaveDeamer, Prof. at University of California Santa Cruz, inventor of the latest DNA wonder technology and now doing amazing work on Darwin’s ‘warm pond’ origin of life theory, thought the same in 1992: see his Wonderfest lecture here. He uses GAC but assigns the note E to thymine. This gives four notes either in major sixth (CEGA) or minor seventh (ACEG) chords, both loved by jazz improvisers ‘cos everything sounds good with these notes. It’s a great choice if you want direct translation of DNA strings and don’t mind the ‘goes on forever’ aspect. I’ll post more about Dave’s later DNA musical activities in the future.

Dave proposed expanding the idea to choosing notes for amino acids which would give twenty notes instead of four. This idea has been expanded by Markus Buehler at MIT – here’s his Soundcloud page. Sounds pretty good (what do you think?) but again uses the direct translation method so not much for a human composer to do!

In my setting of rhodopsin, I’d used the translation of T = B (see oldest/first post in this blog). That gave a ‘leading note’, one of the two semitone intervals in the diatonic scale (eg E to F, B to C) which allows a melody to arrive somewhere. I also used the principle of ‘third letter redundancy’ which allows a composer some harmonic control but ends of with the same end results – see Evolution of Redundancy in the Genetic Code. This gave the first theme (melody) in Eyenigma ; you hear it on the ‘cello in the extract.

Another composer who has written a genetic string quartet is Deirdre Gribbin – ‘Hearing your Genes Evolve’. This is a great example of starting from a DNA translation base but using absolutely contemporary compositional skills to get a fully satisfying result from simple ideas (I used a more classical Variations structure to tell the story I wanted of the ‘Eye Debate’ of 1860). I’d love to know what ‘rule’s Deirdre uses – hopefully she’ll tell me!

Gregory Brown has also used DNA derived ideas in his Missa Charles Darwin. I wrote about this in my 'Evolution Day' (24th November) post.

Picture credit: DNA-MUSIC Abhijit Bhaduri, Flickr CC