Not Weird Worm Specific

There’s a new study out about epigenetics and it’s just more proof that Lamarck may not have been as completely batty as we all learned in school. It does still appear to be true that Darwinian natural selection is the way evolution occurs, but it’s…
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This Aussie Cockatoo Nonsense

There’s a viral story in the last day or so about cockatoos raiding people’s bins in Australia. The cockatoos learned to open people’s bins; people put bricks on the lids; the cockatoos learned to push them off; people did other things; the cockatoos can’t open…
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An Amazing Photograph, Lithium, and Consciousness

I just saw this incredible picture today by Roberto Garcia-Roa of a “zombie fungus” fruiting from the body of one of its victims. You can read more about it here but what struck me particularly strongly in this photo is the fragility of self. Flies…
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On Process

Over the last decade or so there has been a lot of research dedicated to “Human Accelerated Regions (HAR’s).” These are the regions of our genetic code which have, for some reason, shown accelerated evolution since our divergence from chimpanzees about 7 million years ago…
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Technology and Erasure of Self

There was quite a long piece in The Verge recently about AI writing tools – specifically Sudowrite. Sudowrite is a piece of software based on Open AI’s language model GPT-3. These kinds of tools are particularly interesting to me because I studied artificial intelligence as…
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New Lens, Old Data

I don’t know why the research just keeps coming right now, but after the work, I mentioned in my last two essays was published, there is now another piece in another field that suggests life began on earth almost as soon as the planet formed…
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On the Tenacity of Life

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a piece about the possibility that life is not some ultra-rare miracle, but rather potentially inevitable. A few pieces of new research out in the last few weeks reinforce this possibility, and develop it, but from different angles….
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Why ET Won’t Return Our Calls?

Why do we expect aliens to be more altruistic than we are? We’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of the Arecibo message – the radio signal we beamed out to Globular Cluster M13 in 1974 which contained 1,679 bits of data communicating some of….
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Can Jerome Powell Impact Human Evolution?

One of the ways in which Game Theory has been applied to Evolutionary Biology is through the development of Signaling Theory. Here, the concept goes, prey and predators or potential mates communicate with each other using signals like calls or dances or pretty feathers and….
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Uptown Rats and London Underground Mosquitoes

In a paper published just a few years ago, it was determined that there are populations of rats in Manhattan which can be distinguished by neighborhood. Specifically Uptown and Downtown Rats. Likewise, the London Underground species of mosquito is distinct from the surface species, biting….
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Relativity, Vaccination, and Tag

Every day on the way home from school I ask my 7-year-old the highlight of his day. Yesterday, it was “playing ‘vaccine’ with my friends.” It turned out that “playing vaccine” meant someone was “giving out the vaccine” and people would refuse to get it…
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Human Action

I noticed that, on Wikipedia, the number of significant libraries listed as destroyed by “human action” is much greater than the number destroyed by natural causes. Certainly, many of these were because of disagreements with ideologies expressed in texts in those libraries. But many of…
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The Chimney and The Internet by Nic Kelman

Almost 1000 years ago monks, scholars, poets, and the like lamented the invention of a new technology that was going to destroy the fabric of society: the chimney. Until the late 12th Century, in Northern Europe, people ate their meals together in common rooms, dressed…
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Night Mother by Nic Kelman

I just learned for the first time that the Ancient Greeks had a god of criticism: Momus. He was eventually expelled from Olympus (no surprise there), but when I looked up his genealogy, I noticed something I also hadn’t realized before: that Nyx and Erebus…
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Nic Kelman’s Guest Articles

Science Fiction Writing by Nic Kelman – Writer’s Digest

The single biggest trap of writing science fiction is focusing on the science, not the fiction…
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Polychromatophilia by Nic Kelman – Copious Magazine

My results were ruined. As I ran the tests again that afternoon, I considered her spectrum. But it was no good, I realized, she was all absorption, all dark matter…
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Poisonous Flowers by Nic Kelman – The Village Voice

Notice is a difficult book. But not in the sense that it is an obscure work, some kind of experimental literary leviathan demanding to be mastered. Rather it is difficult because you will understand it all too well. It will make you uncomfortable..
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