Friendly Reminder that

“the world” is not an entity and it is never unified in a singular way “against” you as an individual. Anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is not a friend.

Thoughts for a Thursday from An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks

It is, thus, discontinuities, the great discontinuities in life, that we seek to bridge, or reconcile, or integrate, by recollection, and, beyond this, by myth and art.

Thoughts for a Thursday from Saving Tarboo Creek

In the history of life, no gene has ever been expressed in the absence of environmental influences. These environmental influences, in turn, come in two distinct but interacting types: a genetic environment created by the unique combination of fifty thousand distinct alleles in every person, and an external environment with thousands of factors–temperature, disease, nutrition, learning experiences, social milieu, and so on–that influence whether a gene is expressed at all and if so, when, where, and how much. Likewise, it’s not possible for experience, learning, training, or other aspects of nurture to create a trait in the absence of the structures and potentials created by gene products. There is simply no such thing as nature versus nurture.