“Nature is a blindfolded gambler playing with a deck of shuffled genes”
⌛ There are 77 days remaining in 2024 (!)
Issue #185: the Nobel Prize in chemistry, dealing with bad bosses, and living with envy
By Harris Sockel
Something I love about Medium, and the internet generally: You’ll always find a perspective that complicates what you thought you knew.
Sílvia PM, PhD— a paleontologist and former professor — runs a publication, Fossils et al, that does just that. It explodes common misconceptions about a topic I’ve always been fascinated by: the origins of life on Earth.
Take dinosaurs. I grew up with the most basic understanding of their tragic end (I vaguely remember watching an animated asteroid land on Earth and destroy them in a flash of light) but it turns out some survived! Specifically: birds. Sparrows, hawks, and even chickens are lil’ dinosaurs with wings. They’ve inherited air sacs in their bones, which originally evolved with dinos to help them store air outside of their rigid lungs.
One species that truly did go extinct: the dodo bird. As one writer explains in a story about their demise: “Nature is a blindfolded gambler playing with a deck of shuffled genes.” Some species win, others lose… and the dodos, it turns out, simply got too comfortable to stick around. Dodos evolved without fear on a serene island off the coast of Madagascar, and when Dutch settlers arrived, they couldn’t hold their own. (It’s more complicated than that, but that’s the gist.) As a result, plants on that island also went extinct, because not enough animals could spread their seeds.
The dodo is such a striking parable for life and work: If you live without fear or natural predators… you may not live very long?
One lesson of Fossils et al: Every tiny change triggers several others. The megalodon, a gnarly 82-foot shark, went extinct due to a confluence of subtle shifts in their environment, like changes in how the oceans flowed and the emergence of more efficient Great Whites. Nothing is stable, ever, and evolution is “just nature’s way of saying, ‘Well, that didn’t go as per plan, but let’s see what happens next!’”
⚡ Lightning round: Great, recent Medium stories in 2 sentences or less
- Last Wednesday, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Kevin Blake, PhD’s “thesis grandfather” (the advisor to his advisor) for designing new proteins that may one day be used to create new drugs, vaccines, and tiny computers.
- High-school English teacher Michael L. Maceira remembers the worst boss he ever had (think: barking orders instead of saying hello) and realizes that bad bosses deserve pity, not hatred — because they’re usually deeply unhappy.
- Here’s an essay you don’t come across every day: After a traumatic brain injury in 2019, Jessica Minier’s brain did something really strange (but also kind of beautiful?). It sent her back to the best year of her life: 1991.
Your daily dose of practical wisdom
Ask yourself: Who has what I want? Then turn your envy into curiosity.
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Edited and produced by Scott Lamb & Carly Rose Gillis
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