Coffee Shop Conversations
Beethoven - dad's X - reduced to want - nanotech moth - etc.
The first half of every coffee shop conversation is free, the second is for paid subscribers. If you crave some recent, fully free writing expeditions, check out your bundled self, writing as symbiosis, love like a blue jay, or say hi to the elephant in my brain.
Or take a peek at my new essay in Clarkesworld Magazine on space potatoes, asteroid fungi, and moon dirt.
Hi. It’s been a while since we met up for coffee.
Please, make yourself comfortable. It’s always good to see you. Let me get you a coffee. I’ll zhuzh it up with a bit of cacao or cinnamon. What? You already made me one with cinnamon and freshly scraped vanilla bean? You spoil me, you absolute delight.
Tell me. Have you read or seen anything interesting recently? What color and taste do your emotions have today?
Beethoven sucks at music (says genetics)
A while ago, I wrote an essay on the genetic recipe for the perfect baby. I wrote,
Still, to get superbabies that grow up to be superadults, we need more than supergenetics; we need a super-supportive society and parents that provide the individually adjusted balance between positive challenges and unconditional care.
Yet, that leaves a lot of complexities unspoken. For example, polygenic indices are all the rage in build-your-own-baby land and several commercial labs already promise you a genetic scorecard for your baby. Does this have its use? Absolutely. We can screen for many diseases. But (you know there had to be a but) many ‘desirable’ traits are influenced by many gene variants and, like a dimmer switch, each gene variant can be differentially expressed due to environmental influences. Add that many, many processes, including sneaky other genes, can nudge the path from gene to trait in different directions, and you can begin to imagine how complex it is.
Also, imagine Beethoven.
After sequencing the DNA from strands of hair from our gloomy German composer, scientists used polygenic indices for musical ability to assess the full extent of Beethoven’s genius.
The result? With the best currently available indices, Beethoven scored… way below average.
Da-Da-Da-DUM
Dad’s X
In most cases, mammals with two X chromosomes biologically develop as females. One X comes from mum, one from dad. So, each female cell has two X chromosomes. But, during embryonal development, one of those X’s is turned off by random X inactivation in each cell. Because this process is (as far as we know) random, some women have more active mum X’s, some more active dad X’s, and some women have a nice balance of mum and dad represented in their active X chromosomes.
Does it matter whether you have more active mum or dad X’s? The idea is that having a nice balance is probably best, but until recently, we didn’t know.
A new study in mice now suggests that dad X’s have their benefits. By tweaking the balance of mum/dad X’s in mouse brain cells, the researchers found that mice with an active X balance skewed toward mum’s chromosomes,
… impaired cognition… throughout the lifespan and… worsened cognition with age.
The reason behind this appears to be a difference in gene expression between mom and dad X’s.
Parent of regret
Speaking of parents… A few days ago, I stumbled across a The Times article about the costs and benefits of parenthood. It wasn’t all that new or interesting. I was more interested in the backlash. “How dare a man twist and massage data to convince women to have children? What if you split up the happiness scores of parents per gender? Men have it easy.”
To be fair, fair points.
The underlying thread here is that, perhaps, the costs of having kids, both tangible and intangible, are genuinely greater than the benefits. Ironically, the only people who can actually know this are parents.
So, do parents regret having children? Parental regret is a very understudied, still taboo topic. Still, if we take our broad brush to paint across a few limited surveys, we end up with an estimate of roughly 10-30% of parents who (anonymously) express regret about having kids. Especially women are concerned about the stigma of expressing parental regret, even though childfree-through-choice women tend to report high levels of life satisfaction.
The question that matters most, though, is why? In one of the few studies that digs into this, most people express parental regret because of the conditions of having children, rather than having the children by itself. Most regretful parents express regret about the timing, the partner, or the external world, whereas only a minority express regret about being a parent, having challenging kids, or secretly wanting to be child-free.
Reduced to want
What do you get when a superb writer and gifted poet fall in blazing love? Amazing love letters, that’s what.
While Virginia Woolf was married to Leonard Woolf and Vita Sackville-West to Harold Nicolson, the two women had an affair raging and roiling with passion. This letter Vita sent Virginia in 1927 is gorgeous in its simplicity.
I am reduced to a thing that wants Virginia. I composed a beautiful letter to you in the sleepless nightmare hours of the night, and it has all gone: I just miss you, in a quite simple desperate human way. You, with all your undumb letters, would never write so elementary a phrase as that; perhaps you wouldn’t even feel it. And yet I believe you’ll be sensible of a little gap. But you’d clothe it in so exquisite a phrase that it should lose a little of its reality. Whereas with me it is quite stark: I miss you even more than I could have believed; and I was prepared to miss you a good deal. So this letter is really just a squeal of pain. It is incredible how essential to me you have become. I suppose you are accustomed to people saying these things. Damn you, spoilt creature; I shan’t make you love me any more by giving myself away like this — But oh my dear, I can’t be clever and stand-offish with you: I love you too much for that. Too truly. You have no idea how stand-offish I can be with people I don’t love. I have brought it to a fine art. But you have broken down my defenses. And I don’t really resent it.
To me, that very last sentence is the most brilliant one.
*squeal
Moth nanotechnology
This is the fruit-sucking moth, or Eudocima aurantia.
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