Infinite Jen's Reviews > She Has Her Mother's Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity

A small slice of information pertinent to the actual content of this book has been bracketed for those concerned. Though I suspect the majority of you are not here for that.

Has it ever occurred to you that the quantum interference patterns within the microtubules of your brain are culpable for the tragic passing of Norm MacDonald, you bastard!? Wait, permit me a mulligan, if you will. Have you ever, while producing cavitation bubbles in the geometry of space-time like unto a certain carnivorous marine crustacean of the order Stomatopoda (i.e. Mantis Shrimp) utilizing the carbon fiber planing hull of a Colombian drug boat, the Archimedes Principle, and gratuitous combustion, turned to regard your bound captives with a white residue clinging to your whiskers like titanium dioxide and said the following?

“More quantum mechanics mechanisms were also introduced. Exocytosis, as an intriguing discovery, was chosen as the indispensable and pivotal step. In the standby phase of the synaptic bouton, exocytosis was seen as a staged quantal event based on the quantum tunneling effect, resulting in momentarily increasing the probability of exocytosis (actually, it was named the selection of events in quantum mechanics). This selection mechanism augmented the likelihood for exocytosis and led to amplified excitatory postsynaptic potentials. Then, a coherent coupling of boutons in a dendron occurred. Because the dendrons in the cerebral cortex contain countless synaptic connections, there is an enormous amount of quantum transmission in the human brain, which inevitably leads to the randomness and freedom of mental phenomena-free will.”

Did one of your hostages then rebuff you thusly?

“After more than twenty years, no subsequent development of this ancestral hypothesis has occurred; additionally, the true identity of psychons was never discovered, despite countless works focused on cortical architecture.”

And, after running Monte Carlo sims in your wetware until your decision tree has been whittled into a javelin by the hideous parsimony of a certain razor (i.e. a sharp instrument for partitioning blow for manageable ingestion confiscated from a certain English Franciscan friar (i.e. William of Ockham)), hurled the sharp stick of your conviction down fate’s gaping hallway to strike the only remaining target in resolution-space whilst screaming the immortal words of Bill Hicks, “Ahhh, ha ha ha, it's gone, it's gone, it's gone. Oh, it's gone. All the shitty shows are gone, all the idiots screaming in the fucking wind are dead, I love it. Leaving nothing but a cool, beautiful serenity called... Arizona Bay. That's right, when L.A. falls in the fucking ocean and is flushed away, all that it will leave...is Arizona Bay.” Abruptly banking so hard you flip the boat an impossible number of times, accelerating laterally like alien technology, skipping across the water like a green basilisk lizard until it’s spinning so fast it resembles nothing so much as a blurry oblong shape, gaining FPS as if a bug in the simulation has inextricably linked some part of the physics engine to the refresh rate of the observer. Ascending skyward as if in a Bethesda game and continuing to rotate before exploding into impossibly long polygonal spikes which, due to shoddy collision detection, (i.e. the collection of algorithms that react to the interaction of two adjacent overlapping geometries), clip through the known universe and collapse this instance of reality?

Do you wish to learn about the particulars of genetics? (A pun so crass that Gregor Mendel would throw his head back as if billions and billions (i.e. Carl Sagan) of Nutted But She Still Sucking memes suddenly cried out in ecstasy and were suddenly silenced.) Then eliminate, with extreme prejudice, those who would multiply entities without necessity (i.e. telling your boy William “go fuck thyself” ) by bifurcating your flow diagram. Have you ever, while in a mad rush to procure a book recommended to you by an unhinged country bumpkin, kicked a man so violently in the bollocks that he saw, in a magnificent flash of pyrotechnic pain, life in all its ribald generative glory, and gurgled out what follows?

“Young lady, you and I, and everyone - the world over, are bound by a common inheritance, stretching back in an unbroken chain of procreative successes. In these most improbable unions, a twisted ladder of phosphates and sugars, zipped and unzipped in just such a way, interacting with the environment epigenetically, expressing and suppressing according to transcription factors and..

Flattening his gonads with the instep of your foot like warm pizza dough.

“METHYLATION PATTERNS!” He whistles through clenched teeth like a balloon unpinched. Falling to his knees and guarding his germ line from further deformation with shaking hands. “Winnowing the genetic population through predation, disease, starvation... Preserving only what...”

Cuffing him about the ears you say: “I have known many gods. He who denies them is as blind as he who trusts them too deeply. I seek not beyond death. It may be the blackness averred by the Nemedian skeptics, or Crom's realm of ice and cloud, or the snowy plains and vaulted halls of the Nordheimer's Valhalla. I know not, nor do I care. Let me live deep while I live; let me know the rich juices of red meat and stinging wine on my palate, the hot embrace of white arms, the mad exultation of battle when the blue blades flame and crimson, and I am content. Let teachers and philosophers brood over questions of reality and illusion. I know this: if life is illusion, then I am no less an illusion, and being thus, the illusion is real to me. I live, I burn with life, I love, I slay, and am content.”

Capitulating to this senseless barbarism he rolls into a gutter and finishes with a quote: “Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”

Well, I’ll be frank, you were way out of line here, and that enthusiastic ornithologist was just out searching for information on the mating habits of Blue Footed Boobies. And that, my good friend, should give you a bit of the dicky tummy.

[This book is a history of heredity and a tool to help you better understand the current science of genetics. Charting the exciting breakthroughs which have deepened our understanding without shying away from its numerous, tragic misuses.]

If our species is to move forward, it must solve what has been called The Twin Nuclei Problem of Cell and Atom. We must navigate a landscape fundamentally changed by our mastery over atomic energy and our increasing fluency in the language of biological manipulation. Those genies are out of the bottle, and…

Abruptly capsizes vessel.