Of Self-Proclaimed Messiahs
Dr. Avrana Kern reminds me of ruthless pragmatists common in dystopian stories, e.g., Boy Wonder in “Alien: Earth”, Evelyn Maddox in “The Ark”, etc.
gives us her point-of-view that we don’t typically get in film & movies. Read more books to dive more into such Messiahs as film usually focuses on the protagonists' state of mind and less the antagonists'.
“This is where mankind takes its next great step.” […] She almost went on with the line about them becoming gods, but that was for her only.
The muffled banging was more insistent, but the pod only had room for one. Her heart had always been hard, but she found that she had to harden it still further, and not think of all those names and faces, her loyal colleagues, that she and Sering between them were condemning to an explosive end.
Had the entire human race been exterminated save for her, or had it simply been thrown back into a new dark age, where the dumb brute people looked up at those moving lights in the sky and forgot that their ancestors had built them.
He’s been up and about for maybe fifty years, on and off. He told his cultists he was God, and when he woke up next time they told him he was God, and that little loop has gone round and round until he himself believes it.
The illusory truth effect is the tendency to believe false information to be correct after repeated exposure. On 3 occasions, researchers presented the same group of subjects a list of 60 plausible statements. 20 statements appeared on all 3 lists. When asked how confident they were on the truth or falsity of the statements, the subjects confidence in the repeated statements increased from 4.2 to 4.6 to 4.7.
Do you think any of this would have happened without me? Do you understand how important having a single vision is? This isn’t something to delegate to some committee; this is the survival of the human race.
Guyen almost managed it then. Holsten’s perception of right and wrong flipped and flopped, and he found he could look into that grey, dying face and see the savior of mankind – a man who had been trained to make tough decisions, and had made them with regret but without hesitation. […] “Traitors,” Guyen repeated, as if savouring the word. “In the end, they got what they deserved.” The transition from earnest, martyred leader to raving psychopath had simply happened without any discernible boundary being crossed.
Progress Above All?
The whole point of civilization is that we exceed the limits of nature, you tedious little primitives.
Let the Non Ultra Natura preach their dismal all-eggs-in-one-basket creed of human purity and supremacy. We will out-evolve them. We will leave them behind. This will be the first of a thousand worlds that we will give life to. For we are gods, and we are lonely, so we shall create…
All he could think was that his own people, an emergent culture that had clawed its way back to its feet after the ice, was nothing but a shadow of that former greatness. It was not simply that the Gilgamesh and all their current space effort was cobbled together from bastardized, half-understood pieces of the ancient’s world’s vastly superior technology. It was everything: from the very beginning his people had known they were inheriting a used world.
Holsten’s people had thought themselves lucky that someone had built such a convenient flight of steps back up from the dark into the sunlight of civilization. They had never quite come to the realization that those steps led only to that one place. Who knows what we might have achieved, had we not been so keen to recreate all their follies. Could we have saved the Earth? Would we be living there now on our own green planet?
The more he learned of them, the more he saw them not as spacefaring godlike exemplars, as his culture had originally cast them, but as monsters: clumsy, bickering, short-sighted monsters. […] The shining example of the Old Empire had tricked Holsten’s entire civilization into the error of mimicry. In trying to be the ancients, they had sealed their own fate – neither to reach those heights, nor any others, doomed instead to a history of mediocrity and envy.
There had been those back on Earth who claimed the universe cared, and that the survival of humanity was important, destined, meant. They had mostly stayed behind, holding to their corroding faith that some great power would weigh in on their behalf if only things became so very bad.
Late Stage Capitalism: Time as a Commodity
A whole life inside these boxes. And what? And children? Can you imagine? Generations of ice-dwellers, forgetting and forgetting who we ever were, wasting away and never seeing the sun except as just another star. Tending vats and eating mulch and putting out doomed generations who could never amount to anything, while you – all you glorious star-travellers – get to sleep wrapped in your no-time, and wake up two hundred years later as if it’s just the next day? And when you woke up, all of you chosen who weren’t condemned to the ice, we’d be dead. We’d be generations dead, all of us.
The mutineers are especially bitter about time being stolen from them “for the greater good”. This contrasts with ants in the colonies that do not have a sense of self; the ant colony survives at the expense of some of its individuals:
The advancing colony will meet these dangers as it meets all dangers, by sacrificing enough of itself to nullify them, with the main thrust of its attack barely slowing.
Not long ago, it seemed that time was becoming something that happened to other people – or, as other people had then been in short supply, to other parts of the universe. Time was a weight that he seemed to have been cut free from. He stepped in and out of the forward path of its arrow, and was somehow never struck down. […] Now, in his cell, time weighed him down and dragged at his heels, chaining him to the grindingly slow pace of the cosmos where before he had leapt ahead across the centuries, skipping between the bright points of human history.
We are of the line of those who gave their lives – all of their lives – to preserve this vessel. That was and is our task, one to be undertaken without reward or hope of relief: an endless round of custodianship, until we reach the planet we were promised. My parents, their parents, and theirs, all of them have done nothing but ensure that you and all the cargo of this ship shall live, or as much of them as we could save. And it pleases you to call us “Tribe” and consider us children and savages, because we never saw Earth.
Theory Hits the Road
“What would happen if an asteroid was going to hit us in the side?” Holsten asked. Lain gave him a look that said eloquently, And that’s what important right now? “The odds are vanishingly unlikely. It wasn’t resource-effective.” “To protect the entire human race?” Nessel demanded, more as a jab at Lain than anything else. “The Gil was designed by engineers, not philosophers.” Isa Lain shrugged – or as much as she could will her hands still secured.
Absent, too, was the expected air of dismissal, that of a man of action who had no use for a man of letters.
Tell me how any of this… speculation does us any good. Or is it just like all the rest of your bag of tricks? Academic in every sense of the word.
God’s PoV of Evolution
Past individuals of her species might have decided that the little male was a safer lunch than the Scytodes, and made plans accordingly, but now something changes… She does not quite grasp that he is something like her, but her formidable ability to calculate strategies has gained a new dimension. A new category appears that expands her options a hundredfold: ally.
A sense of self and the ability to contemplate the universe are not necessarily survival traits in and of themselves. Portia is a rare exception – though not the only exception – where increased cognitive capacity granted an immediate and compelling advantage.
Portia understands that their celestial journeys are predictable enough to use when navigating her own. One, though, is special. One light does not tread a slow and year-long course over the heavens, but hurries past, a genuine traveller just as she is. Portia looks up now and sees that tiny glint of reflected light passing overhead, a solitary motile speck in the vast dark, and she feels a kinship with it, lending to that orbiting pinpoint as much of an arachnomorphic personality as she can conceive of.
From the microscopic point of view of the nanovirus, Portia and every other affected species on the planet are merely vectors for the onward transmission of the virus’s own evolving genes.
The innate, virus-hardwired Understanding of these mathematical transformations that she inherited did not inspire her in the same way as being guided through the sequences by her teachers, slowly coming to the revelation that what these apparently arbitrary strings of figures described was something beyond mere invention – was a self-evident and internally consistent universal truth.
Violas’s studies are in another language still, inexpertly rendered in that knotwork script. In her writings, she calls it the language of the body. She explains that every spider’s body contains this writing, and that it varies from individual to individual, but not randomly.
It is hard to say which scientist was first to the mark: it is one of those ideas that seems simultaneously to be everywhere, exciting every enquiring mind. Portia’s treatment has allowed living adult spiders to benefit from a foreign Understanding. Yes, what was transferred was an immunity, but surely the process would work with other Understandings, if they can only be separated out and their page noted in Viola’s great book of the body. No longer will the spread of knowledge be held down by the slow march of generations or by laborious teaching.
Tower of Babel
They gaze up at the Messenger in its fleet passage across the sky, and they see an entity that speaks to them in mathematical riddles that are aesthetically appealing to a species that has inherited geometry as the cornerstone of its civilization. They do not conceive of it as some celestial spider-god that will reach down into their green world and save them from the ant tide. However, the message is. The Messenger is. These are facts, and those facts are the doorway to an invisible, intangible world of the unknown.
Portia is aware that other scientists – even priestess-scientists – have been experimenting with some means of reproducing the invisible vibrations by which the message is spread. Publicly, the Temple cannot condone such meddling of course, but the spiders are a curious species, and those who are drawn to the Temple are the most curious of all. It was inevitable that the hothouse flower of heresy would end up nurtured by those very guardians of the orthodox.
The Temple old guard, the priestesses of the former generation, hold the message sacrosanct and perfect. The path of Portia’s people is to better appreciate it, to learn the hidden depths of the message that have yet to be unlocked. It is not for them to try and howl into the darkness to attract the Messenger’s attention. Passing overhead, the Messenger observes all. There is an order to the universe, and the Messenger is proof of that.
There is a deeper book. Viola identifies it, There is a second book in a second code, short and yet full of information, and different, so different. I asked Viola what it was. She says it is the Messenger within us. She says the Messenger is always to be found when new Understandings are laid down.
She grasped that whatever that alien, artificial tangle of language is doing, it has a divine function: drawing them out of the bestial and into the sublime. It is the hand that places Understandings within the mind and tissue of life, so that each generation may become greater than the last. So that we may know you, Portia reflects, as she watches that far away light arc across the sky. It seems self-evident now that Bianca has been right all this time. Of course the Messenger is waiting for their reply. This was heresy such a short time ago, but Portia has since looked within herself. Why should we be made thus, to improve and improve, unless it is to aspire?
The replies to the Messenger’s mathematical problems – that every spider knows and understands – are ready for transmission. They wait for the Messenger to appear in the night sky above, and then they send that unequivocal first transmission. We are here. Within a second of the last solution being sent, the Messenger ceases its own transmissions, throwing the whole of Portia’s civilization into a panic that their hubris has angered the universe. Several fraught days later, the Messenger speaks again.
Meeting your Maker is a monumental achievement. How have other authors described this event?
Grant Morrison’s “Animal Man” had Animal Man confront Morrison about how his life and that of other characters were frivolously treated by Morrison. This was a more rebellious contact moment.
For a recursive, untimed moment, the systems of the Sentry Pod – the sea of calculation that boiled behind the human mask of Eliza – were unable to make a decision. Too much had been lost, misfiled, edited out of existence within its mind. It attacked the discontinuities within its own systems. Whilst it was not truly a self-aware artificial intelligence, it nevertheless knew itself. It restored itself, worked around insoluble problems, reached the right conclusion by estimate and circuitous logic. It did its best to awaken Avrana Kern. […] Tell them this: I am your creator. I am your god.
Religion: Dogma
Portia’s people inherited a creation myth, and had their destiny dictated to them by a being of a power and an origin that passed all their understandings. The Messenger was the last survivor of an earlier age of the universe, they were told. In the final throes of that age, it was the Messenger who was chosen to come to this world and engender life out of the barren earth. The Messenger – the Goddess of the green planet – remade the world so that it would give rise to that life, next seeded it with plants and trees, and then with the lesser animals. On the last day of the previous age, at the apex of creation, the Messenger dispatched Portia’s distant ancestors to this world, and settled back to await their voices.
A unity of religion has led to a rivalry and factionalism between the nests. In all their long histories they have worked together, kindred nodes on a world-spanning continuum. Now divine attention has become a resource that they must squabble for. Of course Great Nest is preeminent amongst the foremost favorites of God, with its own knot of frequencies with which it monopolizes much of the message. Pilgrims of other nests must come begging for what it is that God wants. Only those of the inner temple are uncomfortable aware that the message they distribute to those petitioners is merely a best guess. God is at once specific and obscure.
I have seen the face of the Messenger, and measured and studied it as it passes above. I have set out my plates and analyzed the light that it seems to shed. Light reflected from the sun only. And the mystery is that there is no mystery. I can tell you the size and speed of the Messenger. I can even guess at what it is constructed from. The Messenger is a rock of metal, no more.
The adults all seemed to posses some disconcerting quality, people who had been fed a narrow range of lies that had slowly locked their faces into expressions of desperate tranquility, as though to admit to the despair and deprivation that so clearly weighed on them would risk losing them the favour of God.
Great Nest denounces its weaker neighbors as straying from the purity of the message, and claims for itself the right to take whatever steps it must, to put into effect the will of God. Transmissions from the Messenger, though always obscure and open to interpretation, are taken to endorse Great Nest’s proclamation.
They are performing that oldest of tricks: constructing a path by which to reach a destination, only in this case the destination is permanent security. With each step they take towards it, that security recedes. And, with each step they take, the cost of progressing towards such security grows, and the actions required to move forward become more and more extreme.
Religion: Informed Apostasy
Bianca is hailing God with a simple announcement: We are coming.
Many came to believe that the Messenger was responsible for their existence, a belief that their God had actively fostered. Furthermore, they believed that the Messenger had their best interests at heart, and that the plan they were following so diligently – and, later, at such cost – was one that, could they only understand it, was for their express benefit. Bianca has considered all of that, and finds none of it supported by fact.
That the Messenger is an entity of great breadth of intellect, she cannot contest. Potentially it is a superior intellect, but that is a harder judgement to make because she can only conclude that it is a very different type of intelligence from her own. […] Moreover, descriptive language is usually lost on it. It is able to deal with visual descriptions in relatively basic ways, but any language coloured by the rich sensorium of a spider – the touch, the taste – tends to lose itself in translation. What is received most readily is numbers, calculations, equations: the stuff of arithmetic and physics.
Bianca is living with a recurring thought concerning the theoretical similarity between the Messenger and an ant colony grown sufficiently advanced and complex. Would it feel the same, to communicate with both?
Bianca sends a signal to Her, inviting dialogue. She includes a certain amount of the formalities that Temple once used, not because she believes there is any need for them, but because God is better disposed towards those who feign the right humility.
One of the giants whose shoulders she stands on is a still-living colleague who has bred a colony of seeing ants. Their sight is feeble compared to the spiders' own, but the individual pinpoints of what the colony perceives can be assembled, by fearful mathematical effort, into a complete picture. Moreover, this picture can be encoded into a signal. […] She tells the Messenger that she intends to transmit a picture. […] Then the Messenger speaks, requesting clarification. The scientific world holds its breath. God has understood, at least, that something new is in the air, and has replied in the odd unemotional style that Bianca recalls from antique conversations, when She was teaching this common language to Her chosen. This is God at Her most procedural, seeking to understand what has just been received.
The Messenger bombards the planet insistently for more information, during which time Bianca comes to a startling conclusion: that the Messenger cannot see what goes on upon the planet right beneath Her. Far from being all-seeing, and despite being readily familiar with the concept of sight, the Messenger is blind. Radio is Her only means of sight.
Now she sees their eyes. She sees all eight of them. The image sent to her is insane, fantastical, a vast, layered, structure of lines and links and enclosed spaces that exist only because they have been pulled into temporary arrangements of tension. The spiders are all about it, caught in mid-creep. The words that heralded this image were simple, clear beyond mistaking: This is us. Avrana Kern flees into the limited depths of her remaining mind and weeps for her lost monkeys, and knows despair, and she does not know what to do.
What Bianca asks is this: What does it mean that you are there and we are here? Is there meaning or is it random chance? Because what else does one ask even a broken cybernetic deity but, Why are we here?
And she does not say it, but she thinks: “And that is you. My children, it is you. You are not what we wanted, not what we planned for, but you are my experiment, and you are a success.” And that jagged-edged part moves once again and she knows that some part of her, some locked-away fleshy part, is trying to weep. But not from sorrow; rather from pride, only from pride.
You are made of My will, and you are made of the technology of that other world, but all of this has been to speed you on path you might have taken without me, given time and opportunity. You are Mine, but you also belong to the universe, and your purpose is whatever you choose. Your purpose is to survive and grow and prosper and seek to understand, just as my people should have taken these things as their purpose, had they not fallen into foolishness, and perished.
Pretty unexpected coming from Dr. Kerns. She did mellow out over centuries. Time heals even the wounds of pride?
For now that the Messenger has found the patience and perspective to properly understand Her children, She can finally communicate Her warning in a way they can understand. At last the spiders appreciate that, even aside from their orbiting God, they are not alone in the universe, and that this is not a good thing.
Changing a People
The practice is covertly overlooked – girls will be girls, after all – but overtly frowned upon. Killing a male, sanctioned or not, is a world apart from killing a beast. Even as the fang strikes, the killer and the slain know themselves to be part of a grander whole. The nanovirus speaks, each to each.
If the meanest female is killed, that is a matter for investigation and punishment, just as if someone were to damage the common ground of the city or to speak out against the temple. If I am killed, then the only crime the perpetrator commits is to displease you. […] I know it will not happen, so long as I retain your favor. But I am concerned that it can happen, that such things are permitted.
“You are of value,” Portia insists. “You are a male of exceptional ability, one to be celebrated, to be protected and encouraged to prosper. What have you ever been denied that you have asked for?”
Portia disagrees vehemently. “If they were of any quality or calibre, then they would ascend by their own virtues.” “Not if there was no structure that they could possibly climb. Not if all the structure that exists was designed to disenfranchise them.”
A life lived entirely at the whim of another is no life at all. He has always been surprised at the large number of other males who see matters differently, revelling in their own cosseted captivity.
“I want the right to live,” he tells them, as firmly as he dares. “I want the death of a male to be punishable, just as the death of a female is – even death after mating. I want the right to build my own peer house, and to speak for it.” A million-year prejudice stares back at him. The ancient cannibal spider, whose old instincts still form the shell within which their culture is nestled, recoils in horror. He sees the conflict within them: tradition against progress, the known past against the unknown future. They have come so far, as a species; they have the intellect to break from the shackles of yesterday. But it will be hard.
Many Faces of Intelligence
After all, the ants work by nature. They have no inclination or capacity to consider the wider philosophy of life, and so such opportunity would be wasted on them. From the point of view of the ant colonies, they prosper as best they can, given the peculiarly artificial environment they find themselves enmeshed in.
Its behavior was strange and complex, but it seemed mute, producing no kind of gesture or vibration that could be considered an attempt at speech. Some noted that when it opened and closed its mouth, a cleverly designed web could catch a curious murmur, the same that might be felt when objects were pounded together. It was a vibration that travelled through the air, rather than across a strand or through the ground. For some time this was hypothesized as a means of communication, provoking much intelligent debate, but in the end the absurdity of such an idea won out. After all, using the same orifice for eating and communication was manifestly too inefficient.
No… not what they’re saying, but the structure. Isa, I’m a classicist, and a lot of that is a study of a language – old languages, dead languages, languages from an age of humanity that doesn’t exist any more. I’d stake my life that these signals are actually language rather than just some sort of instructions. It’s too complex, too intricately structured. It’s inefficient, Isa. Language is inefficient. It evolves organically.
Carbon Over Silicon
There is no hive mind, but there is a vast and flexible biological difference engine, a self-perfecting machine dedicated to the continuance of itself. It does not understand how what it does functions, but it constantly expands its behavioral repertoire and builds upon those trial-end-error paths that prove fruitful.
Their constant exploration of possibilities has resulted in this solitary contact with something vast and intangible, and the colony processes the information it receives and attempts to find a purpose for it, more and more of its biological processing power being applied to the task, more and more ants quivering under the pulsed rhythms of a distant radio signal.
Imagine that most of the ways the ants know about the world, all the ways that they act and react, and most importantly the way that their actions spur other ants on to action, are a web – a very complex web. We have unravelled and consumed that web entirely. We have left them without structure or instruction. […] I am weaving them a new structure. They will follow the lead of our own ants now. I have given them new minds, and henceforth they are our allies. We have an army of soldiers. We have devised a weapon to defeat the ants, no matter how many of them there are, and make them our allies.
In and of itself, my new architecture carries no instructions, no commands. It sets the ants no tasks or behaviors. A secondary architecture can be distributed to the colony, to work within the primary. And another, and another. A colony could be given a new task instantly, and its members would change with the speed of the scent as it passes from ant to ant. Different castes could be made receptive to different instructions, allowing the colony to pursue multiple tasks all at once. A single colony could follow sequences of separate tasks without the need for lengthy reconditioning.
And then Fabian is lost briefly in a dream of science, where every ant soldier could be fitted with a radio receiver, and somehow could write its own chemical architecture according to the urgings of signals sent out over that invisible web. A colony of ants that could be orchestrated swift as thought … ? He trembles at the thought. What could we not do? And it nags at him, and nags at him, that he has come across such a thought before. And with a sudden jolt, he realizes that the great project of the Messenger, which Portia and her fellow zealots have given their all to realize – the indirect cause of this war – could itself be just such a thing. No ants, no chemicals, but that net of copper would carry impulses just as the radio would, just as the individual ants in a colony would. And were there not switches, forks, gates of logic … ? It seems to him that such a design would have the virtue of speed, yet surely it could not be as versatile and complex as an ant colony working at full efficiency?
Although the ants can go everywhere, their physical pace would be too slow to coordinate the vast ship’s constant metamorphoses. […] Bianca has pioneered artificial neural networks (cultured tissue) that link to chemical factories. Hence the ants in the crew capsule do not need to walk to the other widely spaced elements of their colony. Instead they send impulses through the ship’s nerves, and they are translated to chemical instructions at the other termini. The neural network – unliving and living all at once – is a part of the colony, as if it were some bizarrely over-specialized caste.
Casualties of War
Another task that ant colonies will perform without special conditioning is to fight unfamiliar ants, and a mining colony is no match for an invading army column equipped with special castes and technologies. In two months of hard warfare, not a spider has died, but their insect servants have been slaughtered in their thousands.
The enemy they face is the child of a technology she cannot conceive of, advanced beyond the dreams of her own kind’s greatest scientists, using a technology of metal and fire and lightning, all fit tools for vengeful deities. At her disposal is fragile silk, biochemistry and symbiosis, and the valour of all those who will put their lives at her disposal.
There is an army: Portia is one of hundreds who will serve on the front line, one of tens of thousands whose turn will likely come to fight. They will die, many of them, or at least that is what they expect. The stakes are so high, though: individual lives are ever the chaff of war, but if there was ever a just case, it is this.
Portia’s people have come far from fighting with only ants taking casualties. This time, the spiders are also on the front lines.
We couldn’t trust them. They couldn’t trust us. Mutual attempts at destruction are the only logical result. He though of human dreams – both Old Empire and new – of contacting some extraterrestrial intelligence such as nobody had ever truly encountered. Why? Why would we ever want to? We’d never be able to communicate, and even if we could, we’d still be those same two prisoners forced to trust – and risk – or to damn the other in trying to save slightly more of our own hides.
We are. Portia feels a swelling of angry determination at the destruction. The deaths, the destruction of the Messenger, the heedless brutality of it all, fire her up with righteous zeal. We will show them.
In the end, he supposed, it didn’t matter. Genocide was genocide. He thought of the Old Empire, which had been so civilized that it had in the end poisoned its own home-world. And here we are, about to start ripping pieces of the ecosystem out of this new one.
Kinship at the sub-microbial level, so that one of the Gilgamesh’s great giants, the awesome, careless creator-gods of prehistory, might look upon Portia and her kin and know them as their children.
Happier ending than I expected. Portia’s people took the high road and showed that they were more civilized than their creators.
Memorable Descriptions
It seemed to be Lain’s turn to find the silence awkward, but she was a practical woman. She simply got up to go.
Her expression should have curdled into contempt – stating the obvious when every word might count – but instead she just shrugged.
Someone was sobbing and Holsten envied them, because he himself was having a hard time just drawing breath.
Reason dictates that their mission is no more than peripherally connected – in that both events involve the erratic brilliance of Bianca – but, like humans, the spiders are quick to see patterns and make connections, to extract untoward significance from coincidence.
This was not showmanship or a desire for suspense, simply that Vitas considered herself a pure scientist first and foremost, and would report positive and negative results with equal candor without judging the value or desirability of the outcome. Holsten was familiar with that particular academic school, which had grown more and more popular towards the end of Earth, as positive results became harder to find.
It was too much. It had been too much. He, who had translated the madness of a millenia-old guardian angel. He who had been abducted. He who had seen an alien world crawling with earthly horrors. He had feared. He had loved. He had met a man who wanted to be God. He had seen death.
The pod systems themselves, running on minimal power, did their best to keep everything going, but still there were sacrifices: she is blind, she is fragmented, she is not sure where ends and where the machines begin.
Behind her defiance there was a terrible desperation: a woman who had always been able to simply physically impose her will on the world, who now had to ask its permission and the permission of her own body.
Worse is the relentless geometry of it. Portia is used to a city of a thousand angles, a chain of walls and floors and ceilings strung at every possible slant, a world of taut silk that can be taken down and put back up, and divided and subdivided and endlessly tailored to suit. These giants must live their lives amongst these rigid, unvarying right angles, entombed between these massive, solid walls. Nothing makes any attempt to mimic nature. Instead, everything is held in the iron hand of that dominating alien aesthetic.
A hairy arachnid with a shimmering exoskeleton, and a suggestion of carved fangs within some kind of mask: man’s oldest fear waiting for him here at the outer reach of human expansion, already equipped for space.
References
- The Selfish Gene - Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org . Accessed Dec 28, 2025.
- Deism - Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org . Accessed Dec 29, 2025.
- 3 Body Problem Episode 3 Recap: Who Are the San-Ti? - Netflix Tudum. www.netflix.com . Accessed Dec 30, 2025.
- High-context and low-context cultures - Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org . Accessed Dec 30, 2025.
- Illusory truth effect - Wikipedia. en.wikipedia.org . Accessed Dec 30, 2025.
I wish I had encountered a similar story back in 2012 when covering evolution in high school biology. It took me a while to appreciate that populations, and not individuals, evolve.