Thread by @mylesbyrne

1/10 @NobleDenis has done something truly great in shepherding 'Cause of Cambrian Explosion - Terrestrial or Cosmic?' by Steele et al., to publication in Prog. Biophys. Mol. Biol. 2018 ..

sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

2/10 Publishing the review is itself a powerful statement, but *not* about who wins in neodarwinists vs. panspermians: if the tone of the review is triumphal, it's not because panspermia wins, but because the stasis of neodarwinism is broken.

3/10 What comes next is not the ascendence of the story or methods of the authors, but a 'Cambrian explosion' of new stories and methods. Not a new set of ideas in Science, but a new idea of Science. Not just panspermianism, but multiple giant back-flips are on the doorstep.

4/10 As Weinberg 2014 and others have noted, what comes next is a return to holistic biology - Waddington, Margulis & the Sagans (Carl & Dorion), et al. - and to cosmic biocomputation a la Gödel, Von Neumann, Turing, and Chaitin. Biology as cosmic software archaeology.

5/10 But this return occurs in a new context, in which institutional and economic boundaries are shattered, as well as disciplinary ones.

6/10 If the servers of the Broad and Wellcome Sanger institutes are storing thousands of human genomes under the assumptions of 'pre-Galilean biology', what happens with human genomes in 'post-Galilean biology'?

7/10 In preview of a formal answer:

'Life is a process that can be abstracted away from any particular medium' - Von Neumann

A Topiary, @UpstreamColor, written/dir. by Shane Carruth

8/10 The past is not only occasionally rewritten, it has to be rewritten in order to remain comprehensible to the present. One creates one’s predecessors. - Borges

Annihilation, etc., by @jeffvandermeer

9/10 The rigor of physics comes to biology, but biology becomes the new root science. Earth becomes Tlön, becomes Yuggoth.

Providence by @alanmoore_

10/10 Yes, 'all these worlds are yours' .. but you can't take your human bodies along

2010: Odyssey Two - Arthur C. Clarke