Views from Crestmont Drive

• Big picture: What we know about how life arose, a good summary by NYT’s science writers;
• Relatively trivial items: Vance lies about gas prices; men in groups; Edsall on Trump’s real agenda; Krugman on how Trump actually hates America and what it stands for; Reich criticizing the NYT for its false equivalencies; and Heather Cox Richardson on charges from a decade ago that Trump is Putin’s puppet.
• Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde.

Decent summary. Not sure of the occasion.

NY Times, William J. Broad, Kenneth Chang and Carl Zimmer, yesterday 19 Oct: How Did Life Arise? [gift link]

Subtitled: “Where did it start? How did it grow complex? Why did it get big? Three moments in Earth’s early history when evolution suddenly, inexplicably turned up the dial.”

Apparently this is part of a NYT series called “Unknowns” — “A special project exploring unanswered scientific questions — the big mysteries about ourselves, our origins, our world and our universe.” — that also included that item about whether babies are conscious a couple weeks ago.

I’ll quote the intro:

Life on planet Earth is a riot of diversity: ants and elephants, frogs and blue whales, tulips and redwoods, even a branch of the great apes known as humans. Uniting it all is biochemistry, in particular the shared biochemistry of genetic inheritance — DNA and RNA, the universal instruction kits of life.

Tracing these biochemical threads back through time has convinced many scientists that all life descends from a so-called Last Universal Common Ancestor, or LUCA, that emerged between 4 billion and 4.5 billion years ago, after Earth itself congealed from the gas and detritus of a nascent solar system. How this LUCA rose from the primordial stew may be impossible to ever say definitively. No fossils exist to provide a window onto that moment in time, and scientists have no point of comparison: So far, Earth is the only place in the universe known to harbor life.

After that initial “how,” the questions become marginally easier for scientists to address. Here’s what’s known about three of the biggest inflection points in the evolution of life on Earth.

4 billion years ago: Where did life first emerge?

2 billion years ago: How did life get complex?

580 million years ago: Why did life get big?

There are many ideas about these questions, all based on the evidence of reality that sits all around us. (And not, as is my persistent theme, revelations from ancient prophets or appeals to imaginary gods, which are essentially story-telling.) A sample of the conclusions from the three writers:

“It looks like the early events happened really, really fast, which points to ‘first life’ not being the hardest part,” she said. “Maybe the origin of life was easier than we thought.”

and

One thing is clear: Once the eukaryote cell evolved, Earth was never the same. From coral reefs and giant squid to Amazonian rainforests and vast herds of wildebeest on the African savanna, eukaryotes gave rise to all the life we can see, including the one in the mirror.

and a counter-intuitive one, the kind of insight that I think might solve many of the so-called deep problems of science:

Dr. Butterfield, for his part, thinks that scientists have been looking at the question backward. He proposes that complex animals began to appear before Snowball Earth, not afterward, simply as the culmination of random genetic mutations. This revolution in evolution, he says, upended the food chain, altered the chemistry of the oceans, pulled carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere — and tipped the world into a frozen state. Big life caused Snowball Earth, not the other way around.

“To my eye, the single most insulting, ecologically insulting, thing that has ever been imposed on this planet,” Dr. Butterfield said, “is animals.”

Reality is far more interesting than childish religious myths. These basics should be taught as part of any curriculum, at least by high school. Humanity has discovered many things about the actual world.

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I’ll note these just briefly. They all support recurring themes.

• PolitiFact, yesterday 19 Oct: JD Vance: “The biggest reason why gas prices are so high is because when Joe Biden was president, we had about 20% of American refining capacity that went offline.”
• Truth-o-meter: False

• NY Times, guest essay by Kate Manne, a professor of philosophy at Cornell University, today 20 Oct: What Makes Men in Groups Behave So Badly?
• This is about the Cornell incident.
• My premise for some time has been that there is danger in any group of like-minded people, because such groups reinforce the members’ prejudices and tribal values, and discourage individual thought.

• NY Times, another long guest essay by Thomas B. Edsall, today 20 Oct: Trump Can No Longer Mask His Real Agenda
• “Trump, however, is anything but a routine politician. Throughout his three presidential campaigns, he claimed again and again to be the savior of working-class America. Those claims, however, mask his real agenda: to protect and enhance the wealth and income of the superrich — most importantly himself — while leaving driblets behind for the struggling working class.”

• Paul Krugman, today 20 Oct: The Traitor in Chief, subtitled “Trump and his allies hate America and what it stands for”
• Then why do they say they love America and those who don’t support Trump hate it?
• Because Trump supports Putin, and other dictators. Reich elaborates.

• The right dismisses the New York Times for their reasons. But some on the left dismiss the NYT for bending over backward to pretend that both sides have their points.
• Robert Reich, today 20 Oct: Enough With the False Equivalencies!
• Subtitled: We’re two weeks from deciding the future of our democracy, but what does The New York Times do? Bury what’s really at stake.

• Hesitating conspiracy thinking, it’s long been speculated the Putin has something on Trump. (See David Brin.) That P is blackmailing T. How else to explain some things?
• Heather Cox Richardson, today: October 19, 2026
• An exchange between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump a decade ago about whether Trump is a puppet of Putin. He denied it. Since then, the evidence mounts.

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Dark is life, is death. The Mahler symphony no one counts as one. Bernstein.