Author: Maria Popova / Source: Brain Pickings
Crowning the many wonderful things that take place at Brooklyn’s Pioneer Works is Scientific Controversies — a series of conversations with some of today’s leading scientists exploring the most thrilling unsolved questions at the frontiers of science, from dark matter to consciousness to the multiverse, envisioned and hosted by astrophysicist Janna Levin.
One unusually cold March evening, I packed into Pioneer Works alongside one thousand other humans to hear a SciCon conversation about genetic engineering.
It opened with a striking statistic:We share 99% of our DNA with lettuce.
This elemental biological fact stops you up short with its immense existential implications — if the creaturely difference between us and a species as dissimilar as a salad plant is so negligible, what of the differences among us humans, on which we wage all of our wars and our bigotries and our divisive sense of otherness?
I was instantly reminded of a spare and stunning poem by Lucille Clifton (June 27, 1936–February 13, 2010), addressing this very…
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