Notes and links from 31 Oct

Prescription renewal time so off I go through the park taking this month’s photo of the tree. Journal Bit of a meh few days. Nothing too problematic but definitely struggling a bit with doing the human thing. Autistic traits are spiking and everything’s a mix of too hard and a threat. Probably means I’m tired. Populist science writing 50 years of The Selfish Gene: flawed, outdated, yet still a model of truly popular science writing Back in the late 1990s I ran a Popular Science department at Dillons/Waterstones and got a lot of pleasure from doing it well. Pop Sci was booming at the time and it felt good to be a small part of getting big ideas out there. Dawkins was one of the pioneers with the Selfish Gene and through the 90s developed this into to the activist atheism/bigotry he’s known for today. If you have a problem with him now (and there are many good reasons to have a problem with him) does that invalidate his earlier work? In hindsight Pop Sci is a slippery category of book…