Merger

Lee Berman · 28 Jan 2011, 20:27 · from 2011-January.txt.gz

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From: severiansola at hotmail.com (Lee Berman)
Date: Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:27:10 -0500
Subject: (urth) Merger
Message-ID: <SNT123-W63BC9BE6142B28AA4F2623CFE10 at phx.gbl>

I feel like mentioning that, with full admiration for Gene Wolfe, he was as we all are, a product
of his times. It has been discussed previously how BotNS was probably influenced by popular movies
and TV shows of the time, as well as the prevailing pop science obsessions of the 70's which included
cloning, black holes/quasars, aliens as ancient gods, pyramid power and ESP.

Another pop science phenomenon of the time was the chemical basis of memory. McConnell's now discredited
research got many researchers (including, unfortunately, some high schoolers' science projects) in which 
everything from flatworms to mice were taught to solve mazes, killed, minced and fed to other worms or
mice in hopes they would solve the maze faster. (We see a similar use of this concept with Mr. Million).

I think current research considers that RNA may play a role in memory retention, but the basic storage is
in standing neural circuitry rather than a chemical code which is transferrable organism to organism.

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