About the Author

This is my blog. I go by the name simian (there are some who call me… Tim… O’Neill); I’m a freelance journalist and amateur scientist in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. The topics I cover include a wide range of science, politics, culture, and art - with an emphasis on the science. Professionally, I work in the medical software industry doing QA and systems integration, but my academic background is in biological anthropology. I aspire to earn my graduate degree in evolutionary biology and transition into a research career. Comments are always welcome, and quotes or reposts are too, so long as an appropriate citation and link back to the original post are provided. If you are on the admissions committee of a graduate program I’ve applied to, please leave a comment on a post and let me know you dropped by!

The name “Survival Machine” is something I’ve co-opted from Richard Dawkins, who used it first (to the best of my knowledge) in his book The Selfish Gene to describe living organisms. We’re all survival machines built by our genes, temporary vehicles for their immortal journeys—lumbering robots programmed by sequences of just four amino acids. I think there’s a lesson we can learn from genes, and it’s this: we ought to build and shape our culture to help human intelligence survive. Of course genes don’t do anything consciously, they survive or die off based only on their differential fitness. But unlike genes, we have intelligence, and we have ambition, and god dammit, people like us. So let’s work together and turn human culture into the best bloody survival machine we can.

Contact the author:

AIM: Just Ratiocinate
Email: simian@subspecies.org