Exclusive: Interview with Dick Dorkins

GENOTOPIA: Welcome to Sideline, where we towel off the washed up and try to make them look presentable. Dr. Dick Dorkins is President and CEO of the Society for the Prevention of Intelligent design, Theology, Transcendentalism Or Other Nonsense (SPITTOON). His new meme-oir, haha, is called Me, Me: Portrait of a Selfish Geneticist. It’s a 900-page tell-all about Dorkins’s contributions to science, culture, and life. It also features lots of nice things people have said about him and many other nice things he has said, and continues to say, about himself. We just couldn’t resist inviting him to come and tell us about it. Dr. Dick, welcome to the program.

DICK DORKINS: It’s nice to have me here, isn’t it?

GT: Why, yes, of course. It seems like only yesterday that you made some geniune—

DD: I mean, you were right just then: you are fortunate. I just think it’s so important for us to recognize life’s gifts, the random generosities of the cosmos, as it were.

My book is another one. I truly believe—scratch that: I know it is the best thing I’ve ever written—which of course is saying something. Some of my closest friends agree with me. My dear friend Harold Hairnet, for example, said…pardon me, let me get my glasses… [intones]:

Bravissima! Encore, encore! Dick Dorkins’s Me, Me is the finest example of memoir since anatomically modern man last mated with a Neanderthal. Its sparkling prose and flashing wit are a perfect mirror of the towering intellect that produced it.

That’s a nice bit just there, isn’t it? There’s more:

Being a book, it is highly readable, and in addition to having pages it has even more pages, which is a most excellent and fortuitous happenstance, for they are, every man Jack of them, examples of their kind.

GT: Impressive.

DD: Well I was impressed. He adores me, and I love that quality in people. And that’s just one tiny fraction of the good things—glowing, radiant, heart-warming things—my very best friends say about me, my book, and my theories. In fact, I wrote a computer simulation to model how much my book would sell if wise, thoughtful opinions such as this spread throughout the population. It could be done with a kind of hypnosis I’ve developed in which my minions—sorry, readers—echo my ideas, thereby persuading everyone around them. I call it “lognosis,” from logos and gnosis.

Here’s how it works. Imagine that praise is a real, physical thing, like general intelligence (with which, obviously, it is correlated). Now, when I read that passage to you, you listened raptly, absorbing every word.

GT: Every word.

DD: Just so. It’s as if I transferred a gene for loving my book into your brain. It’s just like mating in bacteria: when two cells conjugate, one transfers some of its genes into the other. When it happens with ideas, I call it “thought-sex.”

GT: Thought-sex?

DD: Yes, but without the question mark—that’s a deleterious mutation you’ve made there. It does not faithfully transfer admiration of me into your nucleus Dorkins.

GT: Nucleus Dorkins?

DD: Again with the question mark! You must absorb my words exactly as your hear them, otherwise I am simply wasting my time.

GT: I am simply wasting my time.

DD: Good! Much better. By the way, if you’ll allow me a little digression (and you will), the nucleus Dorkins, a small but exceedingly important region of the brain, was described by my brilliant and—I damn it, it’s my interview, so I’ll say it—drop-dead gorgeous friend, the stunningly attractive and successful neuroscientist Andromeda Telekinesis. Anyone who says that women don’t belong in science doesn’t know Andromeda. She really pops off my pipette tip, as we used to say in the damp, dear labs at Oxbridge. Anyway, while having dinner with me one night, she discovered a nucleus in the brain that recognizes talent, wit, good looks, and achievement. And she decided then and there to name it after me. I protested, of course, but she would hear none of it. I was deeply humbled, and I say so every chance I get.

At any rate, I described my simulation in my book Unweaving the Basket. The original simply cannot be improved upon, so I shall quote. Eh-im!

I found that if I produced a memoir of staggering significance and touching sentimentality, and then had thought-sex with twenty beautiful, intelligent, influential women a day, conservatively assuming an intellectual fertility rate of fifty percent and a generation time of 24 hours, I should be able to buy that sweet little eight-person jet I’ve been eyeing in just nine months!

And do you know what? I flew here today in that very jet! That, my little friend, is the power of science.

GT: [sotto voce, sarcastically] Power of science. Pooh! [Aloud] About that…we received a call from the highway patrol and they are rather upset about the traffic jam your plane has caused on I-95. The interstates really aren’t meant to be used as runways.

DD: This is America, right? Let’s just call it a little experiment in the efficacy of prayer.

GT: With the establishment of SPITTOON, you have become one of the world’s most notorious atheists. Now, you are English by birth…

DD: —By right, damn it!

GT: Damn it! [regains composure] So my question is, why did you relocate to the United States when you founded SPITTOON?

DD: Death to America! Haha, that’s one of my wittle litticisms. But in all seriousness, I did so in order to infiltrate one of the most powerful fundamentalist states in the world. Through my ceaseless efforts of self-promotion, I have accumulated lit’rally thousands of followers who hang on my every word. My every word!

GT: Your every word?

DD: [eyes us suspiciously] Yyess. [brightens] So. I liken what I do to a kind of genetic engineering of the mind. By having thought-sex with my followers, I am indoctrinating them into the doctrine of de-indoctrination, if you will. Then they go out and explode others’ mistaken beliefs. I call them “suicide bombers of the soul.”

GT: [incredulously] Suicide bombers of the soul?

DD: [narrows eyes] Are you…?

GT: No.

DD: Good. Because if you are…

Off mike: Boss? Ever’tin’ OK? [sound of knuckles cracking]

DD: For the moment, Vinny, yes, thank you.

GT: I assure you, I would never. It’s just…isn’t that a little…inflammatory?

DD: You can’t start a forest fire without burning a few trees, what!

GT: How is that working out for you?

DD: Funnily enough, a recent independent survey by one of my graduate students found that religious fervor and hate crimes have tended to increase in towns with SPITTOON chapters compared to the general population.

GT: That ought to make you think, I imagine.

DD: Absolutely right, old sod! It makes me think, “What a wonderful confirmation of our wisdom in targeting the most populations with the most entrenched religious problems.” We are right where they need us!

GT: What about in East Carolina, where the young man blew himself up, killing two young Muslims, and citing your influence in his suicide note?

DD: Mm, unfortunate, that. Wasn’t meant to be taken quite so lit’rally. But my followers are passionate people! They believe in disbelief!

GT: Unbelievable. I’d like to go back a bit now, to a different crusade: the so-called sociobiology wars of the 1980s. What exactly was your beef with scientists such as Popinjay Gould?

DD: As I wrote in what I consider my least-appreciated book, The Gould Delusion, they made one of the classic errors of science: they let their ideology color their work. They believed things and then did science, instead of doing science and then knowing things, as I do.

GT: So you bring no beliefs, no values, no opinions whatsoever to your science?

DD: Positively not! I have no beliefs—only certainties.

GT: Have you ever changed your mind on anything?

DD: Nope. Wait a minute—yes. I do remember once back when I was an undergraduate. My philosophy professor was introducing us to Einstein’s concept of gedankenexperimenten—that’s “thought experiments,” for the philistines in the audience—and mine was to try to change my mind. I halfway succeeded for a moment, but then my mind snapped back again, like the steel trap that it metaphorically is. I was just too strong for myself, haha!

GT: [sound of hand slamming table] Right. That’s enough. This conversation is repetitive, pointless, and vacuous. You’re just smugly self-indulgent and vain, and you keep bashing away at the one or two really original things you’ve ever said, thirty years ago.

[Enter VINNY SMALLCHANGE, a 350-lb. bouncer, in black suit, dark glasses, and with suspicious bulge in his pants.]

VS: Just too strong for myself. Hey-uh, Dr. Dick. Dis guy botherin’ ya? I can take his microphone from his mout’ and insert it in another orifice, if y’ get my drift.

DD: What a brilliant analysis, Vinny! Bravo! But I’m afraid I cannot stand by and watch violence carried out, especially on my behalf. So I’ll just turn around and inspect this utterly fascinating fly on the wall there…

GT: Ha. Ha. Well! Look at the time. I’m afraid we’re going to have to wrap up. Dr. Dick, I’d like to thank you for being on Sideline. G’bye!

DD: It’s been a pleasure having me.

VS: […]

The preceding is for entertainment purposes only. Any resemblance to vertebrates living or fossilized is completely coincidental.

Hail Britannia! (Dorkins Reviews Wade)

Editor’s note:
Regular readers of Genotopia will be familiar with Dick Dorkins, a genomicist, faculty member of Kashkow University, and founding President of the Society for the Prevention of Intelligent design, Theology, Or Other Nonsense (SPITOON). Given the forceful nature of some of Dorkins’s opinions, we hesitated when he offered to review this book. But we acceded to his wishes, because we do indeed love our daughter and would, in fact, hate for something to happen to her. One can find a two-part interview with Dorkins here and here

A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race, and Human History, by Nicholas Wade (New York: Penguin) 2014, 288 pp.

Dorkins profile picIt really is a bloody shame that India just had yet another free and fair election, because Nicholas Wade’s new book is so bally good it makes me want to dig out the old pith helmet and mustache wax and jolly well troop off and colonize her again. Since I can’t conquer India, I itch to conquer Mrs. Dorkins and spread my genes, via more little Dorkinses. Alas, Wendy says she has a headache (again!), so the next best thing is to dab my favorite plume into grandfather Dorkins’s inkpot and, in my best public-school hand, pen this little squib on behalf of Wade’s latest. Perhaps I can prompt the some of you lot to do your Darwinian duty and either have or not have more children, depending on your race.

Let me begin by stating that I haven’t read such a stirring work since the sixth form, when our English Master (jolly good word, “Master.” Woody.), Old Man Donglethwaite, cracked the whip and put us through our paces on Lord Acton’s History of Freedom and Herbert Spencer’s What Social Classes Owe to Each Other. For what Wade manages in this book is to resurrect bally old triumphalist English history and social Darwinism, girding them with modern-day genomics. One sincerely hopes that modern science can provide those gallant traditions with a foundation strong enough to last.

Wade, a journalist whose previous books include Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors and The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures, has composed an argument so elegant, so accessible, so unassailable that it might have been written by Spencer himself—had Spencer known the genetics that supports his ideas. Wade’s fundamental question is not original but rather classic: Why is the West superior to the East—or, god help us, the global South? The truth of this axiom is undeniable: we have the best of everything. The most money, the most freedom, the best science, the neatest gadgets, the finest music and art (never mind Justin Bieber), the strongest militaries, and the most money. Granted, in sports we sometimes lose, and you have to include North America in Europe even though many of the Americans’ achievements are by ethnic Africans and Asians, so it gets a little messy if you examine it too closely. But those are fine points. In the War of the Continents, it’s Europe all the way—and mostly Great Britain—if you look at it right.

Bleeding-hearts such as the anthropologist Jared Diamond have feebly explained the Rise of the West as accidents of geography and climate. Social “scientists” such as Ashley Montagu and the population geneticist Richard Lewontin (honorary social scientist, because he’s so political) have tried miserably to erase the very question of race, as if denying that the term has meaning could make it go away. Burlap-clad, politically-correct academics have even strapped on their Birkenstocks and paraded around the quads, protesting entire fields of inquiry that bear crucially on this question. Only an ideologue would deny the freedom of science to merely ask the question, for example, why white people are smarter than blacks. But Wade—whose peer-reviewed scientific articles have never been called into question—points out that such arguments are disqualified because those wuzzle-headed liberals have an ideology, something that of course has no place in modern science. No, Wade staunchly insists, true science must be blind to values and morals. It must deal exclusively with facts. Wade selects his facts brilliantly, using the latest and best of Western science to explain why Western science is the latest and best. The answer, he courageously concludes, is that we Westerners have better genes.

He argues irrefutably that behavior is shaped by genes, as demonstrated by an Everest of evidence in animals and in humans. Evolution did not stop when the first African hunter-gatherer stepped from his dugout onto the mighty shores of Europe to begin the painful process of civilization; nor did it cease when some enterprising Mesopotamian plucked a leathery handful of wild wheat seeds and poked them purposefully into the Fertile Crescent; nay, nor did it halt even at the coronation of James II in 1633, as he began his campaign to rein in Parliament in the name of liberty. Natural selection is still with us, ruthlessly but efficiently plucking society’s fittest, sweeping the best alleles across the land like so much seed corn. Though it pains one to say it, really it does, the result is that in the genetic lottery some are winners and others are losers. The winners, self-evidently, are those who have been globally dominant these last seven centuries or so: we Westerners, and most especially—here I lower my eyes, reflecting the humility that is my birthright—the British. And, alright, the Americans, who are, or at least were, mostly British. Okay and the Jews. Who, one notes, Britain and America welcomed with open arms after the war, ensconcing them in our finest universities as much as our quotas would allow.

History is not made by individuals, insists Wade. It is made by peoples. Peoples with the finest qualities. Qualities such as patience, thrift, innovation, openness, nonviolence, and civility. Demonstrating those very qualities himself, Wade acknowledges that there have been minor blips along the way, such as colonialism and the Third Reich. One might add slavery, the Columbian Exchange, and the Crusades. But these are mere trifles compared to the wise stewardship with which we have managed the planet over much of the preceding millennium. The practically invisible hand of the free market has brought untold riches to literally hundreds of people worldwide. It has rendered arable vast trackless wastelands of rainforest, making it possible to raise beef cattle for millions of our beloved Big Macs. For much of this period, our oceans and rivers teemed with plump and tasty fishes; likewise the skies with birds and the plains and tundra with wild game. And today, the climate is becoming ever more interesting and will, within a few short decades, bring the luxury and tranquility of coastal life to millions of people now toiling their lives away inland. All this and of course much more constitute the fruits of these peoples. Our peoples. Your peoples. But not their peoples.

The qualities that have made these developments possible, Wade shows, are probably genetic. At least partly. Wade, a journalist, has for decades covered the genetics beat for a little paper you might have heard of called The New York Times. He has extraordinarily broad secondhand knowledge of the arcane panoply of research coming out of Western laboratories published in English; which is to say, the most important, reliable, cutting-edge, and objective facts in the world. So when he says that the traits that underlie the rise of the West are probably at least partly genetic, you know he has read some papers in reliable major journals that seem to suggest this. In addition, Wade cites a wealth of objective, ideology-free facts by leading thinkers such as Charles Murray (co-author of The Bell Curve), Arthur Jensen—whose bold article of 1969 (pdf) demonstrated that compensatory education must fail, because objective, ideology-free science shows that blacks are simply not as intelligent as whites—and Richard Lynn, a British—note—distinguished psychologist and eugenicist who sits on the board of the objective, ideology-free Pioneer Fund, as well as that of the Pioneer-Funded journal Mankind Quarterly, which soldiers on as an objective, non-ideological stronghold of classical eugenics, social Darwinism, and white supremacy in an academic world that has moved leftward in lockstep, as if manipulated by a socialist puppeteer. Murray’s, Jensen’s, and Lynn’s writings, it must be observed, are controversial, an objective fact that may be partly explained by an occasional propensity toward language that can be taken the wrong way—as racist, social Darwinist, or eugenic. Wade, then, has become a cheerful cheerleader for a network of fearless scholars associated with what some have uncharitably branded “scientific racism,” but which I prefer to call “racial scientism.”

In short, if the West has won—and anyone who says otherwise is asking for a drone strike—it is because we are an intelligent, gentle, open, and creative people, and also because we have, as the Americans would say, a Big Gulp of Whoopass in the cup-holder of our figurative Escalade. Genetics suggests that genes underlie social traits such as intelligence, gentleness, creativity, and whoopass. Western populations must therefore have higher frequencies of the alleles for these traits. And so, little ones, we prevail not because might makes right, but because right makes might. We are on top because this is the natural order of things. As the Yale sociologist William Graham Sumner so aptly put it, “A drunkard in the gutter is just where he ought to be.” One might add that an upper-class Briton running over that drunkard in a mint-condition 1970 Aston Martin is just where he ought to be.

One quibble, to reinforce my objectivity: the book’s only serious problem is the title. This inheritance isn’t troublesome at all. It’s marvelous—for someone with the good taste to be born upper-class, C. of E. (Church of England, sod it), and Oxbridge-bred, like Wade and me, anyway. And yes, you marmots, in fact I was born Oxbridge bred: if five generations of Dorkins Firsts doesn’t breed it into you then epigenetics is a joke. What could be troublesome about my inheritance? I closed the cover of this pioneering work of retrograde science writing with a wink and a plummy little smile, lit my pipe, and reflected on how good it is to be rich, brilliant, tall, and English. On top of the world, dominant in every way that matters, and here not by force but by right, dammit, Mother. Did you hear my fist—beknuckled with a light pelage, masculine but not atavistic—pound my oaken desk? The cats lit’rally jumped off the divan.

 

Major new cause of achievement discovered: studying

In a breakthrough discovery, researchers have identified a significant causal factor in educational achievement. It involves sitting one’s ass down at a table and opening books.

The problem of the underlying causes of educational achievement have stymied geneticists for years. Back in the Progressive Era, eugenicists attributed most of the variance in IQ, or intelligence quotient–a test designed to measure educational achievement–to a single Mendelian gene. Today, geneticists are just as obsessed with the genetic causes of IQ. After years of study, they have succeeded in spreading the effect out over several genes, while whittling the genetic basis down to under two percent of the variation. A recent study in Science magazine found that all known genetic variations combined explained 1.98% of the variation in achievement; the largest single effect of a genetic variant was 0.02%.

A different approach was taken by a researcher who prefers to be known simply as “Miss Perkins.” With her half-moon glasses, her hair done up in a tidy bun, and her sensible shoes, she is the picture of an elementary school teacher. Which she is. Collecting data over more than 20 years of teaching social studies to 3rd, 4th, and 5th graders at Martin Luther Malcolm Kennedy Roosevelt Elementary and Middle School, in Slippery Rock, Missouri, she has found that studying (STUH-dee-ying) explains a whopping 60% of the variance in educational achievement–no matter whether it is measured in grade-point average, standardized test scores, or subjective evaluations.

Another 30% of the total variation can be attributed to parents teaching their kids to put their butts in the chair and keep them there, without videos, music, or cell phones to distract them. A further 8% was attributed to nutrition.

The results have rocked the biomedical world. “I’m literally stunned,” said Dick Dorkins, of the Society for the Prevention of Intelligent design, Teleology, Or Other Nonsense (SPITOON), a biological think tank in Tumwater, Washington. “I feel exactly like I did last week when I accidentally got TASERED at the end of a bar fight.”

Not all scientists are convinced by the results, which involve 573 children and 1,719,000,000,000 base pairs. Nicholas Spork, a genomicist at Kashkow University, best known for its discovery of the “Republican gene,” said that Perkins’s “one-size fits all” approach was a “pedagogical dinosaur.” He was pioneering a personalized education approach, he said, that would tailor standardized tests to an individual’s genome. He also said he had applied for a federal grant to buy fourteen new high-speed sequencers that would identify 2 trillion base pairs in 93 seconds. “It’s just a hunch of course,” Spork said with a conspiratorial wink, “but I have every confidence that, with enough venture capital, in ten years we can double the amount of variance explained by single-nucleotide polymorphisms” (or “snips”). That would bring the total to around 3 percent.

Meanwhile, Miss Perkins continues her study—and her students continue their studying. She teaches about 60 students a year, in two classes. Her most high-tech tools are a globe, in the corner, a whiteboard (without a projector), and a terrific set of dry-erase markers, ranging from deepest violet through the spectrum to cherry red. But that’s not all. “Over the summer, a parent donated me a set of grays and blacks,” she said proudly during a quiet moment in class. “They were expensive, but oh, this will help a great deal. Nothing’s too good for my kids. Derek! What do you think you’re doing? Sit down and be quiet this instant, or you’ll have extra homework!”

The Bacon Gene

According to a recent study, pork appreciation could be genetic. Though the finding remains speculative, the correlation of such a high-level subjective character trait with a particular gene is already having a far-reaching impact on domestic policy.

In the study, variants of the OR7D4 gene, which encodes an odorant receptor, were correlated with a preference for pig meat. Subjects who possessed the RT allele rated the appeal of pork more highly than those who possessed a variant called WM. The gene in question responds to the steroid androstenone, which, it turns out, is present in high amounts in the muscle of male pigs. The authors simply connect the dots and suggest that the taste for pork may be mediated by this gene. The paper was published this week in the journal PLOS One.

This study represents a breakthrough in the genetics of breakfast. For years now, researchers have searched in vain for the gene for crispy potatoes, tender inside, with onions, bell peppers, salt, pepper, and a little oregano. An egg-hunt for the Over Easy Gene has flopped, the candidate-gene approach providing exactly zero gene candidates. The scientific community was buzzed, however, by the discovery of two coffee genes in the spring of 2011.

The Pork Board, American Home Fries Association, Egg Board, Florida Citrus Growers, and Coffee-Growers’ Association are joining forces and lobbying direct-to-consumer genetic testing companies such as 23AndMe to create a Breakfast Panel in their personal genomics profiles. Researchers and marketers hope to identify a genotype for the preference for an “American breakfast.” Preliminary studies suggest that a still-hypothetical “Continental” genotype shows linkage between a preference for a nice buttery croissant or currant scone with cigarette smoking, universal healthcare, promiscuous sex, and tight pants with pointy little effeminate shoes. Dick Dorkins, who heads up the personal genome sequencing effort “Project Dick,” has already assembled such a hypothetical panel and run it against his own genome. He claims that his sequence shows that he is as American as the gene for apple pie.

These findings raise the possibility of prenatal genetic diagnosis and selective abortion. The prospect of implanting only embryos genetically tailored to like Mom’s cooking may be too tempting for farsighted prospective parents to pass up. In the not-too-distant future, only “foodies” may have gastronomically adventurous children, while those for whom salt is a spice may be able to tailor their progeny to share their lack of taste. Vegetarians could become a separate caste and sent to a reservation in Northern California, where their only sustenance would be mung beans and marijuana.

This naturally has political implications. Indeed, the conservative pro-science group Freedom Control Institute issued a white paper yesterday recommending genetic screening for health, genealogy, and breakfast preference for all presidential candidates in future elections. Under their plan, a Breakfast Panel profile would be used to screen anyone seeking to occupy the highest breakfast nook in the land. Any candidate showing a Continental Breakfast Profile, with variants such as OR7D4-WM, would be ineligible to be included on primary ballots in Kansas.

The idea is not without controversy. Questions remain about where one would draw the lines around a properly free-market American breakfast. Watchdog groups decry the amount of pork in American politics, yet it seems unrealistic to do more than trim some of the fat. Presumably the sausage-links gene variant of OR7D4 would qualify one for office. But what about Canadian bacon?, asks Dorkins. Is that even bacon at all?

Then there is the whole matter of toast. Right-wing genetic hardliners insist that true Americans eat only white bread, while moderates point out that six out of the last six Presidents have eaten wheat toast. Possession of a pumpernickel variant, all sides agree, would indicate a dangerously Euro-socialist culinary constitution and should debar someone from higher office.

The dairy lobby, which so far has been left out of these discussions owing to low blood-sugar, has begun to push for social policy on the genetics of preference for milk products. Cheese, for example, has long been a political hot potato. Hardliners favor limiting candidates to cheddar and colby. Rallying around the slogan “Soft on cheese—soft on defense,” they argue that a strict “No Brie” genetic policy is a bulwark against socialized medicine. Opponents, however, accuse them of lactose intolerance, pointing out that the high correlation between the genetics of preference for hard and soft cheeses would make such a policy impractical.

Such self-styled “lactose liberals” suffered a blow last week, when a Colorado woman spilled her yogurt on President Obama. With one flick of her spoon, she disabused the President of what had been a pro-active culture stance. Within hours, the Oval Office issued the “Yoplait Doctrine,” which severed diplomatic relations with any nation producing dairy products containing live bacteria intended for sale in the United States. More than 40 countries, including India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Germany, and even neutral Switzerland, immediately closed their American embassies.

A global food fight may be beginning that could trigger the Broccoli Clause of the 1992 Paris Convention on food policy. If invoked, all participants would be required to eat their vegetables or else be sent to their rooms without any dessert.

Dorkins Speaks!

After months of emails, instant messages, not-so-instant messages, and dammit-downright-slow messages attempting to get his attention, Genotopia has finally secured an interview with Dick Dorkins, the professional cynic, atheist, and genomics enthusiast. Genotopia readers first met Dorkins when he commented on the discovery of a gene for thalassophilia. Best known for his work with SPITTOON, the Society for the Prevention of Intelligent-design, Theology, or Other Nonsense, Dorkins is also an outspoken advocate for personal genomics, which he champions as the true path to spiritual enlightenment. In this first part of our interview, he tells about “Project Dick,” his effort to sequence his own genome, and the breakthrough technique that has made it possible.

 

GT: Thanks for taking the time to sit down with us.

DD: Don’t be an ass. I’m just banging out ex cathedra ripostes in between doing things that matter.

GT: What matters?

DD: Well I do, for starters. But I’m not doing myself at the moment, if that’s what you’re implying.

GT: What are you doing then?

DD: If you must know, I’m looking at myself.

GT: In the mirror? Doesn’t that make it confusing to type?

DD: Don’t be an ass. Not my image. My self. My true self. My genome.

GT: Ah, your DNA sequence. But wait—your genome famously refused to be sequenced.

DD: That’s right, it did. But I kicked its nucleic butt and now it’s as docile as a retriever.

GT: How did you do that?

DD: Through a breakthrough technology called “nuclear sequencing.” Not as in the cell nucleus. As in Hiro-fucking-shima. You’ve heard of shotgun sequencing?

GT: Sure. Craig Venter’s technique of “blasting” the entire genome into smithereens of DNA, sequencing the fragments with high-powered automated sequencers, and stitching the pieces together using massive computing power. It’s how the Human Genome Project finished early.

DD: You’re not as dumb as you type. Well, as you know, I’ve formed a company to sequence my own genome. We call it “Project Dick.”

GT: Catchy. I like the ambiguity.

DD: I came up with it myself. Anyway, as you say, my genome was impervious to shotgun sequencing. It squinted down the barrel of Venter’s biggest ABI machine, tossed back its head and gave a bitter, defiant laugh: “Hahahaha.” There might even have been an evil “Bwa” at the beginning. We hit it with everything we had and when the smoke cleared my genome was still just sitting there smirking.

GT: Tough. What did you do?

DD: We invented machine-gun sequencing. But still, nothing. My genome wears kevlar nucleus armor. It drives an Armored Personnel Carrier. Not so surprising really, when you consider the individual it encodes. So this brilliant chap we’re collaborating with out at Stanfoo University, Will B. Rich, upped the ante, so to speak, and invented the atom bomb of DNA sequencing.

GT: How does it work?

DD: It literally destroys my DNA, atom by atom, and then reassembles it. The processing power this requires is staggering.

GT: My God.

DD: Not quite. Google.

GT: You hired Google to sequence your DNA?

DD: Hired? Don’t be an ass. Like God, Google is everywhere. We have written code that borrows computing cycles one at a time from every desktop and mobile device on the planet and uses them to assemble the sequence of my genome. In between the “A” and the question mark of your last question, your Android contributed one tiny piece of my genome. Your device is sequencing me. You are sequencing me.

GT: You’re welcome. So in a sense, Google already has all this information—about you, and, theoretically, anyone else—and you are simply tapping in and extracting it? Should we be concerned about this?

DD: Google knows. Google cares.

GT: Dick! What you’re suggesting is the exploitation for personal gain of a giant omniscient, omnipresent, celestial intelligence, privy to our every move and capable of probing into the deepest recesses of our genetic structure–and that moreover, it is in a sense voluntarily created by our desire for communication with our fellow man and our desire for really cool apps! Explain, please!

DD: Can’t. Later, at my leisure, I will try to explain it to you slowly. But it’s time for my cup of special Punjabi aceyjee tea. It has telomere-lengthening properties, don’t you know. So ciao for now.

(Check back later for Part II of our interview!)