TOW #6 - The Strangers in Your Brain

What accounts for the extraordinary wiring of the human mind? - Rebekka Dunlap

     This week, I've decided to pick something different by reading a scientific article. The author, Kelly Clancy, only has one article on The New Yorker but has written many others, all published on her website (www.kellybclancy.com) and on the topic of the brain and its complexities. In this essay, she writes about a new discovery in the genome of neurons, cells that make up brains: each cell has a slightly different genome. In order to explain this discovery and convey the significance of it to a wider audience, Clancy uses personification and allusion throughout her essay.
     In her first paragraph, it is essential for her to clearly explain and define technical terms that she will need to use in order to explain the research later in the essay. She defines transposons as “wandering snippets of DNA that hide in genomes, copying and pasting themselves at random” and “unsung heroes of natural selection.” In science class, biology in particular, every teacher that I’ve had has compared the activities of the topic of discussion, whether it be atoms or organelles, to human activities because it helps people understand the function and/or reasoning behind each reaction and action. Clancy employs this technique in her careful placement of personification in order to help her reader, who most likely isn’t very well versed in biology, better understand the extremely technical subject of the essay.
     Also in her first paragraph but not limited to it, Clancy alludes to Darwin and Darwinian evolution. These references are understandable by everyone that’s ever been to school, since no one is able to escape the lessons about finches and the Galapagos islands that are typical of every biology class. In her first paragraph, Clancy writes “Without [mutations], there would be no novelty and no change; the slow-churning Darwinian search algorithm would stop.” Here, Clancy assumes that the reader knows Darwin’s theory of evolution, a correct assumption, and does not bother explaining it. Later on, Clancy compares the different types of beaks of Darwin’s finches to different types of neurons with different genomes. Again, she assumes the reader will automatically catch on and in doing so effectively explains the phenomenon through the comparison, aiding the reader’s understanding of an esoteric topic.
     Although Clancy’s use of personification and allusion help a very general audience with little understanding of higher biology or neurology understand the new discovery much more deeply than it would’ve through reading a scientific paper, this essays is also very interesting to those who do know a little about biology but are not so fully immersed into the scientific community, such as myself. Even after having taken AP Biology, I did not know what a transposon was. It was interesting to read something new that we hadn’t learned about in school and to read the little asides the Clancy had written in parenthesis that went into more detail and biology than the rest of the article. Overall, Clancy’s essay was effective in capturing the attention of the audience no matter what the background and explaining the content and importance of this scientific discovery.