The Bifarin Canon
[Friends, there will be two polls in this essay, one at the beginning and one at the end, please endeavor to vote, this will give me much-needed feedback. If you are a Bifarin V reader but haven’t subscribed, attempting to vote will prompt you to subscribe.]
On writing more
It’s been a year of writing on substack. I do relish the act of putting my thoughts and ideas in essays and sharing them. If anything, it’s an easy way to stress test, steelman, and reinforce what I have learned and am currently learning. As you may have noted, the tagline of this blog is to blur out disciplinary boundaries. I am not sure if my ‘pay grade’ will suffice for such an ambitious goal; however, I must say that the tagline was a splendid rescue from the blankness I suffered when coming up with a required tag.
The central themes of my published works include the sciences, technology, and the humanities. If we zoom in a little bit more, the subject areas are philosophy, sociology, anthropology, biomedicine, theology, and modern work and life.
Like many people who live today, I have fantasized about having more time to do stuff. Perhaps a little bit more than 24 hours will do – more time for me to read good books and write some more essays.
In reality, I have an intense day job that requires a lot of technical reading and writing (computer codes and written words) that do not overlap with what I write here on Bifarin V (See Fun in Maine). And, anyways, it’s not unusual to be exhausted when I am done for the day. And despite the urge to write essays, sometimes the last thing I want to write about is, say, Thomistic metaphysics (an essay I have put off for far too long).
In summary, I do think I do not have a crazy number of ideas to write about, but I am bereft of the time to write the little ones trapped between my ears.
And now that I am done complaining, let’s review the essays (and the contents) I have published in the past year.
Philosophy and theology
My first essay on Bifarin V is titled ‘What Things Exist.’ In this philosophical essay, I started with Aristotle’s famous quote on ‘what is true?’ I argued first for the inevitability of the existence of truth and then proceeded to introduce a few theories of truth: correspondence, coherence, pragmatism, etc. I devoted some paragraphs to solipsism, but I didn’t go too deep before I dovetailed into scientific realism and antirealism.
This essay will be my main thrust into other areas of my interest in philosophy. For example, I will write about naturalism in the next few weeks or months. Specifically, I will be arguing against it.
Another philosophy essay was on epistemology: Fragility of (Epistemic) Stability. This one is slightly less intense than the first one. I used David Hume’s two ways of knowing (Hume’s fork) to distinguish between what we mean by ‘knowing’ and ‘believing’ and how we often conflate the two. There is so much of an illusion in what we refer to as stability. Citing the recent pandemic, I argued that we do not appreciate that we cannot know anything with certainty about the future, and how humbling that ought to be. Ultimately, I concluded that “stability is a spiritual reality.”
Now, talking about spiritual realities and matters, I have been influenced by Thomistic philosophy over the past few years, which refers to the philosophical methods used and inspired by Saint Thomas Aquinas.
I have written an essay on a relatively famous critique of the Saint in St. Aquinas on Trial. In brief, some have accused him of opening the floodgate for modern humanism because of his natural theology approaches. It doesn’t appear that such claims can be validated, especially when we have more probable causes like the William of Ockham’s nominalism.
Nominalism argues against the existence of abstract objects and universals. This view, once accepted, obliterates the final cause in the Aristotelian framework, and what we have left with is modern humanism, moral relativism, et cetera.
Sociology and Anthropology
My sociological and anthropological outlook is largely Girardian. That is, it is based on the works of the polymath Rene Girard. I have written three essays that cover this theme on this blog.
In We are all Copycats and Prestige as an Illusion, we looked at an idea called the mimetic desire (and the mimetic theory in general), which means that our desires are primarily imitative. We generally lack the ability to muster novelty in our desires. We want what others want not because we want them genuinely but precisely because other people want them. And because of this, our various interactions give rise to a plethora of sociological phenotypes, one of such is our mode of conflict.
I continued my thought on human mimesis in Twins, Mirrors, and Taboos, an anthropology essay. In the essay, Girard’s mimetic theory was used to explain why primitive humans engaged in human sacrifices, the prevalence of taboos and prohibition, and an anthropological examination of why some cultures have an unsettling relationship with mirrors and twins. For example, just a century ago, in various places in Nigeria, twins – or at least one of them – are killed at birth. I will continue to thread Girardian’s thoughts on the blog.
Biology and Medicine
My central theme for this section, essay-wise, has been aging. I might go into other areas, such as the microbiome and human health, in the future. But why am I writing about aging? It is because I think aging research is one of the biology fields poised for a revolution.
And perhaps a good place to start is the essay: Why We Die, But Cities Don’t. Using scaling laws, I explained the differential age of death of animals and why cities are very resilient longevity-wise.
But I didn't stop there. In Why We Age, I started the essay with a brief history of life expectancy at birth. In pre-industrial society (< 1850), global life expectancy was about 35 years. In contrast, by 2019, that number literally doubled just within a few centuries without any genetic engineering or anything of the sort.
So how did this happen? Well, we took care of child mortality; we figured out that clean running water is about as good as anything; we learned how to wash our hands, and so on.
Today, many people are growing old enough to die of ‘old age.’ Which begs the question, why do we age? I wrote:
“When [..] genomic and epigenomic instability mounts over time, the loss of cellular identity ensues (because the accurate genetic expression for a particular kind of cell is compromised). So, genes that are supposed to be switched off go on; those that are supposed to be switched on get switched off. For example, because of the chaos in the system, the kidney cells can now begin to act up like a part brain cell, part skin cell.”
Now that we have a pretty solid theory on while we age, it turns out that we can delay it. In Go Hungry, I wrote about the biochemistry of what happens in your body when you fast, and I explored a longevity pathway via fasting, specifically Sirtuins (silent information regulators).
Yes, current scientific evidence supports the idea that you can extend your lifespan by fasting. Go Hungry is my second most-read essay in the last year.
Typically, when people decide to start intermittent fasting, they start by skipping breakfast. In The End of Breakfast, I wrote about the history of breakfast. Did you know that eating breakfast was deemed immoral at some time in history? Or that only poor people ate breakfast? See End of Breakfast for more.
Et alia
My Ph.D. Memoir Essay, Wander, is my most-read substack post over the last year. In the memoir, I wrote about my Ph.D. journey in the United States. Specifically, I told the story of completing a Ph.D. program in Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at the University of Georgia.
Talking about other categories, for someone who has his legs in many ponds, how I spend my time is one of my main interests. In Working in the Storm, I wrote about productivity and how to navigate our current world of unending, recalcitrant distractions.
I am also big on psychology, mostly social psychology, and I am surprised I haven’t gotten enough mileage in this category this past year. Anyways, I wrote How (Not) to Be Happy. This essay is a reminder that our intuition about happiness is often wrong. I discussed concepts like the hedonic treadmill, focusing illusions, and the like.
I have also tried my hands on fiction (See Moderation, surprisingly, for me, it’s my third most popular blog in the past year.) I guess I should write more fiction.
Another subject area of interest of mine is machine learning and AI. I am considering starting a separate blog on this subject, given the depth I might be willing to go. Other times I feel I should write about it here. Whatever I decide to do, I hope to write essays on AI/machine learning in the future. So far, I have only one entry in this category: My Machine Learning Books: what to read if you are doing data science.
Newsletter, book reviews, and grant programs
Around the Web is a monthly newsletter that is becoming a fun thing for me to write. It is mainly comments and links to videos, essays, and tweets on AI 🤖, philosophy 🧠, biomedicine🥼, etc. – that, hopefully, you have been finding interesting.
I started book reviews a few months ago, and I plan to continue to write this. They come in two flavors, bite-size reviews and lengthy reviews. For the former, the goal is to write something you can read in only four minutes; and see for yourself if it’s a book you will enjoy. For the latter, this will be a couple of thousand words. (See Formation: The Making of Nigeria from Jihad to Amalgamation for a bite-sized review. See Build: An Unorthodox guide to making things worth making for a long review.)
Finally, last year I launched a grant program experiment to foster innovative thinking amongst young people in Nigeria. To foster foresight and responsibility by taking on challenging problems in society. While it was no easy feat coordinating, I liked it and think it is impactful (Read about the MBB Grant 2021 Winners). I am planning a second round towards the end of the year. I will be writing more about these over the coming weeks.
I want to close this with a poll to get some feedback from you about the least representative subject areas on the blog so far.