The idea of writing a blog has been in the back of my mind for several years, but as often happens, one's priorities relegate these kinds of activities to wishful contemplation rather than action. Ever since my interest in biology grew after starting a Ph.D. in Biophysics, I wanted to share what I learned about the quirks and nuances of the natural world, from the dynamics of gene networks to the complexities of development and evolution. Like many others, I've been inspired by the great names of science communication: J.B.S. Haldane, Stephen Jay Gould, Richard Lewontin, Evelyn Fox Keller, and Loren Eiseley, to name a few. Through their fantastic books and essays, they showed me that genuine science needs not to be sacrificed at the expense of accessibility and that writing about scientific topics can have literary value in its own right. Even though science popularization has traditionally been deemed a low-status activity, I believe that current academic prose places unnecessary barriers between academics and the general public, hindering the democratization of information and the potential for collective progress. In this spirit, I aim to write about topics that might initially feel obscure for the untrained eye—problems at the interface between physics, biology, and evolution—and try to make them understandable to researchers and the general public.

As a physicist-turned-theoretical biologist, I will also use this blog to highlight the tendency of current scientific research towards interdisciplinarity and how fields traditionally deemed disconnected (such as physics and biology) might not be so separate after all. Luckily, researchers are starting to realize how sharing the tools, methodologies, and ways of approaching problems usually associated with specific disciplines provides a fertile ground for creativity—perhaps the most crucial quality a researcher can aim for—to flourish. Examples abound where this merging of scientific disciplines has borne fruit (see this paper and this paper for two instances in the context of developmental biology). Indeed, many researchers now believe that only with this approach will we solve some of the most critical problems we are currently facing both in science and society—from climate change and the stability of ecosystems to the origin of life and the complex nature of organismal development. Unfortunately, because conducting, reviewing, and publishing research that transcends conventional academic boundaries is usually harder, we are now in a state where interdisciplinary research is severely underfunded. Nevertheless, despite the grim prospects for an increasingly bleak future, I believe there's room for hope. The joining of forces some corners of academia are currently experiencing embodies the belief that only when we recognize the division between disciplines as an artificial human construct will we find that interdisciplinary research must be the norm and not the exception in our quest to disclose the peculiarities and generalities of the natural world.

Finally, I must warn the reader that this won't be a politically neutral site. I won't shy away from taking a political stance whenever I see fit—when the status of science as a legitimate way of knowing the world is perverted to justify and promote racism, sexism, queerphobia, social class disparity, and other forms of injustice (as was recently done in a PNAS paper and subsequently called out and discredited in this preprint)—for nowadays we are well aware that science is not and never will be exempt from political and social bias, despite some stating otherwise.

All right! I hope this manifesto is clear about my intentions regarding the content of this blog, so those of you who feel sympathetic about them, come onboard and stay tuned for the upcoming blog posts!