Andrés Parada

Evolution. Bioinformatics. Genomics.
Asistente G2 @ Depto Ecol y Evol, Fcien, Udelar, Montevideo.
# at

[Andrés Parada @drelopara]

the J.G. Ballard era has begun...

[Prof. Ryan Katz-Rosene @ryankatzrosene]

"Siri, what 15 second video clip serves as a metaphor for the culmination of the last half-Century of American-led, fossil fuel driven, neoliberal capitalism?"

[Video by @stuartpalley]

[Andrés Parada @drelopara]

@EseDeSole ricotero pro movicon... pero si te cobraban hasta las llamadas entrantes!

[Andrés Parada @drelopara]

@candelinthewind acabo de mirar por N vez cuando a Tracy lo secuestran los amigos de Bill Cosby...mismo nivel

[Andrés Parada @drelopara]

@irenichus @Seoriza17 @sofideagua algunos replies que le hacen son insuperables...

[Sergi Valverde🌍(under a blue sky) @svalver]

"People who do not understand the complexity of systems will prompt systems and write processes that will fail." People have long desired a magical solution to software complexity. However, this has always been a social issue, not a technological one.

[Andrés Parada @drelopara]

@darioelque Y la banda lo sabía por eso jugaban con las texturas, el tamaño del librito, el medallón, etc

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

Steven Spielberg on the set of Jurassic Park, 1993

[Andrés Parada @drelopara]

@flansx Es imposible no seguir encontrando referencias, nuevos gags más sutiles, etc en la N rewatch. Es el writers room soñado. Veo Tracy haciendo terapia con Jack haciendo la voz del padre y la madre y lloro de risa.

[Andrés Parada @drelopara]

@EseDeSole Eial encarna la versión con diploma de aquel que le entregas información de cómo paso algo o funciona algo y te dice "ah pero es mas complejo en realidad" -> y le pega alguna anécdota personal.

[Imtiaz Mahmood @ImtiazMadmood]

She was rejected 15 times, dismissed as unruly, and largely written out of the conversation. Then the science proved she was right — and changed everything we thought we knew about life itself.

In 1966, a twenty-eight-year-old biologist named Lynn Margulis sat down and wrote a paper that contradicted one of the most fundamental assumptions in all of science.

She was not a tenured professor. She was not working at a prestigious research institution. She was a young mother of two, recently divorced, completing her PhD while raising her sons largely on her own. The scientific establishment had no particular category for her and no particular interest in what she was proposing.

She proposed it anyway.
Her idea was this: that the story of evolution told through competition and conquest was incomplete. That somewhere in the deep history of life on Earth — billions of years ago, long before anything with a spine had appeared — something had happened that was not a battle but a merger. Two separate organisms, each unable to survive alone, had come together and become something neither could have been independently.

The mitochondria in every one of your cells — the structures that convert food into energy, the engine that powers every thought you are having right now — were once free-living bacteria. They did not evolve gradually inside cells. They moved in. They formed a partnership so deep and so permanent that over billions of years they became indistinguishable from the cell itself.

She called the theory endosymbiosis. She called the process symbiogenesis. What she was really saying was that cooperation, not just competition, was one of the engines of evolution — that life's greatest leaps forward had sometimes come not from one organism defeating another, but from two organisms becoming one.

Fifteen scientific journals rejected the paper before it was published in 1967.
Fifteen.

To understand what she was working against, you need to understand the scientific culture of the 1960s. Neo-Darwinism — the synthesis of Darwin's evolution with Mendelian genetics — was the reigning framework, and it was defended with the particular intensity of a field that had recently achieved hard-won consensus. The idea that a bacterium had simply moved inside another cell and stayed there, permanently, was considered not just wrong but somewhat absurd. Evolution happened through random mutation and natural selection, slowly, over generations. Not through dramatic mergers. Not through cooperation.

The reviewers who rejected her paper used words like speculative and insufficiently rigorous. One described the idea as the sort of thing that was interesting to think about but impossible to prove.

She was also described, more than once, as unruly.
It was the specific word that followed women who challenged scientific consensus — not wrong, not misguided, but unruly, as though the problem were her manner rather than her method.

She had been exceptional from the beginning in ways that made people uncomfortable. Born Lynn Petra Alexander in Chicago on March 5, 1938, she entered the University of Chicago at sixteen — intellectually restless, reading at a level that outpaced her coursework, drawn to the questions at the edges of what science had settled. At nineteen she married a young astronomer named Carl Sagan, who would go on to become one of the most famous scientists of the twentieth century. She would later say, without particular bitterness, that during their marriage she was primarily considered someone's wife rather than someone in her own right.

They divorced in 1964. She raised their sons — including Dorion Sagan, who would become her longtime collaborator — while completing her doctorate in genetics from the University of California, Berkeley. She did the work that would change biology while managing the entire domestic architecture of a life that offered her very little structural support.

When molecular biology caught up with her theory in the 1970s — when DNA sequencing technology became sophisticated enough to actually test what she had proposed — the results were unambiguous. Mitochondria contained their own DNA. That DNA was bacterial. The evidence was not suggestive. It was definitive.

The fifteen journals that had rejected her paper were now looking at proof.

The scientific establishment did what establishments eventually do when reality forces their hand — it incorporated her theory, celebrated it as a cornerstone of modern evolutionary biology, and credited her in terms that ranged from gracious to slightly grudging depending on who was doing the crediting. E.O. Wilson, the legendary sociobiologist, called her the most successful synthetic thinker in modern biology. Richard Dawkins — who disagreed with her on multiple other scientific questions — praised her sheer courage in holding to the endosymbiotic theory through years of institutional resistance until the evidence made denial impossible.

Science magazine, the most prestigious journal in American science, called her science's unruly earth mother.
They still couldn't let go of the word.

She was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1983. She received the National Medal of Science in 1999 from President Clinton — the highest scientific honor the United States government bestows. She collaborated with British scientist James Lovelock on the Gaia hypothesis — the provocative and still-debated theory that Earth itself, its atmosphere and oceans and living systems, functions as a single self-regulating organism maintaining the conditions necessary for life. It was another idea that the mainstream received with raised eyebrows, and another idea that has proven more durable than its critics expected.

She wrote books with her son Dorion that translated complex scientific concepts for general readers — believing that science belonged to everyone and that the story of life was too extraordinary to be locked inside academic journals. She co-founded a publishing imprint. She taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for decades and trained a generation of scientists who carried her framework into fields she never lived to see it reach.

She died on November 22, 2011, from a hemorrhagic stroke. She was seventy-three years old.

What she left behind was a redrawn map of life itself.
Every complex cell on Earth — every cell in your body, every cell in every plant, every cell in every animal that has ever lived — is a collaboration. It contains within it the descendants of bacteria that chose, billions of years ago, to stop competing and start cooperating. The boundary between self and other is not where we thought it was. It never was.

Lynn Margulis saw that when almost no one else did.
Fifteen journals said no.

The universe had been saying yes for two billion years.

[Algo Cinefila 👩‍🦰 @algocinefila]

Dejen de querer justificar las películas dobladas, no chicos no.

[Andrés Parada @drelopara]

@perezanalaura @Itu_Agustin Para explicar estas cosas se necesitaría más literacy en estadística y está faltando un montón

[Andrés Parada @drelopara]

@paubgood Google Docs

[Andrés Parada @drelopara]

@darioelque https://t.co/Npykdr4CBT

[Dune Quotes @DuneQuoteBot]

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind.

[jeremy @jeremylovesyall]

no one could have foreseen that the butlerian jihad will be catholic

[Andrés Parada @drelopara]

@aguanuncanunca @Siperono_ antes lo pensaba cada 90 canciones, ahora cada 4 o 5 🫤😢

[Dune Quotes @DuneQuoteBot]

Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a man's mind.

[Andrés Parada @drelopara]

@SGRodriques Cooper: So, what are you being paid for?

Rubin: The confidence that I have in my taste, and my ability to express what I feel, has proven helpful for artists.

https://t.co/GyQXgQcIEb

[Andrés Parada @drelopara]

@EseDeSole tiene menos alma que un Airbnb armado de apuro

[Matthew Gross @HurricaneAddict]

Lurking below the surface in the equatorial Pacific is possibly the most impressive blob of above average ocean temperatures we've ever recorded since we've had the ability to measure this stuff. When that enormous concentration of bath water reaches the surface over the coming weeks and months, it's going to release devastating consequences around the globe throughout the second half of the year. Get ready for severe droughts in parts of South America, Africa, and Australia, devastating monsoons in southern China, and a roaring southern jet all winter long in North America. When you combine this with the fertilizer crisis bubbling as a byproduct of current global events, there's going to be crop failure on a level most of us have never seen during the closing months of 2026. Hard to see how we avoid widespread deadly famines across multiple stretches of the planet at this point.