I didn’t believe in evolution once. There were a few reasons why, but one of them was that there didn’t seem to be enough transitional fossils. I’d heard various biologists and paleontologists say the same thing: the chain had missing links.

Now I realise that evolution, on a long enough timescale, often stops looking like a gradual slope, and starts looking like a series of steps.

Evolution often work in fits and jerks. There’s periods of rapid change (when there’s strong selective pressure), coupled with long pit stops where not much happens (the pressure relaxes). This conceit is found in several theories. Ernst Mayr’s “genetic revolutions.” Stephen Gould’s “punctuated equilibrium”.

Sometimes, this is dictated by outside pressures – climate change, or the introduction of a new competitor. Sometimes it’s dictated by the form itself. As WD Hamilton pointed out, you’d expect a complete flying creature to be more successful than a semi-evolved creature with half-grown wings. Once selection starts working, the creature rapidly moves through morphological space until it reaches the new optimum.

The fossil record can be likened to a ship traversing an ocean, while a satellite in space takes a photograph of it every day. Imagine the voyage takes 10 days – would you expect the 10 photos of the ship to be at perfect 10% intervals along the journey? Not hardly. There might be doldrums. There might have a strong tailwind. It might have to carefully navigate around some rocks. But this isn’t disproof of the mechanism of sail, and it’s not proof that the ship is magically teleporting from place to place. Evolution isn’t just a question of “where are we going”, it’s a question of “how quickly will we get there?”

This sort of adaptationist thinking isn’t trendy, but even an evolution driven by drift isn’t going to operate at a constant rate throughout history. The generation of mutations is modulated by a host of environmental factors (radiation, UV light), and their spread is capped by social factors. Maybe all kinds of interesting mutations developed in the humans living the New World. So what? Until 1948, none of that affected the gene pool of the humans living in Europe at all. There was a big natural barrier in the way: the Atlantic ocean.

Another thing: does something looking superficially unchanged mean it’s not evolving? The horseshoe crabs are a famous example of “living fossils”, nearly unchanged after hundreds of millions of years. But it seems they did actually change a little bit – fossilized horseshoe crabs have legs that split into two ends, while the modern kind have no split. (Perhaps there’s better examples of living fossils. Cladoselache is a Devonian fish that looks very much like a modern shark. Trigonotarbida is 400mYa old yet easily recognisable as a spider – some fossils even have spinerettes.)

I guess you always want more fossils. But when I die, the fossil record will likely keep no record of me, so who am I do to deny transitional fossils a hypothetical existence?

Music is a form of art, and although there are many ways to define art, one definition is “intentional specialness”. We live in a universe ruled by randomness and chaos, and things that aren’t chaotic (meaning they have elements of planning, intention, predictability, uniqueness, etc underpinning them) register in our minds as interesting.

Put another way: the universe is a random series of numbers (1, 4, 2, 7, 9, 3, 6, 4, 1, 2) while art is a non-random series (1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4, 1, 2, 3, 4).

Art is a man-made island of reason in an ocean of stochastic chaos. Even works of art that seem chaotic (like a Jackson Pollock painting) have “intentionality” behind them. Pollock wants his paintings to look that way. It’s not an accident.

Listen to the sounds around you. Bird chirps. The humming of an air conditioner. A passing car. All of it’s just a boring canvas of random noise. But then, consider music: a series of frequencies carefully arranged in time by a composer. A steady beat. A steady rhythm. An E superimposed over a C# to create a sad minor third. A submediant (VI) resolving back to the tonic (I). All of it planned, all of it deliberate.

The power of music isn’t that it sounds pleasant (noise rock, death metal, etc). It’s that it’s special!

So why does music sound empty to you?

Assuming your brain is neurologically undamaged, my guess is that you’ve listened to so much of it that the “specialness” has gone away. That it’s been a part of your life for so long that your brain has totally habituated to it and you no longer perceive it as distinct or different to the rest of the background noise in the world.

William S Burroughs said that the new addicts shoot smack to feel good, while old addicts shoot smack to feel normal. And eventually you stop feeling anything at all.

We rely on specialness to give our lives meaning, but it’s short lived and easily destroyed. The first act of sexual intercourse on a movie screen was a transgressive, outrageous statement. The 2,436,734th act of sexual intercourse was just lazy button-pushing.

But people still keep trying. Much of our lives are spent shuffling around in the dark, trying to recapture the ghost of specialness that was exorcised long ago.

Percy Shelley’s “Ozymandias” is usually interpreted as a poem about the decay of empires, and the inbound annihilation of the present. But there are other interpretations.

An internet celebrity would probably read the poem and think Ozymandias had it easy. He lost his empire, but at least he left behind two trunkless legs of stone and an inscription. A Vine star can disappear entirely. There are no low and level sands: the internet in 2016 is more like an ocean of quicksand in 9-magnitude earthquake riding a subducting tectonic plate straight into the asthenosphere. Changing trends, changing media, nobody having any clear idea what works and what doesn’t…Fame achieved on the internet is only slightly longer-lasting than fame achieved by starring in an ISIS beheading video.

Time for my quarterly Maddox check-in. Yep, still alive.

I’ve written before about how I obsessively check everyone I’ve ever heard of to make sure they haven’t died. In Maddox’s case, I check to make sure he hasn’t committed suicide. He just seems like he’s on that road. He updates his website with bitter rants with zero jokes. He alienates friends and business partners. He actively repudiates much of his early writings – you get the vibe of an aging musician insulting the hits that brought him fame. His last book failed. His next one will probably do the same. Everything I see from him depresses me.

When I first found him in 2004, he was at the top of his game. He had a hilarious shtick (which I’d describe as “smart person pretending to be stupid person pretending to be a smart person”…read his stuff and you’ll get it), a series of wildly popular viral articles, and rabbit ears for internet culture of the time (SomethingAwful, bash.org, etc). His site was getting monstrous amounts of traffic, with zero promotion. He inspired countless imitators.

Around 2005, gaps between articles started going from weeks to months. From September 2007 to September 2010 he published a whopping six articles. And this was around the point where you could no longer afford to do that – the internet was changing, and it went from “charismatic writers with loyal followings” to “clickbait writers dangling shiny objects in front of your face, and hoping you weren’t distracted by an even shinier object”. By the time Maddox finally came “back” (sorta), he’d lost all the momentum he’d built up. His articles now get tens of thousands of hits. It used to be millions.

He’s still an interesting person. Not so much for the content he’s putting out (which is sporadic and shitty), but for the brief glimpses behind the curtain.

He seems to be trying to rebrand, to “pivot”, as political wonks are saying now. This video has been edited to include a grovelling “explanation” of why he used the word “gay”. His rejection of his first book is a calculated move to deflect blowback from a passage that appears to recommend sexual assault (if you’re an idiot with no understanding of satire or humor). I don’t know why he even bothers. The people who are offended by such things are intractable to apologies. They don’t want him to grovel, they just want him destroyed.

To be fair, he’s always been a conflicted guy. What I liked about his occasional forays into politics was that he’d be so unpredictable in his stances. On some topics he’d lean left, on others right, on still others he’d take a view shared by no political ideology I’m aware of.

But now he’s virtually repudiating his edgelord past. It’s a shame, but it’s not surprising. People get older, and people change. Tucker Max is now an entrepreneur. Thilo Savage took down his site after it apparently caused problems for his professional career. Robert Hamburger…god, I don’t even know. If I think too much about him I’ll read Real Ultimate Power one last time.

A shattered visage.