I’ve gone down a little bit of a rabbit hole with my thinking about Junk DNA and analogies, metaphor, and communicating to the public. In talking with people about my topic, I’ve had to describe the rift between “pro junk” vs “anti junk” positions. Switching from an already complicated scientific phenomenon to a complicated philosophical conversation about “value” and how we determine it doesn’t lend itself to an “elevator pitch”-style, compact explanation.
So I tried to develop a higher level metaphor for the entire situation. We have a complicated, multi-faceted debate that can seamlessly morph between facts and science into value judgement and personal world views. And then back again. An argument where both sides are trying to advance a broader goal of the general good, but differ on terminology, rubrics, and what is really considered “good” in the first place.
Maybe I just have a bad case of 2017, but this reminded me of politics.
So, for our “advertisement” assignment, I made two political attack ads for each side of the debate. Hopefully this can transmit the fundamentals of the junk DNA conversation, but also be indicative of some of the nuances of the conversation. Choosing a metaphor can be a way of clarifying a concept. But it can also be a way of emphasizing the solid points of your argument while diminishing or ignoring the weaker points.
This piece is a kind of parody, so the location would be “on the radio” inside of it’s own story world. But the actual audience would be people who would want to learn more about the disagreement around junk dna in a more accessible way. This could be something like a fun bit on a podcast that not only distills down what junk DNA does and what it doesn’t, but it summarizes the meta conversation down to a 2-3 minute piece. This allows for quick digestion, as all ~1 minute political radio ads do. But also by being in the format of a political ad, the audience is guided to be somewhat skeptical of the claims being made.
If I can guide the audience to a brief understanding of the basics while also instilling a sense of critical reading of the arguments at play, all in under 5 minutes, I think this could be an effective piece.
Now that I can look at this, I don’t know if I want to go in this direction for my final project, though. Perhaps a little too jokey. Not that I don’t like that in general, but not sure if I’m inspired by that direction at the moment.
I’m going to do a bit more research before I outline my proposal for a final project. But I do like the idea of playing with the concept of musical mappings to DNA, and perhaps playing with a metaphor of “music vs. noise” and “dna vs. junk dna”. There seem to be some existing “DNA music” projects, so I want to make sure I approach with a fresh take that addresses junk DNA specifically.
“Don’t listen to the noise” is a good tagline.
You are onto something – and you have done a great job approximating radio semiotics.
There’s good work on signal to noise that you cold consider transposing onto your topic – I appreciate you wanting to go beyond the joke or one-liner – and do something artistic, exploratory, provocative. Maybe these questions would help:
What could the junk DNA be? instead of treat it as waste or “noise,” could you speculate and create other worlds for it, other reasons for being?
What else do we think of as junk or waste or noise that turns out to be important? Neuroscience has shifter certain paradigms about free will and the Cartesian mind/body split for instance. High frequency sounds and EM are other areas in which our concepts about their importance have changed.