Losing My Wings Main Menu Yagharek Longs to Fly Yagharek, from China Mieville's, _Perdido Street Station_, gives up the dream of flight Diptera: Insects with two wings Flies and humans Fallen Angels: Loss as Transformation David Bowie explores themes of space existence in his songs from the 1970s through 1980s From Sensory Bristles to the Spots on a Butterfly's Wing Evolution through co-option Gothic Biology Limb Development in the Human Embryo A description of early human limb development Popular Culture and Extraordinary Bodies

Losing My Wings

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This is a remarkable time in the history of biological thought. Experiments during the past few decades have changed scientists' views of how genes contribute to evolution and development. Genes were once thought to carry the instructions for building an organism, much like a blueprint carries instructions for building a house. Now genes are considered more like exquisitely sensitive switches that initiate and refine sequences of events. This new understanding of how genes operate changes how we think about how organisms develop and how they are related to each other.

Scientists now know that humans possess all the molecular machinery needed to develop wings. The fact that humans don't have wings, however, has haunted stories of personal and social transformation for millennia. There are many popular stories where the development of wings is considered as a testament of humankind's proximity to god or the development of a new technology. A good example of this is the myth of Icarus, where wings signal the potential to transcend animal nature. But recent biology suggests that we might have this backward. What if our stories about gaining wings are really ghost stories about a shared biological potential with other animals? Might these stories of wings, then, be an unconscious and biological testament to what we have lost in becoming human? 

The Losing My Wings project collects stories from film, literature, popular culture, and the history of science to show how deeply human myths of transformation are haunted by developmental paths not taken. What the site offers is the capacity to create a series of gothic fables that question easy assumptions of what has come to pass by imaginatively exploring what may come to pass under a different set of circumstances. Just choose a starting point and begin to explore the different ways that humans, humanoids, and other creatures have lost their wings. Here are the starting points:

Gothic Fables of Losing My Wings
Credits
Author/Director - Phillip Thurtle
Programmer/Designer - Michael Beach
Aesthetic Consultant/Designer - Hannah Patterson
Programmer - John Morrow

This project was made possible by generous funds provided by the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington