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.

For instance, scientists now know that humans possess all the molecular machinery needed to develop wings. All the molecules needed to turn genes on or off in winged animals, are active in humans as well. 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 a testament to humankind's divine nature. A good example of this is the myth of Icarus, where wings signal the potential to transcend earthbound existence. But what we learned about 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 but biological testament to what we have lost in becoming human? Might the important evolutionary and psychological moment, then, be when we lost our wings, as opposed to the potential of growing them? 

The Losing My Wings project explores this moment of loss and transformation through the collection of stories from film, literature, popular culture, and the history of science. What the site allows users to do is to traverse these stories to envision new narratives about the loss of wings and understand how important this specific myth of bodily transformation haunts scientific thought as well as a wider cultural discourse. 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 - Phillip Thurtle
Programmer/Designer - Michael Beach
Aesthetic Consultant/Designer - Hannah Patterson
Programmer - John Morrow

This project was generously funded by the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington

Much of the historical and theoretical reflection that gave birth to this project can be found in Phillip Thurtle, Biology in the Grid: Graphic Design and the Envisioning of Life (University of Minnesota Press, 2018).