Volume 2, Issue 1 · September 2025

Fall 2025

Two changes at planetary scale that almost nobody noticed. Snowball Earth turning out to have flickered rather than frozen once and waited, and a fifth of the ocean growing measurably darker across twenty years of satellite data.

5 articles, in the order the club meant them to be read.

1. 1

   Original ResearchFall 2025

   Why Sex Exists: Watching Mutations Pile Up in a Population That Cannot Recombine

   Mutation only adds. In a population with no recombination, once the last individual carrying the fewest mutations fails to leave descendants, nothing can rebuild that class, and the minimum mutation load in the population steps up by one forever. Muller called it a ratchet. We measured how fast it turns. The instrument was a Wright-Fisher simulation the club wrote and ran on a laptop, carrying the full distribution o

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2. 2

   Original ResearchFall 2025

   The Dosing Schedule Decides Whether Resistance Wins

   We built a stochastic two-strain bacterial population model under a one-compartment pharmacokinetic drug concentration and ran 178,002 simulated treatment courses on a laptop. There are no bacteria in this study and no patients: the computation is the experiment, and none of what follows is medical advice. Before measuring anything we validated the deterministic core. Bisection on the net growth rates recovered the m

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3. 3

   ReplicationFall 2025

   Running Axelrod's Tournament Again, With Noise This Time

   Axelrod's 1980 round robin found that tit for tat beat every program sent to it. We asked whether that survives when moves are occasionally misread. No person and no organism was involved at any point: the computation is the experiment. We implemented fifteen classical strategies, ran a full round robin of 400 repetitions at each of ten noise levels from 0 to 0.20, and then ran replicator dynamics for 4,000 generatio

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4. 4

   ExplainerPaleoclimate

   Snowball Earth Was Flickering: A Planet Stuck in a 56 Million Year Loop

   The Sturtian glaciation opened around 717 million years ago and closed around 661 million years ago, and the 56 million years of ice lying between those two dates have embarrassed every account of the Cryogenian written since anyone first learned to measure the interval at all [5, 6]. A Harvard group published a different reading of it on 27 April 2026 [1]. In their coupled model of Neoproterozoic climate and carbon,

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5. 5

   Data StoryOceanography

   Twenty One Percent of the Ocean Got Darker and Almost Nobody Noticed

   Two researchers at Plymouth took twenty years of satellite measurements of how fast light dies in seawater, one number per pixel per year on a 9 km grid, and asked a question nobody had asked globally: is the ocean getting dimmer? Over 2003 to 2022 the attenuation coefficient rose across 75,341,181 km , which is 21 percent of the ocean, while it fell across only 10 percent. The lit layer shoaled by more than 50 metre

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