As mythical mother of the nine classical muses, Mnemosyne was mother of all the arts and sciences. By inference, she was the founder of all language too, since she was said to have discovered the uses of the powers of reason and to have given names or designations to all things. The languages of art and science of molecular biology are continually reconstructed with names and determinations for things never before seen or imagined. A paradox of reference is inevitably encountered because we are constrained to use concepts and vocabularies invented in the past to describe facts at hand. Obsolete paradigms tend to be incorporated with the very ideas that have overturned them, leaving many people automatically confused. Ethical and philosophical problems stemming from inevitable misinterpretations plague artists and scientists who choose to represent a universe we cannot now and may never completely understand. An effort to sequence the genome of Malus sieversii, an apple shown to be ancestral to all domestic cultivars is presented in this context.

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