Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas came out on 15 May, and within a week I had already read more or less every possible word of praise. The Catholics of the left (read: catto-communists) celebrated it for its explicit anti-capitalism; the critics of technology (read: techno-sceptics) for its warning against Big Tech; the mainstream press for the pop citations – Tolkien, Beethoven, Schindler's List; even a few self-declared atheists, scattered across social media, tipped their hats at the lucidity with which a Pope names the concentration of computational power in the hands of a few. At the presentation, in the Synod Hall, Chris Olah sat among the speakers – co-founder of Anthropic and head of research on AI interpretability. This is not a detail: it is the signature on a document that wants to be taken seriously even by those who actually build the models. Of praise, in short, I have read enough. I, however, want to do the opposite exercise.

There is an envelope, somewhere in England, bearing the handwriting of a Finnish musician. Inside is a proposal that, told in the abstract, sounds like the joke of a drunk poet: a symphonic metal band asks one of the planet's best-known evolutionary biologists to lend his voice to a twenty-four-minute song about the origin of life.

To understand how two worlds this far apart – the guitar and the ribosome, the double bass drum and the DNA – ended up in the same track, you have to start from a biographical detail almost nobody knows. Tuomas Holopainen, the man who has always written Nightwish's music, studied biology before becoming a full-time musician.