waserwill

Assuming that abiogenesis wouldn't happen very frequently (given the right set of conditions, a mean time to happen on the order of thousands to billions of years), a single life-forming event would have the same effect, no? After a foundation is set, the self-replicator starts exploiting existing energy gradients, making any other abiogenesis-event much less likely.

To suggest that modern imagination and the recursive thinking necessary for language evolved _after_ humans started making complex tools (which required hierarchical recursive processes to make) is, to me, dubious. The tool-creation/language similarity was commented upon recently [0].

[0] https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rstb.201...

The important animals are other apes and primates, when considering the evolution of disease. If none of them have it but humans do, then it likely came about recently. This means that it has independently evolved in humans and other animals (like rodents) that may have it. Makes for a misleading headline, though.

This is a common set of colloquial definitions; nothing wrong with that. Philosophical writing, particularly with regards to theology, refers to atheism as the belief that there is no God [1]. As such, it is easy to interpret the article as saying: "the belief in no God [rather than the lack of belief in God] is inconsistent with the scientific method."

1. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/atheism-agnosticism/

Oh, and a summary, based on their report to the press: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/02/190204114641.h...

Hey, I really enjoy the imperial system (besides fahrenhiet). It gets more fun when you get beyond yards and pounds and into stones, hundredweight, and imperial tons and rods, chords, and furlongs.

I was mostly talking about the concept of mitochondrial incompatibility, which is significantly more common than what is discussed in the paper, which is paternal inheritance. I made a note of it being doubly rare (female must survive to reproduce age with a specific mitochondrial sort of defect)

Invalidating conclusions: not particularly; these results suggest that under rare circumstances (in a few sorts of mitochondrial disease), mitochondria can be transmitted paternally. It makes the matrilineal model slightly less definitive, but, overwhelming often, accurate (note that people with mitochondrial diseases rarely exhibit this feature, and are less likely to reproduce anyway due to the disease).

Single Eve: still holds; given the small population size of humans in the past, at some point there was a female ancestral to us all, as other lineages would have stochastically died out.

Human dispersal and Neanderthal-modern human crosses: both have been examined via autosomal DNA. Reconstructions of dispersal may be skewed in the following manner: since we use X- Y- and mtDNA to look as sex ratios of admixture events (such as in modern Caribbean populations, where there is more European male influence and African/Native American female contribution), our reconstruction may be skewed by these selection due to incompatibilities. We expect there to have been some incompatibilities between modern humans and Neanderthals/Denisovans—no doubt some were mitochondrial. But autosomal DNA bears the evidence of our admixture. Likely some lineages (including those with prehistoric-human mt- and Y-DNA) were lost, either due to selection, stochasticity, or likely, both.

Both used to refer to the same sound (the first sound of thing), which mutated into what we have today (as in the), in part due to surrounding sounds (note, for example, that words ending in th are soft/unvoiced).

The presence of two different characters has something to do with the integration of Latin and runic alphabets, but the choice of which was used isn't clear to me.

When researchers look for a planet around a star, they only need to look at a small part of our sky. Not so for nearby objects.

Plus, they can exploit the fact that stars with planets nearby will exhibit patterns of brightness, etc.,—if the planet is in the right orbit, has a great deal of mass, along with other parameters.

Which is silly, since comparing two individuals is very quick; when you get a hit for a subset, you can just do a one-to-one comparison to check.

Since you've done the 23&me test, if you'd like, you can submit a copy of the raw 23&me data for free analysis at places like dna.land [NOTE: These are academics which may use your data in research. They claim that they won't share any non-aggregate data without asking first, though.]

The difference is that while animals like mosquitoes have many offspring and are sexually reproducing, many of the microscopic parasites are not…

The gene drive requires sexual reproduction to spread and produce sterile mosquitoes.

Huh, maybe this will open an opportunity for sex-non-obligate mosquitoes infected by Wolbachia, if those are even produced by their interaction

This may lead to ecosystem crashes, but almost certainly not extinction. The gene drive, here, relies on two major features: high reproductive rate of mosquitoes, and the maintenance of the elements responsible for the drive.

First of all, geographically or reproductively isolated populations will not be affected and will repopulate.

Second, the components of the drive may recombine, creating offspring that will not be affected by the drive, and will out-compete the affected individuals within two generations.

Needless to say, the number of mosquitoes (of this species) will plummet. Perhaps, other insects, including mosquito species, will take advantage of their absence. But given their ubiquity and population sizes, some will survive. Maybe the genetic bottleneck that occurs will make them more susceptible to disease, but that's minor.

First, note that you are conflating Kuhn's talk of theories with talk of disciplines. The introduction of quantum mechanics enhanced the explanatory power of physics; it also sent alternative theories, which proposed too many factors or more poorly explained the world, to the dustbin.

On that note, can physics be called a "mature science," then? To reconcile relativistic and quantum physics—both of which provide limited but very accurate and useful results—would be a paradigm shift; it would require the revision of large parts of one or both theories to be able to combine them without contradiction.

There are core ideas in each of these theories which are not simply revisable: they are connected with too many others. Peripheral ideas are malleable; the precise number of genes isn't very important if we can still explain protein variety (via alternative splicing and other modifications).

This is indeed a massive problem with GWA (genome-wide association), since the studies only see additive variation. Lot of interesting techniques around to look at non-additive variation. Had acquaintances working on drug-drug interactions and the genetics of skin colour; had to find some cool workarounds.

On the other hand, given that height is closely linked to metabolic conditions, and both the transcription/translation rate and functioning of every cellular component relies on metabolism, it doesn't take long for changes to propagate to simple traits like height.

A cool find, but not necessarily surprising: all modern populations have some art in their culture, but modern populations diverged >70 kya. One might imagine that our common ancestors had similar behaviors to all living humans, at least those behaviors which have not been transmitted culturally in recent years (especially when you take long-isolated or unique peoples into account; e.g. Amazonian and Papuan tribes, San hunter-gatherers, etc.).

You cannot see the difference between two acquaintances exchanging goods and a merchant loading his pack, traveling long distances to make profit from trade?

It is the same as between a spat and a war; gathering in a forest and farming. It is in scale and in character, a different beast.

I mean trade as an institution, not just sporadic interpersonal bartering and sharing; more like merchants, trade routes, and the like. Exchange is not unique to man; trade, as such, is.

Trade becomes more worthwhile when communities begin to specialise. When people are nomadic, they cross many lands, and can simply find what they want on the way (obsidian from the mountains, shells by the sea, berries, roots, and game in forests). When people begin to stay in one place, long distance travel for trade becomes more valuable. As soon as agriculture develops, we discover that obsidian shards from deposits in the Caucasus are found thousands of miles away in central Europe. You begin to have towns focusing on a specific resource, or serving a trade route as goods and people criss-cross the land (Jericho, among the earliest known cities, for example, was possibly involved in the trade of salt; few things can grow in the soil near it).

Indeed, it is not a permanent settlement. Suggestions as to its usage generally agree that is was used for several months a year for centuries or millenia, with gatherings of several groups. The monuments of Stonehenge were built by pre-Celtic agriculturalists in Great Britain, not by per-agricultural peoples. Questions remain: why would people aggregate where they did; how would they sustain themselves in a semi-permanent settlement (months at a time) without agricultural products? (Livestock had recently been domesticated by this point, but need to be moved regularly to graze.)

The assumption of its being religious is simple: it isn't shelter, and it has imagery resembling later depictions of religious figures in the region. Religion here is a more general term to encompass the intersection of culture and spirituality. Was it originally non-religious? If so, why aggregate for months to build a structure, before trade was valuable or very necessary?

That depends a lot on which bronze age you're referring to! Different civilisations developed a little differently, particularly where writing is concerned. While in Egypt, writing developed out of central records, it likely developed (slightly earlier) in Mesopotamia as an expansion of a token system, used to ensure counts of livestock, etc.

It should also be noted that Gobekli Tepe was built several millenia before the beginning of the near-eastern Bronze Age. The reason it IS so fascinating is its having been built millenia before agriculture. The systems of religion, administration, and agriculture, did co-develop, but could only do so after the agricultural revolution.

The assumption, as seen in the first set of bullet points, has been: agriculture -> sedentary lifestyle -> large monuments. The discovery of Gobekli Tepe suggests that (in at least some cases), large monuments came first. This is unexpected because there was assumed to be (1) no reason for such monuments before sedentary life (anthropological, i.e. the formation of organised religions was supposed to coincide with the organisation of hierarchies in sedentary life), and (2) not enough manpower to construct such architecture (i.e. nomads wouldn't come together for months to build permanent structures).

The reviewer has interests which are superficially discussed in the book, and even those about which readers may often express interest. I believe the book would have been several times less interesting to me had I not looked into the philosophy of mind and the problems of consciousness and neurobiology. I'd enjoyed the math, the music, the art, the cultural references, and the surreal metaphors; but those weren't the full story—Hofstadter says that the book is not about those things outrightly, albeit towards the latter chapters, iirc. These references, though generally enjoyable, serve as a path towards expressing a strange proposition, however indirectly. Perhaps it was done more clearly in IAASL, but I've not read it. However, personally, the rhetorical flourish with which it was done here was enjoyable.

The encoding used by these sorts of projects avoids 'ATG' (start site), and possibly the Shine-Dalgarno Sequence (where ribosomes attach), if they do it right. The bacterial DNA can mutate, but the likelihood of that mutation creating a viable protein, let alone a dangerous one, is very low. Honestly, since these stored data aren't coding, the chances of them surviving for long, even in a population of bacteria, is low. Bacteria tend to favor smaller genomes, with higher percentage of coding DNA.

True, enzymes cannot change the ∆G. However, there are many cases where an increased binding strength and rate of reactions using the products of the original reaction allow for a shift in equilibrium. Though, it may possibly make the system less profitable. I'm thinking of it from a biochemical perspective more so than a physical one, so take what I have written with a grain of salt. (For examples, you could look into the unprofitable steps of Glycolysis, Glyceraldehyde 3 Phosphate is not spontaneously used on its own, but the ATP used by the reaction ahead of it provides the impulse for the reaction before it. So long as the pathway is productive, they'll survive. (I enjoyed responding to this too much, thanks for the comment, mate))

Oh, I never said that bacteria won't go extinct. Many will. I implied that from the decreased biodiversity part, but I should've made it more clear. Thing is, that because of their population sizes, there will always be outliers in terms of enzymatic activity. Mind, there are certainly limits. Species that survive such an event will be significantly different from their predecessors in the properties of their pathways. Nevertheless, seeing as many phytoplankta have life spans of several days, and that they inhabit large portions of the oceans, the removal of one 'species' of plankton from a region will likely open up the niche for another to inhabit. Life happens to contain enough competition to allow for life past mass extinctions. Different life, sure, but these self-replicating patterns are difficult to cull.

Suffocation really isn't the big issue here. Phytoplankton generate energy via photosynthesis, so as the temperature of water – and this the concentration of gases that are dissolved inside – changes, so too will the organisms' biological fitness. Since they reproduce very rapidly, and their populations enormous, plankton will be able to mutate their enzymes to be more appropriate for the situation (down side from the genomic perspective – decreased biodiversity, especially in species without sexual reproduction).

The more pressing concern is that larger, more slowly-reproducing aquatic organisms will experience significant strain to accommodate their metabolic needs. For many fish, crustaceans, coral, and others: rapid change in dissolved content on the ocean will cause population loss.