91–100 of 306 posts
Scientists Surprised to Find No Two Neurons Are Genetically Alike https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/scientists-surpri...
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It was difficult and I wouldn't recommend it for newcomers.
Weren't you a (very depressed) newcomer yourself? Don't take it bad but someone in an already bad mental state taking 2g more than what McKenna considered a god dose is pretty ... irresponsible (?)
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Probably an annoying question... do you have an opinion on the mathetical unlikelyhood of evolution happening?
How can evolution not happen in a system where you have random mutation and some selection pressure?
- cambrian explosion of life is seen as unlikely given that changing random genes or dna mutations has such a low success rate in generating new life, that an explosion of life happening all at once seems out of step with the math.
- we don't know how to create life at all. adding up bits and pieces of molecules into cells and onwards can be screwed up at any point in the process and has to start over from square one to succeed. people in the lab can't even get it right and they can write down their progress and adapt unlike nature.
- self-organizing molecules and natural forces guided towards life haven't been seen yet to exist in nature, it has no expressed intent or will to self-organize into life. randomness and infinite time just isn't enough
I don't see the evidence that local minima and maxima changes in body shape, size, ect, act to completely change the species of an animal.
There's a long debate running from the 1980s on this stuff, it's just getting views on youtube more recently and becoming properly structured and scientific arguments instead of just conjecture. The stephen meyer 'intelligent design', david berlinski 'doubting darwin', ect arguments. The hoover institute did a piece a few years ago on youtube.
James Tour has a great series on origin of life that shows in the hard tasks of applying biology we are way off knowing how any of this works. https://youtu.be/zU7Lww-sBPg
The counter arguments to stephen meyer's idea a 'heirarchy of information guides dna changes' seem to be good conjectures and nobody really has the next step in the narrative tied down yet. Some say the cell is the powerhouse of life and sidestep the necessity of explaining dna changes. Some stick to the evolved life like Lee Cronin on the Unbelievable podcast.
Just curious if anyone has a stab in the dark for the next step in the narrative. A heirarchy seems like a red herring to me, cause it just leads back to an energy based universe that produces information, but I'm not qualified enough to have a say.
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> The course was so much about WHAT and never about WHY. Biology is pretty notorious for most stuff being arbitrary. There is no model. People who say there's a model, they're talking about something else - sometimes, a literal Platonic ideal of biology, that makes for an appealing pop science course, but not knowledge that like, helps you design experiments or better use drugs or whatever. From the article: > It was…
> Watson and Crick were not math savants. They did not have natural gifts. They had the 'natural gift' of picking up on the clues hinting that DNA, rather than protein, was central to the mechanism of biological inheritance. It is the natural gift of being able to identify the key features of the forest despite the preponderance of obfuscating trunks and branches. It is the gift of seeing some sort of order behind ci…
-Math/CS: inherently better at abstracting & are "proof" centric.
-Life Sciences: inherently better at observing then reasoning and are "argument" centric.
Coming from the CS side this is not a marriage made in heaven as opinions don't matter by design.
Inspiring. His message doesn't apply only to biology. Several subjects in schools are teached in an uninteresting manner that doesn't captivate the students, and so they don't learn, and so they rather hate school. Memorization of the wrong type of things for the sake of tests should end. We should focus more on what sticks with people.
Of course, one of the things that ultimately lead to me doing software, was that it was something I could do "real" work in my own home without a ton of extremely expensive equipment not available to the general public, and immerse myself in it, which is more than I can say for most of the things that have captured my interest.
Also wanted to mention the differentiation of cells in an embryo (how the f*ck can that even work ... not in a lab, but our own bodies?!) - it's explained really well in "The Gene" (hormonal gradients in the embryonic fluid). Author also mentions this.
Natural selection ... is our DNA some kind of cosmic RAM memory that stores all this information over millions of years?
The other day I went to get my hearing checked and the doc explained to me how sound is captured by the ear drum and transferred to the brain through a few bones and along hairs & nerves. It's basic high school stuff but if you take a step back and think about how this mechanism makes us perceive the beauty of our favorite sounds (music, hearing our children laugh), how complex it must actually be and that this ... "evolved", out of a cosmic chemical soup, it's just incomprehensible.
Biology, genes, brains are nothing short of amazing. I'm not a religious person but if something points to the existence of a god then you'll find it in biology.
But most of all, you're being kept out of the house so that both your parents can go back to jobs they don't like.
This is a great article. I had the same realization some years back - this stuff is amazing! Why didn't I get into it when I had a class on it? Of course, it's easy to rail on high school classes for failing to dazzle; maybe it was just my mind not quite being ready or willing to learn. But damn, biology is amazing. How does it all work??!!
I also suspect that part of this is that software engineers, realizing that they can now purchase things like lab equipment and bacteria cultures, are now free to fund their own learning in their own idiosyncratic way (much like they learned to program), and not worry about burning money on something that doesn't pan out.
Between this, a new confidence that the world is understandable and... debuggable, and the fact they can finance their own experiments, gives a shift in perspective that wasn't available when they were in high school.
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Weren't you a (very depressed) newcomer yourself? Don't take it bad but someone in an already bad mental state taking 2g more than what McKenna considered a god dose is pretty ... irresponsible (?)
I was depressed, yes. But 7g wasn't my first experience with psilocybin. I was just saying that generally, I would not recommend 7g for newcomers. As for being irresponsible, I don't know man. I grew a Schedule 1 drug and then consumed it on my own terms in a way that affected no one but myself in a positive manner. There were risks involved, but when weighed against how I felt at the time, I took the chance.