221–230 of 344 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
All spices basically too afaik.
Chilis, tobacco and tomatoes are all in the same family (nightshades). And they are all "New World" plants. Which means Europe had to live without them until 1600 or so. If you can call that living.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It definitely is not useful. Your model should at least attempt to approximate reality, not to depart from it by putting effect before the cause. That way lies madness.
It is not a model. It is a description. I'm torn on whether it would be correct to refer to the approach as constituting a sort of analogy. No idea why you think the effect is being put before the cause. I'm hungry so I head to the kitchen. An observer says "he wants to eat". Antibiotics are administered. Only the bacterial cells expressing a certain set of proteins survive. An observer says "the infection wants to b…
I can confidently claim that literally nobody says this because a google search for this exact phrase has only one result, and its this thread.[0]
Really though, I have never met a biologist who thought this way. All of the ones I've met and worked with knew that development of antibiotic resistance is not in any way like a decision process, and they usually understood on an intuitive level that bacterial cultures don't have a goal of developing the capability. Its just something that evolves, which is a distinct category of process.
Talking about it the other anthropomorphic way, like you claim is normal and acceptable, just confuses things; it is the opposite of helpful analogy. Infections don't "want" anything, they are better understood using the details of their actual biomolecular mechanics, which are about as far different from how brains work as could be imagined.
[0]https://www.google.com/search?q=%22the+infection+wants+to+be...
The Wikipedia page ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hallucinogenic_bolete_mushroom ) talks about effects lasting for days, even in animal studies. Some of the historical records claimed effects lasting even longer, from months to years, though this sounds like triggered psychosis. So perhaps not very recreational as might be assumed given the topic.
For anyone vaguely interested in psychoactive/psychedelic drugs, his books and videos are amazing:
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two things: 0) Humans (and even our recent ancestors) eating you are a very recent thing to be concerned about, numbers-wise. By the time our numbers were enough to provide evolutionary pressure, we started farming what we wanted, which kinda breaks the process. Also. most poisons don't effect everything equally, so what might prevent a horse from eating you might taste delicious to us (like the nightshade family) or…
If I understood correctly the argument in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins suggests that thinking about a genome as having a goal which it adapts itself to work towards, is absolutely a useful conceptual model. He makes it very clear that the genome does not actually have intentionality, but also that this is the right way to imagine how organisms might evolve, as though they did have both goals and a plan.
Regarding intentionality being a good practical assumption, I actually don't recall Dawkins recommending that, and it seems doubtful because that can lead to all kinds of fallacious reasoning. I mostly considered Dawkins a data-based neo-darwininian, so it would surprise me that he would recommend that.
Could you recall a quote or chapter from the book that bolsters your point?
edit: typo
Earlier quoted context omitted.
"Days"?!? Hard pass. My experiments with shrooms in college was fun, but I couldn't deal with the 8-12 hours of hallucinating.
Damn. 8-12? For me the peak always lasted 2-3 hours and I was sober again after 7 hours.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I understood correctly the argument in The Selfish Gene, Dawkins suggests that thinking about a genome as having a goal which it adapts itself to work towards, is absolutely a useful conceptual model. He makes it very clear that the genome does not actually have intentionality, but also that this is the right way to imagine how organisms might evolve, as though they did have both goals and a plan.
In The Selfish Gene, Dawkins emphasized that the primary unit of evolution was the individual gene, not whole genomes. The genes were replicators and the genomes were just collections of replicators, and the way the selection pressure math worked out, there was too much diffusion of responsibility for whole genomes that typically evolution could not work coherently at that scale, or at least that's my best recollecti…
Yes, the second word of the title.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I find it hard to believe that evolution is completely blind. The search space that it can explore via mutations is astronomically large. Considering that the experiment is run at planet-scale over billions of years doesn't really save the argument as it takes some specimen years to develop and get feedback on their fitness. It's hard to believe that it's truly just random "bit-flips". I'm not trying to suggest woo h…
Maybe won't be viewed favorably by the HN crowd, but I enjoyed the most recent Bret Weinstein interview on Joe Rogan [0] where Bret talks about his pet theory on natural selection / evolution (maybe 2/3 way through the interview). Basically, the "junk" DNA we have may be "variables" that influence form and morphology, thus giving natural selection a vastly reduced design space to search for viable mutations. E.g. not…
So, about one mushroom species in five is poisonous. Why is the ratio so low, why are there lots of edible ones? Without hard-shelled seeds to spread, why be eaten? And the poisonous ones apparently don't use color as a warning signal, and don't smell all that bad, and some of the poisons have really mild effects, like "gives only some people diarrhea" or "makes a hangover worse". Meanwhile three of the deadliest spe…
The fly agaric, is very poisonous and has a very distinctive red with white dots pattern to warn about its poison. Unfortunately, that pattern looks so pretty that disney and ninetendo decided to use it as their generic mushroom coloring. So, if you are hiking with your kids, and they see a pretty mushroom just like in cartoons, don't let them touch it. If there are enough poisonous mushrooms, it is possible that mos…
Just wanted to note that these phenomena are important enough in the study of mimicry in biology to have earned their own names:
Müllerian mimicry is when two species who are similarly well defended (foul tasting, toxic or otherwise noxious to eat) converge in appearance to mimic each other's honest warning signals.
Batesian mimicry is when a harmless or palatable species evolves to mimic a harmful, toxic, or otherwise defended species.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its the same evolutionary patterns that plants went through. Most mushrooms are edible because their spores can pass through the digestive system of most animals, thus allowing them to spread. Other mushrooms developed toxins to protect their fruiting bodies - often the biggest threat isn't larger animals, but insects. Toxins that are neurotoxic to insect nervous systems, happen to cause mostly "harmless" psychedelic…
It may be worth mentioning, for anyone who didn't know this already; that the fruiting body, which is what your normally see, isn't most of the mushroom. The rest of it is in the ground, or in something else like a dead log or live tree. So the organism can afford the fruiting body to be eaten, if it serves the purpose of spreading spores.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It definitely is not useful. Your model should at least attempt to approximate reality, not to depart from it by putting effect before the cause. That way lies madness.
It is not a model. It is a description. I'm torn on whether it would be correct to refer to the approach as constituting a sort of analogy. No idea why you think the effect is being put before the cause. I'm hungry so I head to the kitchen. An observer says "he wants to eat". Antibiotics are administered. Only the bacterial cells expressing a certain set of proteins survive. An observer says "the infection wants to b…
That's complete bs. Infections don't want anything. You're stuck in a loop of your own making, the only way out is to backtrack, not to keep on digging.
These lines of thinking were discredited many years ago and since then the field has seen enormous progress, anthropomorphize all you want but reality does not care.