Slashdot Mirror
Freeman Dyson On Open Source Biology
kripkenstein sends us an article by Freeman Dyson in the NY Review of Books, in which the eminent physicist and big thinker takes on the possible end to the Darwinian era of speciation that has endured 3 billion years on this planet. He discusses the history and future of biology in terms that many in this community will find familiar: "[We can speculate about] a golden age... when horizontal gene transfer was universal and separate species did not yet exist. Life was then a community of cells of various kinds, sharing their genetic information... Evolution could be rapid... But then, one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share... [But] now, as Homo sapiens domesticates the new biotechnology, we are reviving the ancient... practice of horizontal gene transfer, moving genes easily from microbes to plants and animals, blurring the boundaries between species. We are moving rapidly into the post-Darwinian era, when... the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented."
If you think that penis-enlargement spam is bad now, just imagine when how bad it will be once "open source biology" takes off
This analogy is flawed. The Open Source community creates code from ideas to create programs and systems. In the Biohacking world, genetic code is copied from one system into another system (with fingers crossed) in the hopes that something good happens. Programmers tend to understand the systems on which their code runs. The biohackers struggle with how their code will impact their systems in terms of "gene expression" and generational interactions.
Sure biohackers are creating new organisms, but it isn't the same as creating it from scratch and understanding both the system and how the system interact with other systems. Maybe I am too critical of the genehackers, but I fear that genehacking without deep understanding is going to end badly.
Just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
Ahhhh, I love when these discussions that come up. The "Luddites" come out against this, claiming we are playing god. The "Technophiles" come out and tell us how we must embrace this. Both sides yell so loud that the moderate (and correct) "proceed with caution" crowd gets drowned out.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
Apparently the mere mention of "open source" whether or not the topic at hand has ANYTHING to do with it AT ALL is enough to get an article on the front page of slashdot. Good to know, just wait until you hear about my plan for Open Source Porn(tm).
Yes, let us humans become DNA equal with the masses of bacteria! They outnumber Slashdot posters, and under one life, one vote - they will demand and get equality!
He also denies human induced global warming. Great scientists are, of course, always great scientists... But, I think it is time for Freeman to go back to church.
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This communal hippy bullshit does not belong on Slashdot.
Actually it does, but perhaps you don't.
Because those of us engaged in genetic programming research find it relevant to stuff that matters to us.
Gene sharing must be exercised with caution. We wouldn't want those self-sterilizing genes that are in Monsanto's seeds ending up in biosphere at large, would we?
A-Bomb
Quote from the linked article: "That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share."
Bill Gates is one of the most disliked people on earth for his refusal to finish his products, and his reliance on adversarial business tactics.
See Microsoft Memories. See Another Bill Gates Meets Satan story.
Several years ago, a short piece in The Atlantic Monthly, a respected U.S. magazine, compared Bill Gates to Satan. I'm guessing Satan found that quite annoying.
A rich person can give a lot of money to charity to try to give people a better impression of himself. With Bill Gates, that isn't working.
So much for ascension...
At its heart, the science of Information Technology will grow and consume all other industries. Biology is a form of information technology - the information contained in the DNA/RNA and mitochondria define the outcome of the biological organism - they are the software that comprises us.
It's not written in a language easily understood by humanity, but once the concepts of how things really work together are clearly understood, it won't be long before a high-level language can be developed to define the requested behavior and structures can then be "compiled" into an organism.
This is the fusion of biology and information technology commonly called the technology singularity and which, I'm convinced, is happening all around us.
Slow at first, growing towards advancing rapidly. I see it in software, networks, information technology, science, medical technology, and manufacturing. It's amazing, exciting, and thrillingly dangerous all at once. I honestly thing that we'll either pull it off, and move beyond evolution to create an entirely new form of life, or destroy ourselves and regress to bacteria, rodents, insect life.
Either way, we aren't in Kansas, anymore.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
This "Freeman" fellow doesn't inspire Gordon Freeman-like expirements, we should be ok.
"Free software" is a matter of liberty, not price.
He seems to think that genes exist to serve species.
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What.
The.
Fuck.
I thought we were supposed to stick with bad car analogies.
This summary would leave any biologist apoplectic for its flaws:
1. Sex IS sharing. It's the ultimate cross-fertilization (literally). Almost all organisms, including humans, openly and enthusiastically share DNA via this mechanism.
2. Horizontal gene flow is terribly terribly limiting in its utility. Once organism becomes more complex, you can't plug-and-play like you can with a bacteria.
3. Horizontal gene flow does not foster rapid evolution in the same way that sex does. Picking up snippets and fragments from another organism is not as powerful as cross-over in sex (which does a far far better job of doing a controlled recombination of complete plans)
3. No organism in the world can resist "sharing its genome." If pirating the DNA of others was really that great an idea, then the human digestive track would contain tools for pulling DNA out of hamburger. It really would not take much cellular machinery to engulf a target cell, deconstruct it, and co-opt its DNA. The fact that horizontal gene transfer doesn't occur outside of simple organism should be an strong evidence of its limitations.
As much as I enjoy Freeman Dyson, he really lost me on this one.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
These are the words of the idealistic researcher, before their work is bought out by the forces of concentrated capital power, as usual.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
but, excuse me, this seems to me the dumbest thing I read in along time: ...the rules of Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. Then the evolution of life will once again be communal, as it was in the good old days before separate species and intellectual property were invented."
What the fuck is he talking about? The whole 'idea' of different lifeforms is about 'us and them'. Evolution is about selfishness, godamnit. There is no, and never was, 'communal' evolution of life. A global soup of bacteria all happily sharing genes is supposed to be the golden age of life? Sorry, this man seems senile.
That's funny, which is how I assume he meant it. As a serious statement, it would be totally laughable except that a few people who know even less are going to say, "Ooh, Freeman Dyson. Must be good."
Like the commenter above said, biologists are just mixing and matching from organisms and hoping for the best. A simple regulatory cascade involves around sixty (60) proteins, and biologists have only the vaguest ideas about how to manipulate the process. And that's a big step up from even three years ago. Really. They have barely a clue. As a biologist who's taught college for decades, really, it's true.
Life was never "open source" in Dyson's sense. Horizontal gene transfer is always a rare event, even more so in multicellular eukaryotic organisms like, say, vertebrates or trees. Natural selection has always and will always operate because in order to survive, creatures have to be able to produce lots of offspring. However, there's not enough resources for all of them, and the ones less able to use the resources die. This would be true of any life, anywhere. It's not limited to Earth. Kind of like the speed of light is the same everywhere, and gravity operates everywhere.
Sure, people will get better and better at genetic engineering and biotech. And a good thing, too. Paralysis will become a thing of the past, as will blindness and failing organs. That's great. But it's not going to change life itself.
"The biohackers struggle with how their code will impact their systems in terms of "gene expression" and generational interactions. "
Well, nowadays, with huge operating systems like Vista, nobody knows anymore what impact their code will have, from security breaches to DoS to unexplainable bugs. Couple this with bugs in the processors themselves (Intel, anyone?), with constant vendor patches, and you have developers that struggle with how their code will impact their systems in terms of features and interactions.
"Programmers tend to understand the systems on which their code runs."
Those days of happy mathematical proofs on computing systems in paper are gone. Today we have the sad ordeal of testing a system like if it was small modification in a mind-boggling complex beast created randomly. A simple sorting algorithm implementation can fail without any sensible reason, because of an obscure detail of the implementation of your processor or operating system.
..the nine assed monkey?
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
>> This analogy is flawed. The Open Source community creates code from ideas to create programs and systems. In the Biohacking world, genetic code is copied from one system into another system
I don't find it flawed at all.
Free and Open Source Software is concerned not with the creation of a bag of abstract ideas, but a bag (or pyramid) of software components of various kinds (libraries, classes, utilities, etc). Those components are copied around from one application to another very freely, and not restricted to just one type of application or system (analoguous to "species"). This is very close indeed to horizontal gene transfer, cutting them out of one sequence and splicing them into another.
The analogy may be little more than a coincidence of course, so one shouldn't read too much into it, but I think that Dyson uses it quite accurately. Moreover, the equivalent to horizontal gene transfer pervades every single one of our fields of technology, so I think it's true to say that speciation is totally dead in all activities of Man, and biotech is just one example.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Until you supply the appropriate credentials and/or published journal articles proving your authority in the field, I'll take your comments with the same grain of salt.Ugh. Platitudinous drivel. What the heck is a great scientist? Someone who agrees with the scientific establishment on every single issue? So, in your opinion, can we now state that Sir Isaac Newton was not a great scientist because of his prodigious theological publications?
I would submit that, even though he were wrong on the one issue, he's still smarter than you in his chosen field of study. And means you should probably listen.
I also disagree with Dyson's theories. I just take strong exception to the GP's hand-waving dismissal of them.
Forget about Freeman!
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Uh, yes because he said fag instead of homosexual. And no, it's not essentially true. Homosexuals aren't "meant" not to reproduce. They just currently don't/can't do so directly with their partners.
In Soviet Russia, your DNA open sources YOU!
He also denies human induced global warming.
That's no surprise at all, because all honest scientists are honour-bound to adhere to the scientific method, which has an extremely strict M.O.. That M.O. prevents them from making handwaving interpretations and supporting what SEEMS to be the right answer, but is in fact not yet substantiated by current GCMs. Short-term predictions mean nothing when they're just ripples on a widely varying curve.
As soon as the GCMs actually start predicting (accurately) the very pronounced 100ky cycles of climate change over the last million years or so, and also explain accurately how the coldest epocs in the history of the planet happened to coincide with CO2 levels many dozens of times greater than the current ones, that's when honest scientists like Dyson will be able to express agreement with the mass hysteria. But not before.
Honest science isn't about being popular.
That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated itself from the community and refused to share...
I'm not a particular fan of Microsoft business practices, but come on, when are people going to give up this crap. Sure, Bill Gates is the richest man on the planet, but he has also given away more money to philanthropy than any man on the planet. I'm sure personality-wise he's just as much an asshole as Steve Jobs in person, but one thing he is NOT is stingy.
sounds a little too religious for me...
In essence it is true, if it isn't true, it is a genetic abnormality and something is wrong with their genes. I believe it is more likely that their genes are normal. Looking at different facts it is easy to come close to this conclusion. Such as homosexuality among males being common in species with overpopulation problems. Or the fact that with each following male born from the same mother in humans there is an increased trend toward homosexuality.
No it isn't necessarily a kill switch, It is more likely a form of population control. Homosexuality will likely increase as our population density increases.
Are you kidding, once they figure out how to prevent marijuana from creating a noticeable smell they are gonna be all over this.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
As soon as the GCMs actually start predicting (accurately) the very pronounced 100ky cycles of climate change over the last million years or so
Done.
and also explain accurately how the coldest epocs in the history of the planet happened to coincide with CO2 levels many dozens of times greater than the current ones
Since that didn't happen, no explanation is required. CO2 levels are positively associated with warming climate throughout the paleoclimate record.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
I don't want to become a Zerg! NO WAY! Keep your genes and I keep mine!
Still doesn't follow. Lots of things may be retained because they prove advantageous evolutionarily. That doesn't mean they are "meant" for anything or restricted from then on.
Sounds a little like NGE, but whats this? No giant robots? The future is grim indeed.
Dyson's moaning about rural poverty misses the point, witness http://www.endofsuburbia.com/ "Who's going to pay for the food stamps" for the suburban-poor, that's OUR problem ! Once upon a time there were peasants with pigs and chickens or rice, whatever. The Chinese government then said to the peasant, look, come to the city, we will give you FREE ROOM AND BOARD in a dorm within bicycle-range of work, for the few years that your are optimally productive, and at the end of this time you can take your few hundred bucks in savings and go back to your pigs and chickens. ( True Story ) In other words "Rural Poverty" is better spelled "Reservation Utility". Pigs and chickens may not seem exciting, but physicist-wise while exciting sex and gambling does NOT actually generate food or goods, they are analogous to "cooling the room by opening the refrigerator door", as The West must soon learn.
>on the possible end to the Darwinian era
:-)
When we can't tell the difference between fake blonde and real blonde and real boobs and fake boobs, won't the genes we like fade away ?
More like free as in single.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
> one evil day, a cell resembling a primitive bacterium happened to find itself one jump ahead of
> its neighbors in efficiency. That cell, anticipating Bill Gates by three billion years, separated
> itself from the community and refused to share.
In all honesty I would have to say that that cell hasn't changed much between then and now.
Yes, I guess I am in a grumpy mood. WHAT'S IT TO YA?
> As soon as the GCMs actually start predicting (accurately) the very pronounced 100ky cycles of climate change over the last million years or so
... that's funny.
Done.
Not even close. The latest GCMs barely predict a 5-6 degC change from the largest acknowledged non-terrestrial effects, primarily direct insolation and orbital variance. They don't model cloud formation except in the most primitive of manners (no surprise, since we don't understand the dynamics yet), they don't model the immense changes there have been in oceanic biota (kind of funny, when you consider that that's the prime vehicle of transport in the carbon cycle, yet is ignored), and they don't yield glaciations every 100ky at all.
So no, sorry, the GCMs are far too primitive at this stage to be considered models of climate akin to theoretical models in the scientific method. That day will come, but it's decades away.
> and also explain accurately how the coldest epocs in the history of the planet happened to coincide with CO2 levels many dozens of times greater than the current ones
Since that didn't happen, no explanation is required. CO2 levels are positively associated with warming climate throughout the paleoclimate record.
Haha, "didn't happen"
Rewriting history just because it doesn't match your worldview seems to be the done thing these days in the climate debate. Fortunately, it matters little to science, because the data continues to say otherwise.
Temperature and CO2 Variation over the Last 600 Million Years.
High levels of CO2 have been the norm in our paleoclimate, not the exception. In the last 600 million years of Earth's history only the Carboniferous Period and our present Quaternary Period have seen CO2 levels less than 400 ppm. And the Late Ordovician Period was an extremely severe Ice Age while at the same time CO2 concentrations then were in excess of 4000 ppm, over a dozen times higher than today.
It all depends on the definition of "meant". There is some evidence that homosexuality is an advantage - the basic idea is that homosexual aunties or uncles improve the odds of offspring surviving. Even though there is not a direct transfer of genes, increasing the survival odds of people who carry some of your genes improves the survival odds from the gene's point of view.
It could be argued (as the original post did) that homosexuality is a kill-switch in some sense. From a biological programming point of view - it is, as it encodes for a behaviour that stops the genes from reproducing directly. Of course, many people would be arguing about "meant" as an ethical or moral judgment. And there, all bets are off, a rational person could argue that if we start designing our own life that its time for us to define morality ourselves rather than $BOOK of $DIETY. But this being slashdot that is what most of the discussion will follow...
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
HGT is common outside of biotechnology. Quite surely it happens much more often than a new engineered species is being released. Our symbiotic intestinal bacteria are remarkablz similar to us. Also, look at any current phylogenetic tree of the plant kingdom. Hint: It's not a "tree".
...that intelligence is pathological in a species. I suggest it always leads to self-extinction. Considering that we are uniquely intelligent, perhaps there are actually genetic mechanisms checking the evolution of intelligence and we somehow got off the reservation. Anyway, once again, nature is not an idiot, and if nature, evolution, speciated, she did it early and there is most probably a very good reason for it. Taking genes and sticking them into our own genome in a sort of all-genes-are-equal bio-communism is most likely going to destroy us.
E Proelio Veritas.
Come on, the original post was "fags are meant to die with never reproducing." What sense do you think "meant" was ACTUALLY being used in that case? Aren't the defenses of this statement as "essentially true" getting a little elaborately silly?
If the sense is evolution, then there isn't a coherent sense of "meant" at all, because there is no "meant" in evolution, just past advantage in past environments.
So no, sorry, the GCMs are far too primitive at this stage to be considered models of climate akin to theoretical models in the scientific method.
Look, I just don't think you know what you're talking about. The computational models accurately predict every feature of the paleoclimate record, including the Medieval Warm Period.
Fortunately, it matters little to science, because the data continues to say otherwise.
That's just nonsense. Your graph doesn't have nearly enough data to make that association.
We know from the ice core data - for 160,000 years - that increased CO2 levels are associated with warming, not cooling.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
That's completely false. Link a reference.
I had the pleasure of seeing Freeman Dyson speaking on this subject a few years back (green vs gray, horizontal gene transfer, etc).
He digressed to address the subject of global warming, which he feels is very real -and- something to look forward to. He stresses that during times warmer, the Sahara was a fertile plain with plenty of water. He acknowledges the tremendous economic cost of global warming, and still finds it acceptable as it will be a great equalizing factor. Now, he does not deny that humanity is contributing to global warming, he merely states he is not sure to what extent we are responsible for it. Any serious scientist will tell you the same.
here's one:
http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/abstra ct/153/1/27
I gave you a graphic of approximate temperature and CO2 variation over 600m years, which shows absolutely no relationship whatsoever between their levels. Indeed quite often the curves move in opposite directions.
And yet, you persist with the total fantasy of "increased CO2 levels are associated with warming", even when faced with disparities of such a huge scale. It's quite funny.
Like a lot of scientists though, I have no interest in correcting you --- you would have found out the above by yourself, if you had any interest in understanding rather than in following blindly what others say. The facts will become plain in due course all by themselves, once the current public fad is over.
Does a golden age of horizontal gene sharing require single cell organisms, like it was in the past? I perfer not to find out the hard way.
"Open Source sharing will be extended from the exchange of software to the exchange of genes. "
Doctors have been fixing the open sores from the exchange of genetic material for decades with a dose of penicillin.
Of course, its a different story if you caught "Hong Kong Dong."
Seriously, most "sharing of genes" in nature has always been under a BSD, not GPL, license, in the sense that the recipient is free to use the genetic material any way they wish, without any obligation of giving a copy of the modified genetic material (the offspring) to any contributor.
First impression on actually reading the ENCODE paper follows, which also benefits from conversations with Dr. George Hockney.
This is a paradigm smashing paper in the current issue of Science, about the ENCODE project.
Bottom line: in the Human Genome at least (and other projects show that this applies to Drosophila melanogaster as well), there are (for the most part) NO SUCH THINGS AS GENES.
The word is still used, with a mass of epicycles encrusted onto the concept so that it takes a grad school semester to even define "gene" any more.
But just as we don't know what holds the galaxy together (i.e. the epicycle "dark matter") we don't know what holds the genome together (i.e. the epicycle "heterochromatin").
The model that came from Morgan et al at Caltech in the 1930s was: one gene, one enzyme.
That is, the chromosome is mostly DNA, and certain substrings of the DNA code for proteins. They evolve by Natural Selection. Some other parts regulate. The rest is non-functional, noise, or junk, or outside the paradigm, and never gets transcribed to RNA nor has function nor is selected.
The actual DATA using the latest methodologies in combination, applied to 1% of the human genomne, partly bits we know, partly bits chosen at random, is, to the contrary:
2% to 4% is crudely akin to the "genes" and "pseudogenes." More than half is functional, more than half ends up copied to RNA, the RNA has some dynamic interaction with other RNA and protein in ways we don't know, much of the functional stuff (once called genes) are selectively neutral (or only very weakly subject to natural selection). Things we don't understand are sometimes evolving by natural selection. Functional things are sometimes not strongly conserved. Strongly conserved things are sometimes not functional. There is large-scale structure correlated with when in the reproductive cycle the cell is. The performers formerly known as genes are broken into pieces, scattered, scrambled, started and stopped by things far away on the chromosome in both directions, and overlapping.
There is no "vacuum." There is no "gene." The words do more harm than good.
The truth is out there.
I exaggerate for rhetorical reasons, but this really is revolutionary work I'm reading.
In the sense of Mendel, there are such things as mathematical rules about discrete units of inheritance. But, you're right, the last straightforward link to DNA is broken.
To recapitulate (with vast oversimplification) the history of the key
concept [reference Nature, 25 May 2006, p.400]:
1860s: Gregor Mendel, Austrian monk, plays with pea plants, fudges data, publishes in most obscure place (slowing down recognition): basic rules of inheritance defined; traits determined by deterministic
units passed from one generation to the next, God knows how.
1909: Wilhelm Johanssen, Danish botanist, coins word "gene" for the unit associated with an inherited trait, admitting that the physical basis is unknown.
1930: Thomas Morgan (enjoying the monastic atmosphere of Caltech) analyzes why time flies like an arrow but fruit flies like a banana, and concludes that genes sit on chromosomes, an idea popularized as beads on strings. Turns out as accurate as image of atoms being electron planets orbiting sun nuclei.
1941: George Beadle and Edward Tatum launch the model that one gene makes one enzyme. The classical enzymology yields a PhD for Isaac Asimov, and (when seen through the not-yet-named fields of Artificial Life and Nanotechnology) a neither granted nor denied PhD for Jonathan Vos Post.
1944: Oswald Avery, Colin Macleod, and Maclyn McCarty show that genes are made of DNA. This raises more questions than it answers.
1953: James Watson and Francis Crick find the golden spiral stairway to heaven, publishing the structure of DNA in a sneaky race against Pauling (they ply Pauling, Jr., with sherry to find out what Linus,
Sr., is up to) and denying the essential contribution of Rosalyn Fr
I gave you a graphic of approximate temperature and CO2 variation over 600m years, which shows absolutely no relationship whatsoever between their levels. Indeed quite often the curves move in opposite directions.
- years.gif
You gave me an unsourced curve that looked like your 5-year-old scrawled it in MS Paint. Here's a curve that's a lot more precise:
http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/gene/peakoil/co2-400k
I trust the correlation doesn't have to be pointed out. Back to your curve - did you even look at it? Did you think it was just coincidences that those cool periods fall right on geological boundaries?
Since those boundaries tend to be associated with events - like, you know, nuclear-winter effects following asteroid impacts - did it occur to you that trying to develop a correlation between temp and CO2 at that gross scale was probably bullshit?
No, I guess not. Which is how I know you haven't got the slightest idea what you're talking about.
And yet, you persist with the total fantasy of "increased CO2 levels are associated with warming", even when faced with disparities of such a huge scale.
It's physically impossible for elevated CO2 not to be associated with warming in the absence of any other influence. If CO2 weren't a greenhouse gas life would be impossible on Planet Earth. Plus we know that CO2 absorbs in the infrared spectrum, that can be tested in the lab.
We know that it's not possible for human industry to dump millions of tons of CO2 - to the tune of 2-3 Pinatubo eruptions every year - into the atmosphere without it raising atmospheric CO2 concentration. To suggest otherwise is akin to suggesting that magic fairies show up to scrub the atmosphere.
Warming on the Earth is like filling a pot with holes in the bottom. Whether or not the pot fills to the brim is a question of how much water goes in versus how much spills out. If now the level of water is stable (because input equals output) but we do something to plug a few of the holes, it's obvious that the pot will begin to fill in the future.
That's basic logic. Unless you're arguing that magic is at work in the Earth's atmosphere, the fact that we don't know everything there is to know about the Earth's atmosphere is irrelevant - we know enough to understand the basic consequences of increasing the atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases. (It's the exact same thing that happened in the past - the climate warms.)
you would have found out the above by yourself, if you had any interest in understanding rather than in following blindly what others say.
If you had any interest in finding out for yourself, you would have realized by now how specious your global warming denial really is. Although I suspect you do know, since you've chosen to post these remarks as an anonymous coward.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!
one piece of the fluffburb of a kind. So many words, so zero content...
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
If you're a cactus in an arid desert you really don't want your offspring to include "water-loving" genes from the plants in the oasis next door. And visa-versa.
Likewise, if you're working on the Linux kernel, you don't want your next release to include half the functionality of Open Office. And visa-versa.
The original article is very amusing science fiction.
Reduce, reuse, cycle
First Reference.
Second reference doesn't have a link and can be looked up probably at a university.
Blanchard and Klassen (1997); Birth order and sibling sex ratio in homosexual versus heterosexual males and females. Review of Sex Research, Vol. 8
Being copied to RNA makes it functional by definition.
RNA interactions have been studied since the formation of the operon theory by Monod, Jacob et al. This is very bizarrely missing from your history, since it is a fundamental part of the central dogma of molbio, in that it explains how genes expression can be regulated without making heritable changes to chromatin.
Your timeline seems to favour the alternative splicing hypothesis, which is orthogonal to the central dogma. AS simply invalidates the one to one mapping between chromosomal subunits and specific proteins. This is very similar to operon theory, and is consistent with the central dogma, in that AS does not make heritable changes to the chromatin itself.
Much more interesting work in potential non-Mandelian heritability is being done by Lundqvist et al., although so far all the HSP and chaperonin are similar to operon theory, in that changes are not carried back into chromatin, even if it turns out that mitosis does not necessarily "reset" the daughter cells to the state that the heritable material would produce in an ideal stress-free environment.
Where is this evidence of the "break" of the theory that DNA is the fundamental carrier of discrete units of inheritance in cellular (including paracellular endosymbiont organelle) life?
Where is the evidence of endogenous mutations to chromatin by cellular life?
So far, the apparent examples of "two-way-ism" have all involved exogenous mutators like viruses and prions, and insufficent shock repsonses to other environmental mutagens.
Lolle, ea (2005) and Rassoulzadegan ea (2006) are interesting but not compelling. The former in particular is the most concrete raising of a two-way-ist hypothesis fully grounded in molecular biology in recent years. Susan Lolle's hypothesis is much finer than that proposed in the paper's abstract. In particular, the "hidden selector" argument is that a set of unfavourable dominant-gene traits are passed on to offspring with a substantial bias towards towards the favourable recessive trait. Robert Pruitt, one of the coauthors, has said several times that the molecular mechanics are not understood, and may be explainable wholly within the central dogma of molecular biologiy, without resorting to any of the proposed proximity interaction extensions to the CD model.
Also, I think you (or whoever wrote all that) fundamentally misunderstand the ENCODE May 2007 papers -- it is much more appropriate to categorize it as exposing a much larger than expected amount of transcription, with regulators selectively preferring some of them. This fits nicely with Lundqvist et al.'s recent work, and does not in any way challenge the central dogma. ENCODE does not support the argument that lots of transcription with surprising lengths and starting points invalidates one-way-ism.
In fact, if anything, ENCODE's work on histone-DNA marshalling is generally supportive of the central dogma.
Finally, I think that drawing analogies to orbital mechanics ("epicycles") and quantum mechanics ("vacuum") are rhetorical devices unworthy of someone with a legitimate argument grounded in molbio mechanics. You also have it backwards: when faced with difficulty in tracing the presence of a sequence of base pairs to its expression (or non-expression), favouring either a two-way hypothesis or a DNA+-hypothesis over a mediator hypothesis conformant with the central dogma is by far the mo
What's more, correlation doesn't imply causation. To anyone with any clue about climatology, your curve says exactly the same thing as the good ol' Keeling Curve has always said, that with increased warmth you get increased biological activity and the net result of that is always short-term increase in atmospheric CO2 from decay at season end followed by long term increase in CO2 from oceanic upwelling once it pops out of the carbon cycle. There is nothing new there at all
If it's causal, you need to see its contributory effect, ALWAYS. Over 600m years, you don't see any such effect. I'm sorry, but you can't wish raw scientific data away just like that, nor handwave away everything because of magic geological boundaries. CO2 must continue to be a causal effect as a contribution even across geological discontinuities and mass cosmic mishaps. Yet it's not.
You just don't want to accept it. And that's why real scientists no longer give the GW zealots (both pseudo-scientists and simple wanabes like you) the time of day. You'll see, in due course. In the meantime, you'd better find a reason why where is no correlation between CO2 and temperature even in the periods of calm between "geological boundaries".
It'll be fun to see you try. You just can't wish those 600myr away.
[Hint: the world is not a simple illuminated test tube, in which you just add CO2 and the temperature inside raises a fraction. The climate depends on numerous factors that vastly outweight that tiny contribution from CO2, and if it were not so then we would not have had a collosal ice age at the end of the Ordovician when CO2 was well over 4000ppm. CO2 is secondary, and is utterly swamped by the effect of cloud cover, biotic activity over the carbon cycle, changing albedo, and energy dispersal from the various circulatory systems.]
By the way, the attribution was on the 600myr graphic, but of course you can't see what you don't want to see.
In answer to a graphic covering 600 million years which shows no correlation between CO2 and temperature at all, you reply with a selected 400kyr slot (far less than 1/1000th of the period) in which there is good correlation .... and that's supposed to be an effective response?
...which drives warming ahead of the insolation increase.
Uh, yeah, it is. It was completely effective. That's why you've come back with absolutely nothing at all.
It's just an extremely selective pick.
So select any time period you'd like. Show me a graph for that time period that isn't, like your is, so artificially smoothed. Prove to me that there's no correlation at all, at any scale.
What you're trying to do is akin to trying to show me that there's no dog in my backyard with Google Earth. Sure, you can't see the dog - you can't even see my backyard!
Show me something with finer resolution. I showed you, and you were completely wrong as far as I can tell. If you're not familiar with the idea of resolution of data then you simply don't have the requisite training to even deal with this issue.
What's more, correlation doesn't imply causation.
So, you're disputing the laws of physics? You're of the impression that a century of physical chemistry data on the absorption spectrum of CO2 and other gases are completely wrong?
What's your evidence for that?
To anyone with any clue about climatology, your curve says exactly the same thing as the good ol' Keeling Curve has always said, that with increased warmth you get increased biological activity and the net result of that is always short-term increase in atmospheric CO2 from decay at season end followed by long term increase in CO2 from oceanic upwelling once it pops out of the carbon cycle.
Thus, confirming the action of greenhouse gases - already known from physical experiments.
Over 600m years, you don't see any such effect.
At a data resolution designed to obliterate any such connection? Obviously you don't see what your "graph" was drawn to conceal.
The climate depends on numerous factors that vastly outweight that tiny contribution from CO2, and if it were not so then we would not have had a collosal ice age at the end of the Ordovician when CO2 was well over 4000ppm.
I just don't understand what you're trying to say, here. It's well-understood among climatologists that the ice age at the end of the Ordovician period was triggered by a catastrophic decline in CO2 levels.
Which would seem to completely contradict what you're saying. We did have an ice age at the end of the Ordovician, and it was triggered by a change in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.
And that's why real scientists no longer give the GW zealots (both pseudo-scientists and simple wanabes like you) the time of day. You'll see, in due course.
Good luck with that, Karnack. I'll put that prediction with the guys who said evolution was about to be disproved.
In the meantime, you'd better find a reason why where is no correlation between CO2 and temperature even in the periods of calm between "geological boundaries".
I just showed you the correlation. Your only response was to complain that the data was too accurate. I appreciate the laugh, anyway. Your denial act is top-notch, I must say.
I never have frustrations, the reason is, to wit:
If at first I don't succeed, I quit!