Well, it's not really a highly complex design as much as it is very clear evidence of a two billion year old car crash. Sort of puts the damper on things.
Well, as robotkid pointed out, a lot of people believe that our chirality simply got lucky and had the upper hand, sort of like matter vs. antimatter in the big bang, except with evolution instead of something we don't understand (this is a bad analogy.) The environment these organisms would have been reproducing in was almost certainly achiral (not containing any molecules that benefited either orientation) or at least racemic (an equal mixture of both chiralities.) There's nothing about one chirality, other than the ability to utilize available chemicals based on their chiralities, that makes it better than the other.
Lipids. Fat storage cells (adipose tissue) store lipids as a source of energy. Every cell is coated in a thin layer of lipids, most likely because bubbles of lipid bilayers can bleb off under the right coercion, much like cells dividing. It means less work for the cell when it actually needs to go and divide. (And yes, "bleb" is totally legitimate scientific terminology.)
Yep. It's called endosymbiotic theory. For a while it was just a crazy idea, but we're pretty sure we know exactly what kind of bacterium it came from (purple and green sulphur bacteria for mitochondria and chloroplasts, respectively.) Another name for it might be "yet another blatant dagger in the back of intelligent design," but genomics is a treasure trove of those on any day.
Amazon has less incentive to; their strategy in my experience has always been just slightly undercutting the competition, to maximize profit. In that sense they're a lot like a traditional vendor.
A few clarifications, and things you might find neat:
1. The nucleus and mitochondria only appear in more complex organisms (eukaryotes.) Simpler ones (prokaryotes: bacteria and archaeons) are just bags with DNA in them. Mitochondria and chloroplasts (and their less well-known cousins, chromoplasts and amyloplasts) actually started out as different kinds of bacteria and just got absorbed into a cell one day. They even have their own DNA, ribosomes, and reproductive cycle.
2. No two species have exactly the same proteins, but their sequences are similar enough that we can infer homology (relatedness) over great distances; often billions of years of separation. That being said, there are some species so isolated and so remote (because all of their relatives have died off) that we have trouble proving homology for—but these species still do more or less the same functions with similarly-shaped proteins.
3. The arsenic-using extremophile was more like arsenic-tolerant. Normally, organisms die when they take up arsenic because it replaces phosphorus with a heavier nucleus that has different binding affinities. However, the organism those researchers discovered was capable of replacing at least some of its phosphorus with arsenic without dying. But yeah, your point is correct!:)
4. It's widely believed now (in an idea called the RNA World hypothesis) that DNA and proteins were invented later. The original "life" was probably a self-replicating RNA molecule. RNA can perform both catalytic functions (like proteins) and information storage functions (like DNA), it's just not as good at them. It still performs many of these functions in the modern cell as well—almost the entire ribosome (the protein making machine) is made out of RNA, and there's a large class of so-called "ribozymes" that can cut and modify other molecules.
I won't lie, it's a problem. From my position, not as much of a problem as you're making it out to be, but still a problem. Just cross your fingers and remind yourself that the so-called "sex war" will eventually swing the other way once the excusatory cries of "Misogyny!" have worn itself out in such situations, and hopefully the whole shebang will diminish toward peace.
As would we all. Fortunately, the Fermi paradox ("why haven't we stumbled onto aliens yet if they're out there?"), one of the biggest puzzles in such questions, is easily answered with "because they're probably just getting started" due to the nature of star formation.
The criteria are "affluent enough to have a home computer" and "encouraged to enter a career in technology by social norms" in the 1980s. We all have our first 8-bit box, even if we never really had one and it was just imaginary. (Mine's a Commodore 128.)
This has indeed been pondered! We're pretty sure that all life that presently exists all comes from one root, however. If there ever were alternative life-starting events, they didn't survive. The reason for this is that all extant organisms share a number of completely arbitrary decisions called chirality (if you know any physics, that's left-handed vs. right-handed molecular symmetry.) Chirality is completely random in the chemical reactions that produce amino acids and nucleotides, but absolutely fixed, in the same way, in every living organism we've studied. A number of environmental tests have been conducted specifically to look for organisms of contrary chirality, but we haven't found anything yet.
Yeah... But! There are plenty of fancy single-celled eukaryotes that are fantastically dull. Multicellular life is still a pretty neat thing. You just wait; give molecular biology enough time and we'll see experiments that recreate the emergence of eukaryotes, animals, chordates, mammals, primates, hominids, and finally molecular biologists. Just give 'em time.
Well, it's not that hard to create a similar environment in the real world, they take too long to get grant money for. Consider, for example, a microbe growing in a hot spring that needs a very high temperature to function properly (like every molecular biologist's friend, Thermus aquaticus.) If that thing floats to the top of the pond, it might get cold and die. Evolutionary pressures such as sink-or-die aren't that implausible.
Think of it this way: a random walk will get to every possible location eventually. If you push it in a certain direction, it'll simply get there sooner. But if it doesn't get there when you do, then there's no chance it'll ever get there on its own. Unless they tampered with the genes of the yeast in question, these results are completely legitimate.
That's a big question! We currently believe that the circumstances that created life were pretty harsh in some respects and extremely mild in others. There are a number of different ideas floating around, including the proverbial primordial soup, clouds of space dust (panspermia), and a boiling puddle of fat. Most likely, the conditions that were on Earth billions of years ago (a hot boiling hell with a mostly hydrogen atmosphere, amongst other things) contributed substantially to the factors that led to life's rise.
The so-called war of survival that falls out ever-so-neatly from the equation of natural selection isn't a zero sum game; that's actually a very Victorian viewpoint. Evolution isn't just about individual species, it's about ecosystems and food webs, too. When an alien organism shows up due to rational intervention and wipes out a native species or an entire biome, that's outside of evolution's normal parameters. Grey goo scenarios, the elimination of the dodo, and the introduction of carnivores to New Zealand all count as this. It's not unreasonable to call this sort of thing immoral from the perspective of nature, because it leads to a reduction in biodiversity (generally considered bad) much greater than any other biological shift. (Natural disasters are cruel that way.)
Remember, we got to where we are through a fluke. So did everything else. The fluke that gave us our advantage wasn't really all that big of one, and we're not that far ahead of a number of other species; perhaps only a few million years in some cases. There are even laws recognising many species as higher organisms, and they have to be anaesthetised before being used in certain experiments. Our lead is tiny compared to the history of the planet. Considering the Earth as a toy to satisfy human needs says a great deal about us as a whole: it says we are selfish and only consider others to the extent that they can fight back, or happen to have the same limb configuration, or have a sufficiently low amount of body hair.
Do you really want that kind of barbarism on your resume? I don't.
Recall Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot: there's more to the universe than us.
Institutions are indeed havens for all sorts of extremist viewpoints—also, you may be amused to know that lung cancer kills twice as many women than breast cancer. (Well, four times as many people total. I just divided by two; I'm not excited enough to dig up the real numbers. Source here.) Universities in general have a history of giving safe harbour to minority causes, and it's an inevitable result of their growth dynamics that said minority causes tend to take over a little. It's not good, but most of the time it's a little more subtle than your aforementioned professor. Think of it like a pendulum slowing down.
I think of MLP: FiM as a kind of planned, narrow target audience thing. It's never outright sexist—also, consider the characters Hoity Toity and Fancypants, both successful, intelligent and rich men (although it's true there's certainly a shortage of sympathisable males.) The goal of the show isn't to address all possible social issues or even a mature, thorough social context, but simply to focus just on telling girls that they can fulfil any role in society if they want to, just like the boys. Certainly the existence of such a show is sad, but when you compare it to older MLP media (especially the G3 direct-to-video releases) it becomes apparent very quickly that it serves a function that I think most people would generally agree with. In an ideal world, we'd just cut the crap and everything would be Star Trek, but not everyone's ready to be fed that; it feels too remote and difficult to relate to. A raw counterbalance is more effective.
Here's a similar data point that might amuse: Transformers Animated. The main character is a little girl, only a couple of background characters are female, and yet it has a huge success rate with young women. (I'm still trying to work through the exact detailed consequences on that one.)
Mostly because we represent only a tiny fraction of the total biomass on the planet, and haven't exactly asked nature how it feels about this whole "replacement" thing. Further, experts hypothesize that it would probably be at least moderately upset about this, and then that it would go on to ramble about how it's been around for eighty times as long as we have, and who are we to go mucking about with these things anyway? Experts further postulate that nature's feelings might even be somewhat hurt.
Also, technology (as a whole) is pretty expensive, and not everyone has it (in the sense that you're using the concept, that is.)
When you get down to it, humans are pretty goddamn arrogant motherfuckers. Okay, hotshot. Let's suppose that the claim that "wars, New York, digital watches, and so on" is why we're better than nature and have a right to displace it in favour of perfect lawns and white-picket fences. What about the chimpanzees, the dolphins, the octopi, the birds, and the gorillas that have demonstrated they have the sentience of small children? (And sometimes more?) Some chimpanzee tribes are now passing on spear-carving as a skill to their children. For hunting. Remind you of any ancestors you may have heard of?
We are not special enough. We don't deserve to turn this planet into our back yard.
Yes, sexism undoubtedly cuts both ways. Ideally, society would deal with both problems at the same time, but since feminists were the first to point out the disparity we more or less got to ride shotgun on the social issues ladder. It will be a while yet before men can openly proclaim their fondness for My Little Pony and not be criticized for it (although fortunately this has been improving very dramatically as of late.) Most responsible gender theorists care avidly about amending both sets of problems, but alas, with the creation of any new perspective or movement, there will always be radicals, and said radicals will always be determined to undermine the rest of the group.
Just try to understand that, like Fred Phelps, Richard Stallman, or Michael Moore, these are not normally functioning people who just happen to be of powerful opinions. They're in it for personal power, and would find other causes or platforms from which to spew hate if they hadn't stuck on to feminism. It's a pervasive intellectual problem that isn't well-studied, but it goes back at least to the French Revolution.
Okay, point. That is a bad thing. But you know what? They'll be a lot easier to pirate, and even if only one person never uses one such textbook outside of normal classes and everyone else still buys paper because they do, it'll be less money wasted overall. Also, at least with music, Apple eventually shucked off (most of?) the DRM. Perhaps something could happen with electronic textbooks.
Doesn't matter. There is no student alive who doesn't want this to happen. (Although many are indeed blind Apple fans, anything that can be done to emaciate textbook publishers is a Good Thing.)
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Well, it's not really a highly complex design as much as it is very clear evidence of a two billion year old car crash. Sort of puts the damper on things.
Well, as robotkid pointed out, a lot of people believe that our chirality simply got lucky and had the upper hand, sort of like matter vs. antimatter in the big bang, except with evolution instead of something we don't understand (this is a bad analogy.) The environment these organisms would have been reproducing in was almost certainly achiral (not containing any molecules that benefited either orientation) or at least racemic (an equal mixture of both chiralities.) There's nothing about one chirality, other than the ability to utilize available chemicals based on their chiralities, that makes it better than the other.
Lipids. Fat storage cells (adipose tissue) store lipids as a source of energy. Every cell is coated in a thin layer of lipids, most likely because bubbles of lipid bilayers can bleb off under the right coercion, much like cells dividing. It means less work for the cell when it actually needs to go and divide. (And yes, "bleb" is totally legitimate scientific terminology.)
Zach Weiner makes most points well, and other points better. Very low dud rate, that one.
Yep. It's called endosymbiotic theory. For a while it was just a crazy idea, but we're pretty sure we know exactly what kind of bacterium it came from (purple and green sulphur bacteria for mitochondria and chloroplasts, respectively.) Another name for it might be "yet another blatant dagger in the back of intelligent design," but genomics is a treasure trove of those on any day.
Amazon has less incentive to; their strategy in my experience has always been just slightly undercutting the competition, to maximize profit. In that sense they're a lot like a traditional vendor.
A few clarifications, and things you might find neat:
:)
1. The nucleus and mitochondria only appear in more complex organisms (eukaryotes.) Simpler ones (prokaryotes: bacteria and archaeons) are just bags with DNA in them. Mitochondria and chloroplasts (and their less well-known cousins, chromoplasts and amyloplasts) actually started out as different kinds of bacteria and just got absorbed into a cell one day. They even have their own DNA, ribosomes, and reproductive cycle.
2. No two species have exactly the same proteins, but their sequences are similar enough that we can infer homology (relatedness) over great distances; often billions of years of separation. That being said, there are some species so isolated and so remote (because all of their relatives have died off) that we have trouble proving homology for—but these species still do more or less the same functions with similarly-shaped proteins.
3. The arsenic-using extremophile was more like arsenic-tolerant. Normally, organisms die when they take up arsenic because it replaces phosphorus with a heavier nucleus that has different binding affinities. However, the organism those researchers discovered was capable of replacing at least some of its phosphorus with arsenic without dying. But yeah, your point is correct!
4. It's widely believed now (in an idea called the RNA World hypothesis) that DNA and proteins were invented later. The original "life" was probably a self-replicating RNA molecule. RNA can perform both catalytic functions (like proteins) and information storage functions (like DNA), it's just not as good at them. It still performs many of these functions in the modern cell as well—almost the entire ribosome (the protein making machine) is made out of RNA, and there's a large class of so-called "ribozymes" that can cut and modify other molecules.
I won't lie, it's a problem. From my position, not as much of a problem as you're making it out to be, but still a problem. Just cross your fingers and remind yourself that the so-called "sex war" will eventually swing the other way once the excusatory cries of "Misogyny!" have worn itself out in such situations, and hopefully the whole shebang will diminish toward peace.
As would we all. Fortunately, the Fermi paradox ("why haven't we stumbled onto aliens yet if they're out there?"), one of the biggest puzzles in such questions, is easily answered with "because they're probably just getting started" due to the nature of star formation.
The criteria are "affluent enough to have a home computer" and "encouraged to enter a career in technology by social norms" in the 1980s. We all have our first 8-bit box, even if we never really had one and it was just imaginary. (Mine's a Commodore 128.)
Didn't you hear? Everyone else on the internet is just one big fat guy.
This has indeed been pondered! We're pretty sure that all life that presently exists all comes from one root, however. If there ever were alternative life-starting events, they didn't survive. The reason for this is that all extant organisms share a number of completely arbitrary decisions called chirality (if you know any physics, that's left-handed vs. right-handed molecular symmetry.) Chirality is completely random in the chemical reactions that produce amino acids and nucleotides, but absolutely fixed, in the same way, in every living organism we've studied. A number of environmental tests have been conducted specifically to look for organisms of contrary chirality, but we haven't found anything yet.
Yeah... But! There are plenty of fancy single-celled eukaryotes that are fantastically dull. Multicellular life is still a pretty neat thing. You just wait; give molecular biology enough time and we'll see experiments that recreate the emergence of eukaryotes, animals, chordates, mammals, primates, hominids, and finally molecular biologists. Just give 'em time.
You'll be pleased to know then that we're exactly as evolved as the yeast: three billion years or so. Some just hide it better.
Yes: these yeast produce less alcohol.
Well, it's not that hard to create a similar environment in the real world, they take too long to get grant money for. Consider, for example, a microbe growing in a hot spring that needs a very high temperature to function properly (like every molecular biologist's friend, Thermus aquaticus.) If that thing floats to the top of the pond, it might get cold and die. Evolutionary pressures such as sink-or-die aren't that implausible.
Think of it this way: a random walk will get to every possible location eventually. If you push it in a certain direction, it'll simply get there sooner. But if it doesn't get there when you do, then there's no chance it'll ever get there on its own. Unless they tampered with the genes of the yeast in question, these results are completely legitimate.
That's a big question! We currently believe that the circumstances that created life were pretty harsh in some respects and extremely mild in others. There are a number of different ideas floating around, including the proverbial primordial soup, clouds of space dust (panspermia), and a boiling puddle of fat. Most likely, the conditions that were on Earth billions of years ago (a hot boiling hell with a mostly hydrogen atmosphere, amongst other things) contributed substantially to the factors that led to life's rise.
The so-called war of survival that falls out ever-so-neatly from the equation of natural selection isn't a zero sum game; that's actually a very Victorian viewpoint. Evolution isn't just about individual species, it's about ecosystems and food webs, too. When an alien organism shows up due to rational intervention and wipes out a native species or an entire biome, that's outside of evolution's normal parameters. Grey goo scenarios, the elimination of the dodo, and the introduction of carnivores to New Zealand all count as this. It's not unreasonable to call this sort of thing immoral from the perspective of nature, because it leads to a reduction in biodiversity (generally considered bad) much greater than any other biological shift. (Natural disasters are cruel that way.)
Remember, we got to where we are through a fluke. So did everything else. The fluke that gave us our advantage wasn't really all that big of one, and we're not that far ahead of a number of other species; perhaps only a few million years in some cases. There are even laws recognising many species as higher organisms, and they have to be anaesthetised before being used in certain experiments. Our lead is tiny compared to the history of the planet. Considering the Earth as a toy to satisfy human needs says a great deal about us as a whole: it says we are selfish and only consider others to the extent that they can fight back, or happen to have the same limb configuration, or have a sufficiently low amount of body hair.
Do you really want that kind of barbarism on your resume? I don't.
Recall Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot: there's more to the universe than us.
Institutions are indeed havens for all sorts of extremist viewpoints—also, you may be amused to know that lung cancer kills twice as many women than breast cancer. (Well, four times as many people total. I just divided by two; I'm not excited enough to dig up the real numbers. Source here.) Universities in general have a history of giving safe harbour to minority causes, and it's an inevitable result of their growth dynamics that said minority causes tend to take over a little. It's not good, but most of the time it's a little more subtle than your aforementioned professor. Think of it like a pendulum slowing down.
I think of MLP: FiM as a kind of planned, narrow target audience thing. It's never outright sexist—also, consider the characters Hoity Toity and Fancypants, both successful, intelligent and rich men (although it's true there's certainly a shortage of sympathisable males.) The goal of the show isn't to address all possible social issues or even a mature, thorough social context, but simply to focus just on telling girls that they can fulfil any role in society if they want to, just like the boys. Certainly the existence of such a show is sad, but when you compare it to older MLP media (especially the G3 direct-to-video releases) it becomes apparent very quickly that it serves a function that I think most people would generally agree with. In an ideal world, we'd just cut the crap and everything would be Star Trek, but not everyone's ready to be fed that; it feels too remote and difficult to relate to. A raw counterbalance is more effective.
Here's a similar data point that might amuse: Transformers Animated. The main character is a little girl, only a couple of background characters are female, and yet it has a huge success rate with young women. (I'm still trying to work through the exact detailed consequences on that one.)
A sewer is better than an ocean of piss. That's what the moderation system is for: separating the recoverable waste-water from the sludge.
Mostly because we represent only a tiny fraction of the total biomass on the planet, and haven't exactly asked nature how it feels about this whole "replacement" thing. Further, experts hypothesize that it would probably be at least moderately upset about this, and then that it would go on to ramble about how it's been around for eighty times as long as we have, and who are we to go mucking about with these things anyway? Experts further postulate that nature's feelings might even be somewhat hurt.
Also, technology (as a whole) is pretty expensive, and not everyone has it (in the sense that you're using the concept, that is.)
When you get down to it, humans are pretty goddamn arrogant motherfuckers. Okay, hotshot. Let's suppose that the claim that "wars, New York, digital watches, and so on" is why we're better than nature and have a right to displace it in favour of perfect lawns and white-picket fences. What about the chimpanzees, the dolphins, the octopi, the birds, and the gorillas that have demonstrated they have the sentience of small children? (And sometimes more?) Some chimpanzee tribes are now passing on spear-carving as a skill to their children. For hunting. Remind you of any ancestors you may have heard of?
We are not special enough. We don't deserve to turn this planet into our back yard.
This is now my favourite Slashdot post ever. All of my imaginary mod points. All of them.
Yes, sexism undoubtedly cuts both ways. Ideally, society would deal with both problems at the same time, but since feminists were the first to point out the disparity we more or less got to ride shotgun on the social issues ladder. It will be a while yet before men can openly proclaim their fondness for My Little Pony and not be criticized for it (although fortunately this has been improving very dramatically as of late.) Most responsible gender theorists care avidly about amending both sets of problems, but alas, with the creation of any new perspective or movement, there will always be radicals, and said radicals will always be determined to undermine the rest of the group.
Just try to understand that, like Fred Phelps, Richard Stallman, or Michael Moore, these are not normally functioning people who just happen to be of powerful opinions. They're in it for personal power, and would find other causes or platforms from which to spew hate if they hadn't stuck on to feminism. It's a pervasive intellectual problem that isn't well-studied, but it goes back at least to the French Revolution.
Okay, point. That is a bad thing. But you know what? They'll be a lot easier to pirate, and even if only one person never uses one such textbook outside of normal classes and everyone else still buys paper because they do, it'll be less money wasted overall. Also, at least with music, Apple eventually shucked off (most of?) the DRM. Perhaps something could happen with electronic textbooks.
Doesn't matter. There is no student alive who doesn't want this to happen. (Although many are indeed blind Apple fans, anything that can be done to emaciate textbook publishers is a Good Thing.)