You're a step behind, I'm afraid. Because it may not be the case that a domesticated lineage actually underwent genetic change (relevant or otherwise), it cannot be guaranteed that an organism that meets the zoological definition of feralness is genetically distinct from a specimen that has never been domesticated.
I suppose we're arguing the semantics of the term "biological meaning" at this point, since "meaning" implies that we're discussing the field of biology as it is studied, rather than natural fact. Let me rephrase to say "no biological significance."
You're right; that looks pretty lousy in retrospect. I think I was trying to make my argument about "cats are not super-domesticated, but canines are" and it came out wrong.
Alright. Neat; thanks. I've always been more of a cat person and have never really understood the temperaments of dog breeds that well. In a way, though, this underscores my original point, that we're fooled by behavioural changes into assuming that animals have changed drastically due to domestication. (I still maintain, though, that cats are generally much less trained than dogs. There are also very few breeds that fit into the 'pocket dog' equivalent, mostly notably the Japanese Bobtail.
I'll keep it bookmarked! But to be honest it's mostly a problem of free time. Somehow I got involved in two part-time research positions and a startup this summer, and it's probably only going to get more ridiculous as time goes on.
I don't think geography is that important. An invasive species would continue acting like it used to if it were transported home, after all.
The trick with barn cats is that our relationship with them isn't nearly as exploitative as it is with, say, cows. For thousands of years, humans' relationship to cats was nothing more than "I will feed and shelter you just for existing (and eating mice), as long as you remain in the vicinity of my home." We never really asked them to change their instincts, and we barely control their reproduction; we just plug in to their minds as some kind of vaguely-defined maternal figure, and they're saved the trouble of finding somewhere new to hide during the day. Stray cats are pretty much completely unmodified, and even have all of the natural territorial habits found in the sand cat.
Have you ever seen a fancier's pedigree cat, like a Japanese bobtail? They're a perfect example of the difference between the average feline and the results of the pet typical domestication process. They're much more sociable, and essentially incapable of surviving as a feral species. In fact I would argue that an animal's ability to revert to feral behaviour in only a generation or two pretty much defines whether or not it's truly domesticated, because otherwise it's (probably) just a transient behavioural change. By this definition, humans may not be fully domesticated either.
Have you ever seen a domesticated tiger? What about a domesticated fox?
The difference between is mostly just a few generations of human attention. There are some more gradual changes (and numerous abrupt physical changes) at work in dogs, which creates the gap between 'feral' and 'wild' for them, but the most important alterations are purely in how the animal has been raised. Barn cats have been selected for their ability to survive and hunt, after all, for most of history. Not very pet-like traits.
Well, I'm hardly a sensible person to go to for career advice, but perhaps you'll find some amusement in this twisted imitation of "out of the mouths of babes."
I must admit that you sound, on the whole, rather disillusioned with research in general. If your work is just about competing with other groups tackling the same problem, it seems like whatever you're doing just isn't giving you the satisfaction that academia is supposed to. At least in theory, mediocre pay is the sacrifice one must make to be on the forefront of discovery, and everything you've said has been... well, it's been in tune with the plight you described in your first post; there's really no need to repeat all that.
If you could invent a structural or institutional change to try and prevent people from ending up where you are, what would you do?
I recently inherited a few shelves of older genetics books, actually, from a retired professor. My favourite is still The Genetic Code by Woese; it starts off describing (in detail) the state-of-the-art leading up to Watson and Crick, and ends up introducing the RNA world hypothesis (for the first time) in the later chapters. For a couple of years I fancied myself a bit of an antiquarian, so my pride and joy is either my 1726 Democritus (a very tiny book printed with hundreds of Greek scribal ligatures that only a handful of people can read), or my badly-beaten 1898 Webster's, which is something like 3000 pages long and is an incredible wealth of old meanings.
...guiltily, though, I haven't really taken the time to learn as many languages as I should; I was bitten by the conlang bug at a very early age and spend most of my free time deriving new words from my own rules rather than studying the ones that surround me.
I believe the most profound sympathies usually go to chemical engineers, who are essentially battle-hardened physical chemists. Calculus all day, Lewis dot structures all night.
I certainly didn't mean to imply that the material is easier to do well at, only that it's possible to scrape through more easily in some disciplines. Linguistics is certainly not a field where good performance is trivial, nor is history. (And I should know, having hobbyist interests in both. I have more dictionaries in my possession than genetics books.) They are, however, more forgiving for most students, because more emphasis is placed on essays as a form of communication, and the language required therefor is generally less formal than the highly-stylized language found in biochemistry. (Even computing papers move at a much more relaxed pace.)
I have, actually, met the sort of person you're describing, although they're generally called pre-med or life sciences students. They certainly don't have any interest in research, nor medicine, which is why they invariably wash out of the med school application process. Usually the blame belongs on the parents, who idolize specialist MDs for no reason other than wealth. (There's even a mildly offensive meme about it.)
The trick, though, is that the moment their dreams shatter, only a handful of them stay on to do research in physiology. A pre-med bachelor's degree does not prepare you to do general biochemistry, so your options when you get to your fourth year are already really obvious to you: either find "one of those jobs" that just requires a bachelor's degree as proof of trial-by-fire, or commit to spending the next eight years doing something that barely pays and requires an immense love of the material you were just skimming anyway. Graduate school is not an attractive option for them; it goes against their (rather materialistic) personal objectives. Instead they usually about-face and either switch majors to a commerce or economics degree when the going gets tough, or just quietly enter the world of business afterwards.
That's so weird. Bioinformatics was almost synonymous with cancer in my fourth year—it was nothing but "gene expression patterns here, leukaemia there, now let's use information theory to figure out the diff patch between this healthy person and this non-healthy person..." And that was just with microarrays, not second- or third-generation sequencing platforms.
However, yeah, the impact of next-gen sequencing is a huge deal. The job doesn't stop at writing software to determine what's weird about a given patient, after all; you still need to interpret the results, too. I for one was surprised how many biologists have a panic attack when they're confronted with Gene Ontology or Entrez.
As for the myths about climate: there are four population centres in Canada (southern Quebec, southern Ontario, southern Alberta, and southern British Columbia), and of those, southern Ontario is more temperate than parts of the northern US due to the lake effect (southern Quebec is similar), and BC is basically an extension of Washington (they barely even get snow in the winter.) It's really not that bad.
Try Canada? I keep hearing from my supervisors and senior coworkers here that every bioinformatician they've ever known has gone on to great things and is making a hundred thousand at some hospital somewhere.
I must admit I'm on a bit of a high horse, as my life's passion has always been bioinformatics. I'm a better software engineer than most software engineers I know, and I fulfilled part of my Bachelor's general education requirement with a third-year course in physical biochemistry taught by the same professors as my mandatory third-year proteins-and-enzymes biochemistry course. (They weren't exactly picky.) I'll also be honest in that I'm just entering my Master's in the fall, and can't really comment on the realities of the job market with anything but wide-eyed hope.
My advice is that you may actually want to consider computing more seriously. Research hospitals pay out their rear ends for bioinformaticians just with masters' degrees, and that's in a field where only a handful of institutions really offer dedicated programs, doing applied work (i.e., not a lot of code review.) Software engineering ability really is not actually a prerequisite, as most of the code turned out by computational biologists is utter garbage by engineering standards (and people with wetlab experience are uniformly way better at writing papers.) I'd also imagine grants are relatively easy to get, if you wanted to keep to a more biochemical circle, given that even popular science magazines are aware of the "[too much] data problem," but, well, I'm no lab head.:)
The truth is that there are very few CS people with an interest in molecular biology or biochemistry. Out of the 14 students graduating this year from my program in our computational biology-and-medicine concentration, I was the only student who definitely professed an interest in genomics rather than robot-aided surgery. (It wasn't the largest CS department, but I've got another anecdote—a friend looking at prospective supervisors at Notre Dame sparked interest just by mentioning that she knew "a bioinformatician.") On the whole, the amount of knowledge in genetics and chemistry required to be an effective molecular biologist just doesn't fit into the learning approach of most people who seek out post-undergrad education in computer science; they have a certain whimsy to them that you'd recognize mostly in philosophy or literature majors. They're just not detail-oriented enough to get all the way into it.
In general, at the Bachelor's level, the material is extremely dense compared to the humanities, and the lecturers are selected based on their research value, not their didactic ability. I have rarely heard of someone switching into biology or medicine because they felt some other discipline was too hard. Since many of these degree programs require organic chemistry, getting through them with a decent average is a real trial by fire. Some of the graduates may not have the greatest critical reasoning skills, but surviving in such a program most definitely requires significant determination and dedication.
Incidentally, the article on the First Fleet gives totally different numbers and a much higher convict:free person ratio. I wonder how long it'll take for those mod points to reverse themselves.
Slashdot Mirror
...significance is also an imperfect word. "Does not necessarily have a biological basis" sounds better.
You're a step behind, I'm afraid. Because it may not be the case that a domesticated lineage actually underwent genetic change (relevant or otherwise), it cannot be guaranteed that an organism that meets the zoological definition of feralness is genetically distinct from a specimen that has never been domesticated.
I suppose we're arguing the semantics of the term "biological meaning" at this point, since "meaning" implies that we're discussing the field of biology as it is studied, rather than natural fact. Let me rephrase to say "no biological significance."
All feral animals are considered wild. The term has no special biological meaning.
You're right; that looks pretty lousy in retrospect. I think I was trying to make my argument about "cats are not super-domesticated, but canines are" and it came out wrong.
I know that feeling.
Alright. Neat; thanks. I've always been more of a cat person and have never really understood the temperaments of dog breeds that well. In a way, though, this underscores my original point, that we're fooled by behavioural changes into assuming that animals have changed drastically due to domestication. (I still maintain, though, that cats are generally much less trained than dogs. There are also very few breeds that fit into the 'pocket dog' equivalent, mostly notably the Japanese Bobtail.
I'll keep it bookmarked! But to be honest it's mostly a problem of free time. Somehow I got involved in two part-time research positions and a startup this summer, and it's probably only going to get more ridiculous as time goes on.
I don't think geography is that important. An invasive species would continue acting like it used to if it were transported home, after all.
The trick with barn cats is that our relationship with them isn't nearly as exploitative as it is with, say, cows. For thousands of years, humans' relationship to cats was nothing more than "I will feed and shelter you just for existing (and eating mice), as long as you remain in the vicinity of my home." We never really asked them to change their instincts, and we barely control their reproduction; we just plug in to their minds as some kind of vaguely-defined maternal figure, and they're saved the trouble of finding somewhere new to hide during the day. Stray cats are pretty much completely unmodified, and even have all of the natural territorial habits found in the sand cat.
Have you ever seen a fancier's pedigree cat, like a Japanese bobtail? They're a perfect example of the difference between the average feline and the results of the pet typical domestication process. They're much more sociable, and essentially incapable of surviving as a feral species. In fact I would argue that an animal's ability to revert to feral behaviour in only a generation or two pretty much defines whether or not it's truly domesticated, because otherwise it's (probably) just a transient behavioural change. By this definition, humans may not be fully domesticated either.
A feral cat is a descendant of a domesticated cat that has returned to the wild.
Have you ever seen a domesticated tiger? What about a domesticated fox?
The difference between is mostly just a few generations of human attention. There are some more gradual changes (and numerous abrupt physical changes) at work in dogs, which creates the gap between 'feral' and 'wild' for them, but the most important alterations are purely in how the animal has been raised. Barn cats have been selected for their ability to survive and hunt, after all, for most of history. Not very pet-like traits.
Well, I'm hardly a sensible person to go to for career advice, but perhaps you'll find some amusement in this twisted imitation of "out of the mouths of babes."
I must admit that you sound, on the whole, rather disillusioned with research in general. If your work is just about competing with other groups tackling the same problem, it seems like whatever you're doing just isn't giving you the satisfaction that academia is supposed to. At least in theory, mediocre pay is the sacrifice one must make to be on the forefront of discovery, and everything you've said has been... well, it's been in tune with the plight you described in your first post; there's really no need to repeat all that.
If you could invent a structural or institutional change to try and prevent people from ending up where you are, what would you do?
I recently inherited a few shelves of older genetics books, actually, from a retired professor. My favourite is still The Genetic Code by Woese; it starts off describing (in detail) the state-of-the-art leading up to Watson and Crick, and ends up introducing the RNA world hypothesis (for the first time) in the later chapters. For a couple of years I fancied myself a bit of an antiquarian, so my pride and joy is either my 1726 Democritus (a very tiny book printed with hundreds of Greek scribal ligatures that only a handful of people can read), or my badly-beaten 1898 Webster's, which is something like 3000 pages long and is an incredible wealth of old meanings.
...guiltily, though, I haven't really taken the time to learn as many languages as I should; I was bitten by the conlang bug at a very early age and spend most of my free time deriving new words from my own rules rather than studying the ones that surround me.
Mysterious music plays as the dark hand of censorship (or just retraction; this is Slashdot, after all) descends upon us all.
Well... do you like it, at least?
I believe the most profound sympathies usually go to chemical engineers, who are essentially battle-hardened physical chemists. Calculus all day, Lewis dot structures all night.
I certainly didn't mean to imply that the material is easier to do well at, only that it's possible to scrape through more easily in some disciplines. Linguistics is certainly not a field where good performance is trivial, nor is history. (And I should know, having hobbyist interests in both. I have more dictionaries in my possession than genetics books.) They are, however, more forgiving for most students, because more emphasis is placed on essays as a form of communication, and the language required therefor is generally less formal than the highly-stylized language found in biochemistry. (Even computing papers move at a much more relaxed pace.)
I have, actually, met the sort of person you're describing, although they're generally called pre-med or life sciences students. They certainly don't have any interest in research, nor medicine, which is why they invariably wash out of the med school application process. Usually the blame belongs on the parents, who idolize specialist MDs for no reason other than wealth. (There's even a mildly offensive meme about it.)
The trick, though, is that the moment their dreams shatter, only a handful of them stay on to do research in physiology. A pre-med bachelor's degree does not prepare you to do general biochemistry, so your options when you get to your fourth year are already really obvious to you: either find "one of those jobs" that just requires a bachelor's degree as proof of trial-by-fire, or commit to spending the next eight years doing something that barely pays and requires an immense love of the material you were just skimming anyway. Graduate school is not an attractive option for them; it goes against their (rather materialistic) personal objectives. Instead they usually about-face and either switch majors to a commerce or economics degree when the going gets tough, or just quietly enter the world of business afterwards.
That's so weird. Bioinformatics was almost synonymous with cancer in my fourth year—it was nothing but "gene expression patterns here, leukaemia there, now let's use information theory to figure out the diff patch between this healthy person and this non-healthy person..." And that was just with microarrays, not second- or third-generation sequencing platforms.
However, yeah, the impact of next-gen sequencing is a huge deal. The job doesn't stop at writing software to determine what's weird about a given patient, after all; you still need to interpret the results, too. I for one was surprised how many biologists have a panic attack when they're confronted with Gene Ontology or Entrez.
As for the myths about climate: there are four population centres in Canada (southern Quebec, southern Ontario, southern Alberta, and southern British Columbia), and of those, southern Ontario is more temperate than parts of the northern US due to the lake effect (southern Quebec is similar), and BC is basically an extension of Washington (they barely even get snow in the winter.) It's really not that bad.
I think you may need to elaborate for your troll to be successful. Pray tell, what do I praise that I cannot comprehend?
Try Canada? I keep hearing from my supervisors and senior coworkers here that every bioinformatician they've ever known has gone on to great things and is making a hundred thousand at some hospital somewhere.
I must admit I'm on a bit of a high horse, as my life's passion has always been bioinformatics. I'm a better software engineer than most software engineers I know, and I fulfilled part of my Bachelor's general education requirement with a third-year course in physical biochemistry taught by the same professors as my mandatory third-year proteins-and-enzymes biochemistry course. (They weren't exactly picky.) I'll also be honest in that I'm just entering my Master's in the fall, and can't really comment on the realities of the job market with anything but wide-eyed hope.
My advice is that you may actually want to consider computing more seriously. Research hospitals pay out their rear ends for bioinformaticians just with masters' degrees, and that's in a field where only a handful of institutions really offer dedicated programs, doing applied work (i.e., not a lot of code review.) Software engineering ability really is not actually a prerequisite, as most of the code turned out by computational biologists is utter garbage by engineering standards (and people with wetlab experience are uniformly way better at writing papers.) I'd also imagine grants are relatively easy to get, if you wanted to keep to a more biochemical circle, given that even popular science magazines are aware of the "[too much] data problem," but, well, I'm no lab head. :)
The truth is that there are very few CS people with an interest in molecular biology or biochemistry. Out of the 14 students graduating this year from my program in our computational biology-and-medicine concentration, I was the only student who definitely professed an interest in genomics rather than robot-aided surgery. (It wasn't the largest CS department, but I've got another anecdote—a friend looking at prospective supervisors at Notre Dame sparked interest just by mentioning that she knew "a bioinformatician.") On the whole, the amount of knowledge in genetics and chemistry required to be an effective molecular biologist just doesn't fit into the learning approach of most people who seek out post-undergrad education in computer science; they have a certain whimsy to them that you'd recognize mostly in philosophy or literature majors. They're just not detail-oriented enough to get all the way into it.
So... don't despair. Not yet, anyway.
In general, at the Bachelor's level, the material is extremely dense compared to the humanities, and the lecturers are selected based on their research value, not their didactic ability. I have rarely heard of someone switching into biology or medicine because they felt some other discipline was too hard. Since many of these degree programs require organic chemistry, getting through them with a decent average is a real trial by fire. Some of the graduates may not have the greatest critical reasoning skills, but surviving in such a program most definitely requires significant determination and dedication.
Wet-lab fields tend not to be like that.
Don't hassle it! This gonzo spelling thing is going creative places.
Incidentally, the article on the First Fleet gives totally different numbers and a much higher convict:free person ratio. I wonder how long it'll take for those mod points to reverse themselves.
Generalizations are verboten in the presence of the mighty commandments of PCdom.