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Most mutations are neutral. The lottery analogy fails due to the fact that evolution is a population level process. A diploid human genome experiences 175 mutations per generation on average. There were 3,745,540 human births in 2019 alone. That's 655,469,500 mutations across the human population in one year. Diploid human genome size is 6.4 Gb - so that population level mutational likelihood space is approximately 10% of the whole human genome in a single year. Next, "fitness" in evolutionary terms is discretely defined as genetic contribution to the subsequent generation. By definition, if a mutation is beneficial, it increases in frequency in subsequent generations (complications of neutral genetic drift aside). Therefore, "random" (they aren't actually random - only naïve with respect to fitness) explores significant portions of the human (or other species) total adaptive landscape every generation, and by definition, beneficial mutations, proliferate through the population throughout subsequent generations.

“Sixty is the worst age to be,” said the 60-year-old man. “You always feel like you have to pee and most of the time you stand there and nothing comes out.” “Ah, that’s nothing,” said the 70-year-old. “When you’re seventy, you don’t have a bowel movement any more. You take laxatives, eat bran, sit on the toilet all day and nothing’ comes out!” “Actually,” said the 80-year -old, “Eighty is the worst age of all.” “Do you have trouble peeing, too?” asked the 60-year old. “No, I pee every morning at 6:00. I pee like a racehorse on a flat rock; no problem at all.” “So, do you have a problem with your bowel movement?” “No, I have one every morning at 6:30.” Exasperated, the 60-year-old said, “You pee every morning at 6:00 and crap every morning at 6:30. So what’s so bad about being 80?” “I don’t wake up until 7:00.” ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- A store that sells husbands has just opened in New York City,… Where a woman may go to choose a husband. Among the instructions at the entrance is a description of how the store operates. You may visit the store ONLY ONCE! There are six floors and the attributes of the men increase as the shopper ascends the flights. There is, however, a catch… You may choose any man from a particular floor, or you may choose to go up a floor,.. But you cannot go back down except to exit the building! So, a woman goes to the Husband Store to find a husband… On the first floor the sign on the door reads: Floor 1 – These men all have jobs, and will love their wife. She then goes to the second floor,… The second floor sign reads: Floor 2 – These men all have jobs, will love their wife, and love kids. She thinks for a while, and then goes to the third floor,… The third floor sign reads: Floor 3 – These men all have jobs, will love their wife, love kids, and are extremely good looking. “Wow,” she thinks, but feels compelled to keep going. She goes to the fourth floor and the sign reads: Floor 4 – These men all have jobs, will love their wife, love kids, are drop-dead good-looking and help with the housework. “Oh, mercy me!” she exclaims, “I can hardly stand it!” Still, she goes to the fifth floor and the sign reads: Floor 5 – These men all have jobs, will love their wife, love kids, are drop-dead gorgeous, help with the housework, and are excellent in bed. She is so tempted to stay,… But she goes to the sixth floor and the sign reads: Floor 6 – You are visitor no. 43,630,912 to this floor. There are no men on this floor. This floor exists solely as proof that women are impossible to please. Thank you for shopping at the Husband Store. Watch your step as you exit the building, and have a nice day!

Ok. I recommend taking a look at Sensei's post. Ask further questions if you get stuck. One thing: When one computer has the DNS problem, can you still surf to the web page https://8.8.8.8 ? (Google's DNS server via IP address instead of the DNS name) Since you seem to have the issue also on the tuner I would look at issues with the router first.

The fitness effects of a mutation are a moving target in a variable environment. While a mutation may be deleterious or neutral in one environment, it may be highly beneficial in another. E.g. antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Further, even if the net number of deleterious mutations outnumber the beneficial, the process of selection increases the likelihood of fixation of beneficial mutations. This seems to be a version of the irreducible complexity fallacy - of which this is a good discussion of. As pointed out above, mutations do not need to be of benefit in the current environment to be prevalent or even fixed in an environment, so a trait can exist that has no contemporary function or benefit. Also, intermediate phenotypes are often more prevalent than many expect - as an example there are both air breathing fish and amphibious fish that can't breathe air that are extant today. Epigenetics and gene interactions may well be associated with beneficial mutation, however neither process could be described as effortful or interactive.

Good news! I'm a microbiologist and one of the many projects I work on is the genomics of bacteria commonly found in fermented foods. One of the things we are finding out about many of the strains that are commonly found in fermented foods, is that they are really good at exchanging transposable genetic elements - namely in the form of conjugative plasmids. When you populate a culture from "wild" bacterial strains, they likely come along with a unique accessory genome. That accessory genome can contain things like antibiotic resistance gene cassettes, toxin-antitoxin systems, efflux pump components, etc and so on. The rate at which these are expressed in the food product, or transferred to the microbiome of the individual consuming the product is probably highly variable and hard to quantify. The individual effects of genetic exchange between consumed bacteria and the microbiome are also hard to quantify - but you probably don't want your naturally occurring Clostridium difficile to pick up a beta lactamase gene cassette, especially if you wind up having to take a penicillin derived antibiotic sometime down the line. As a result, I would suggest that if one intends to commercially sell cultured food products, it would be wise to determine the genomic makeup of the bacteria used, and control for unwanted, potentially hazardous plasmid encoded genes in the strains intended for live consumption. Or you could stick a jar of sugar water outside and hope for the best, I guess.

Yes.

! Moderator Note You can't use one speculation to support another. And don't advertise your threads in other threads, please. Stick to your topic, and try to keep everything non-mainstream in one place. You have a LOT of misunderstandings about science, and it's harder to help if it's spread all over the site. Thanks for understanding.

If the answer is 42, what is the question? I wrestle with this everyday...

Thank you. You need to tie continent formation to the blobs, just stating what you think is not enough. You make many assertions here without discussing viable mechanisms.

I didn't mean it in that sense. "Entertain" as in, "The Bradfords always entertained lavishly at Christmas." You forgot your camouflage then.

This Wiley Miller cartoon summarizes it pretty well: https://www.gocomics.com/nonsequitur @Phi for All can no longer say I owe the community in jokes. I've posted three today and debated on a physics thread that is itself a joke.

Excellent post. I guess it's a good thing land doesn't do the voting.

The point is that these two maps represent the exact same election yet tell vastly different stories about it. One of those stories is much more accurate than the other. An electoral map rendered in a traditional style shows county-by-county data from the 2016 presidential election. (Jetpack.AI) An electoral map by Karim Douieb shows voting by population rather than strictly by geography. In place of vast swaths of red or blue, the map reveals the mixed nature of voting patterns. (Jetpack.AI)

I’m sympathetic to the point you’re making, but you are wrong. These exchanges DO lead to changes in thinking. They’re obviously not effective in achieving that 100% of the time, but they are effective at least some of the time. Our challenges also often plant the seeds of doubt which may later grow and sprout. The brain is a wonderful calculator and it will often chew on logical inconsistencies in the background when we’re not even aware of them. It seeks ways for things to make sense and to align. Perhaps the participant isn’t convinced by our replies today, but maybe 3 or 7 or 19 years from now while singing in the shower or tying their shoelaces or chopping wood there will be an epiphany moment and the gears of the clock will suddenly stop grinding and will start clicking cleanly and without slips. That “Aha! Of course!!” eureka moment can come at any time. And... Even if the participant isn’t convinced, there are often silent readers paying attention from the sidelines weighing their own doubts... thirsting to be convinced one way or the other and relying on what they see in threads like these to help make sense of it all... to see who’s arguments are nonsense and which are convincing... here specifically to quench their desire to be swayed. Then finally... even if NONE of that were true, it is still vital IMO to stand up and defend what is valid and what is true for its own sake... to challenge fictions and push for rational reasonable thinking wherever we can. We push back on principle to stop the spread of misinformation and that matters for its own sake, even if the person with whom we’re posting shows no willingness to listen. And I’d wager a sizable amount of coin that you agree with me regarding these points. x-posted with Halc who made similar points from a more personal perspective

It’s all so clear to me now. You’re Alanis Morissette!! 😂

Did you not post on the forum about solidity before? Did you not study it back then and take notes so you can write it now? I feel like you are spending way too much time on something that would be a lot easier if you got a cheap course. I am not an expert in all this blockchain stuff. Surely there is one on Udemy etc but you will have to wait for a sale.

I realize everyone is probably isolating due to the virus, but I do hope everyone and their families have a very merry Christmas. Give thanks for what you have, be happy, and stay safe.

I can't unsee it. Eh?

Do you seriously think your political opinions regarding the US isn't pre-neocon Republican? You're a Reagan/Thatcher admirer, I have a brother just like you. If you lived in the US, from your arguments you'd be old school conservative, ala John McCain. Nothing wrong with that, it's just not as impartial as you paint it.

Has anyone pointed out how people often self-select rural or metro areas to live, that these choices rather often overlap with their vocation, and the types of people choosing to live in the middle of nowhere versus those living in heavily populated areas might be the type of people with certain isolationist streaks versus preference for community, and likewise certain religious and/or political predilections? Once they're rural, the information desert and lack of diversity of people and opinions often reinforces these challenges, but the fact that they choose to live rurally and avoid high traffic regions at all is itself informative.

I didn't say it, but the reason I think it with you is because it seems every time someone brings up an issue with racism, sexism, etc., your knee-jerk reaction seems to be to minimize it. It reminds me of Trump saying 'there are good people on both sides'. It doesn't seem possible with you to ever just condemn the racism and move on. You have to condemn the other side first, which has the effect of minimizing the racism. It's 'whataboutism'. The issue of 'agenda driven intolerance' is a nice stand-alone issue and deserves its own thread. But if you open a thread on that topic I'm betting that you won't like it if every time a comment is made regarding the effect on society of intolerant, thin-skinned people, that someone else responds with 'yeah, that's bad, but there really ARE racists out there!'. Because OF COURSE there are real racists out there; it's just not germane.

“We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be. ~Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

People who voted the other way (or wanted to) were not disenfranchised? People have literally been disenfranchised, and it’s primarily not people who voted for Trump. Or dissatisfied with the status quo? I think the BLM protests dump a whole lot of cold water on the idea that it’s just Trump supporters who want long-standing practices to change. - - - Anyway, back on the topic of rural voters There’s a quasi-romantic notion that there are a whole host of them, and there quite literally aren’t. The rural population of the US is under 15%. Why should they be listened to with any greater weight than any other group of similar size (or larger)? https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-economic-trends-in-urban-suburban-and-rural-communities/ (and since rural population is predominantly white, many politicians use this as a racist dog whistle)

Worse than that, though. A cult has formed that actually think that the rampant corruption is for unfathomable reason great and justified.

Aren’t the discoveries of science included within the umbrella of nature? Are you suggesting science is supernatural? Yes, if and when science discovers a truth, which in my view requires proof, not "mountains of evidence." What I offer is resistance, not imposition. If I had an office affording a prerogative to enforce it, that would be an imposition I would make. At the risk of being persecuted as preaching and violating a rule, I submit human testimony as evidence: Jeremiah 6:16. Never mind I thought you might be sincerely helpful. I have better kefir anyway.

So you've made desperate attempts to disprove my derivation without knowing what it involved. Is your philosophy “all new truths start as heresies”, so any heresy against special relativity needs to be suppressed to stop it being acknowledged as a truth? So you are unable write a equation for dropping a ball from stationary because at T=0, V=0? You are confusing me with Max Planck. What I said was that Einstein's derivation was “the only valid method of deriving E=MC²”, and that it is E=MC² itself that is inexact. I cannot work out if you think Einstein's 1905 derivation is 'both right and wrong' or 'neither right nor wrong'. Is it possible for you to open the box and reveal all?

January 21 — CDC Confirms First US Coronavirus Case--https://www.ajmc.com/view/a-timeline-of-covid19-developments-in-2020 FEBRUARY 3, 2020 US implements mandatory quarantines for first time in 50+ years over new coronavirus https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2020/02/03/coronavirus-update Correction taken: 13 days is not technically immediate Also, China began a kind of quarantining, at a macro level much earlier than I realized; but not apparently at homes and localized institutions. They kept two districts quarantined, the first population numbered at above 1 million, but only apparently that they couldn't leave those districts. The thing is, today, the reader can't verify revision dates of articles, electronic. For example, a year or more ago I had pulled a replica of the US Bill of Rights to read the First Amendment discretely. The source was the American Historical Society. The source utterly corrupted the content of the first amendment. Months later when I attempted to expose it, I couldn't find it. Conspiracies do exist and they begin subtle and remain so until they bite you.