Ericchiriboga

Hope this topic is okay. It's socially accepted to believe in Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, Native American religions, etc, etc. There are obvious logical flaws and fallacies with many, if not all, of these religions. Yet, it's not socially acceptable to point those out and criticize them in a widespread way. Maybe it's more okay on a science forum like this, but if a prominent figure in media or a politician did, they would face serious blowback. Even most scientists (Dawkins aside) I don't think would readily jump on pointing out the logical inconsistencies. They would likely be accused of discrimination. But there are some beliefs systems which one could criticize with little blowback. Astrology, witchcraft, crystal-healing, reiki, etc. As a personal example, I've seen a couple lectures of Neil deGrasse Tyson and he readily criticized many of those, but he of course didn't stray into criticizing mainstream religion. It seems it's just a matter of historical precedent. Do you think this is fair? Should we openly be more critical of religion as a society? Or is that just an unrealistic expectation, given how incorporated it is into people's identity politics and therefore is a constant critique of it actually a form of systemic discrimination- people are irrational all the time, why pick this one issue to lambast them over? Also, should we be more understanding towards these "fringe" belief systems and not be so critical of them, for fairness' sake?

In the 70's a bunch of Roman amphora were found off the coast of Brazil by an underwater archaeologist which led him to conclude that Romans (even if just a ship that got off course and crashed) were the first Europeans to technically visit Brazil, which led to the Brazilian government feeling threatened by that. In corrupt fashion, they falsely accused him as a plunderer, disallowed further underwater archaeological operations, and the jars were confiscated by the military. However, it came out that it was just some guy who had put replicas underwater to try and age them, so the whole thing was moot.

"Prof Allanach has given the possible fifth force various names in his theoretical models. Among them are the "flavour force", the "third family hyperforce" and - most prosaic of all - "B minus L2"." Please, no. Someone help him with this.

Well, you can always go deeper and deeper in terms of "how" and really get to the fundamental underpinnings of how things work. If you're looking for the biophysics of the molecular interactions guiding it, I'm not really qualified to answer. But if you're just looking for a better understanding of evolution, maybe I can give a basic framework. The main forces acting are called Genetic Drift, Gene Flow, and Natural Selection. Mutations will occur in DNA, creating variability from individual to individual in a population. Some mutations will be more favorable for the environmental conditions and if they confer an advantage to the individual, then the individual will reproduce more, passing that mutation along and increasing its prevalence in the environment. This is the "survival of the fittest" that people talk about and a big factor in speciation, as isolated groups could slowly evolve in different ways until they become different species. Now, if we think about evolution in terms of a change in the percentage of a population that has a certain mutation, it's easier to think about Gene Flow and Genetic Drift. Gene Flow is individuals migrating to and from a population and Genetic Drift is the random change in a population's makeup, which can be easily visualized by thinking about a natural disaster randomly killing some members, regardless of their "fitness." These all work in concert. That's a very simplified explanation, and obviously there's much more to it than that. But I hope it helps.

It's behind a paywall, but here's a paper in Science about that. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/347/6227/1190 It seems it's just very efficient at performing lots and lots of different organic reactions and isolating the correct byproducts. But, it only talks about making single molecules. Making a large scale biological system is much taller order. This might interest you, as it's about using nanorobot AI to facilitate supramolecular assembly via atomic orientations, which has obvious implications towards your hypothesis. https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/36/eabb6987 It's an interesting idea, but it's very theoretical and therefore very much in the realm of science fiction at the moment.

This is true, but I was just focusing more on the context of the question.

Because environments and conditions change so if a species couldn’t change with their environment, they would die off.

Sure, if you find anything else out, I'd love to hear it.

Genetic replication is the product of a series of several enzymes working in concert, the main one of which is DNA polymerase, which is what actually builds the new DNA strands. There's also an inherent error rate in DNA polymerase. The errors are checked and "proofread" and fixed, but it's not a totally perfect process and some slip through the cracks, creating mutations in the newly synthesized strands. There are other ways mutations can occur, including being spurred by radiation, but that's the best, easiest way to think about it in my opinion. And without mutations, species would never change. If 2 different species had 2 different DNA polymerases, one of which replicates with 0 errors, then all the members of that species would stay the same while members of the other species would slowly change and the ones who changed for the better would reproduce and eventually the species with the error-prone DNA polymerase would be more fit to survive in their environment.

Are you working on getting this into a peer-reviewed journal?

Online, it seems a lot of sources say LIDAR doesn't work as well as RADAR in rain or humid, dewy weather. Maybe it's obvious, but I was essentially just wondering why. Why does water in the air affect light waves more than radio waves?

Humans have an intuitive idea of what nothingness means, so it makes sense it would show up in philosophies and explanations. And I think you're equating a lot of different kinds of "nothings." "Nothing" in the atomic sense is much different than "nothing" in a Buddhist sense. It feels like you're trying to cram a lot of differently shaped pegs into one single hole.

If nothing else, it seems like a great idea for a City of Ember-esque sci-fi novel.

Like it or not, countries generally have a fair amount of autonomy to terrorize their own people. The rest of the world is reluctant to get involved, for fear of creating a larger global conflict. It's only when countries start terrorizing people from other countries that swift action is taken. Otherwise, it's mostly trade embargoes and the like.

The SYSK podcast.

When species are not native, we do try to take action like that. And I think you don't appreciate the complexity or scale of interactions. When you have thousands and thousands of variables all interconnected in a giant web, arbitrarily going through and changing some from their normal state will cause massive ripples throughout the system, potentially causing unforeseen harm to humans and nonhumans alike. Species have existed in Darwinian struggle since abiogenesis. Now it's our moral prerogative to change the entirety of how the ecosystem works? Regardless of the ethics of it (on which I completely disagree with you), if you don't see that it's impractical, implausible, and probably harmful, then I don't see much more productive discussion resulting from this.

I mean, conservation isn't just some theoretical philosophy adopted by biologists. Yes, it often goes hand-in-hand with what a lot of people view as the ethical way to do things, but it has clearly tangible benefits for the environment and mankind. It's a forward-looking policy, concerned with doing as little damage to ecosystems as possible. Preventing trophic cascades, slowing down anthropogenic climactic change, preventing collapses of populations that serve as our food sources, stopping invasive species that will overrun environments, stopping the destruction of ecosystems that can theoretically yield new scientific advances (think medicines derived from aquatic compounds), etc. It's not just an issue of ethics, but one of pragmatism, too. It's also "easy" in that it's a policy largely concerned with keeping the status quo so there's minimal opportunity to accidentally completely ruin the environment. I've never heard of "antinatalism" before, but even if you think that's the most ethical thing to do, implementing it requires such high levels of human interference that I feel it would almost inevitably end terribly. I'm a vegetarian, so I have no lack of empathy for animals, but not only is it impossible to calculate all the variables needed to implement it and keeps ecosystems functioning, it's not within the realm of possibility, with the tools we have.

I thought it was a fairly commonly held belief that HIIT leads to faster weight loss results. I think it's just boils down to the fact that it's more demanding on your body. Sure, it makes your body dip into fermentation, but it taps out the oxygen first.

Plos, maybe?

That's a fairly compelling argument in theory, that most women haven't historically reached menopause, but I don't know if it's true. The data you linked certainly point to high maternal mortality rates, but it's about 5% (assuming 5 children) in Finland in 1800. There are definitely more morbidities at play than just death from childbirth and we're only looking at a sample size of one country (and maybe the data is still too recent), but that's just not a firm conclusion I can draw.

I'm not sure anyone besides myself is terribly interested in the answer, but I found this nonetheless: The structure and regulation of flagella in Bacillus subtilis Sampriti Mukherjee and Daniel B. Kearns "The B. subtilis basal body differs from that of S. enterica and E. coli in two critical ways. First, B. subtilis appears to lack bushing proteins. The bushings in Gram negative bacteria are two different proteins that form separate rings in the peptidoglycan layer and outer membrane respectively that allow the rod to transit and spin freely in the context of the cell envelope (135). The bushings may also function as a torque stabilizer by direct interaction with the proton channel stators (57). B. subtilis does not encode homologs of the bushing proteins and electron microscopy of purified basal bodies does not seem to indicate ring-like densities that could potentially be attributed to bushing-like structures (38, 81). Perhaps B. subtilis encodes as-yet-undiscovered bushing proteins that do not resemble those of Gram negative bacteria. Alternatively, the Gram positive envelope structure alone may serve as a sufficient bearing and stabilizer for flagellar rotation."

As this is very pre-Shang, it's hard to say. I would be hesitant to connect it to any Chinese philosophy that arose in the warring states era. It's possible it's a depiction of a deity, a sign of fertility, or some spiritual connection. But it's just a fun guessing game; I couldn't tell you in the slightest.

This is really not my area of expertise, but it's probably better in the inorganic chemistry section. From what I know, clay chemistry is very complicated with lots of silicons and aluminums and clay varies a lot in mineral content, so I'm not sure if you can create exact electrostatic maps or anything like that and I'm honestly not 100% sure what you mean by "uniform". But I would think drying out the clay into the bone dry stage and firing it into the bisque stage would change molecular configurations much more than just working the clay.

Lehninger's Principles of Biochemistry seems to indicate that it's left in the cytoplasm. I couldn't tell you anything definitively, but that's the most popular biochemistry book on the market and the one that's consistently highly recommended.

I actually learned about eusociality through a kin selection lens, too, with even naked mole rats being an example because how inbred they are, and I just graduated. I'm guessing the paper you're talking about is The Evolution of Eusociality in Nature in 2010? Is that sort of the start of the move towards multi-level selection models?