PrinceWith999Enemies

Theoretical biologist here. I consider viruses to define the lower edge of what I’d consider “alive.” I similarly consider prions to be “not alive,” but to define a position towards the upper limit of complex, self-reproducing chemistry. There’s some research going on here to better understand how replication reactions (maybe encased in a lipid bubble to keep the reaction free from the environment) may lead to increasing complexity and proto-cells. That’s not what prions are, but the idea is that a property like replication is necessary but not sufficient and to build from what we know regarding the environment and possible chemicals.

I consider a virus to be alive because they rise to the level of complexity and adaptive dynamics I feel should be associated with living systems. I’ll paint with a broad brush here, but they have genes, a division between genotype and phenotype, the populations evolve as part of an ecosystem with all of the associated dynamics of adaptation and speciation, and they have relatively complex structures consisting of multiple distinct elements. “Alive,” to me, shouldn’t be approached as a binary concept - I’m not sure what it conceptually adds to the discussion. Instead, I think it should be approached as a gradient of properties any one of which may be more or less present. I feel the same about intelligence, theory of mind, and animal communication.

The thing to remember when thinking about questions like this is that when science (or history or literature…) is taught as a beginner’s subject (primary and secondary school), it’s often approached in a highly simplified manner - simplified to the point of inaccuracy sometimes. Many instructors will take the approach of having students memorize lists for regurgitation on exams - the seven properties of life, a gene is a length of dna that encodes for a protein, the definition of a species, and so on. I don’t really like that approach, and to be honest I was never any good at it myself.

I was involved in discussions 20-some years ago when we were first exploring the idea of autonomous and semiautonomous weapons systems. The question that really brought it home to me was “When an autonomous weapon targets a school and kills 50 kids, who gets charged with the war crime? The soldier who sent the weapon in, the commander who was responsible for the op, the company who wrote the software, or the programmer who actually coded it up?” That really felt like a grounding question.

As we now know, the actual answer is “Nobody.”

So if the water is holy, does that mean in addition that the evaporated water is also holy, or does the holy get left behind, making future batches even holier?

If the former, does that make the air containing the water vapor holy? Is holiness a percentage thing - the more holy water humid it is, the more holy? Could you take out a nest of vampires simply by boiling a pot of holy water and letting the place steam up?

Yes, but at the same time no imho.

Authors of later books absolutely had access to the works of earlier authors. It wasn’t “the Bible” as we know it today, but there is a direct lineage where new material has been added and existing material has been edited, to result in the book we have now. That’s why the character of Jesus was able to fulfill prophecies.

So I’d tend to define “the bible” as a collection of literary works and interpretations (I don’t think you can separate the two without losing significant meaning) that evolves over time. Evolutionary pressures can include how well a particular “species” serves the rulers at that time, and how well it fits with the general zeitgeist (eg apocalyptic or euphoric).

So, like Trump, they didn’t have “the bible” but they had “a bible.”

Yes. These should be made illegal, or restricted from on-road use. As trucks increase in size and height, there are studies that they become more and more dangerous. They should be banned for safety reasons.

I think that it’s very patriotic of Trump to set piles of money on fire that could otherwise be used to elect republicans to Congress or the senate.

This sounds like a lyric from 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.

Also: Life has no rewind button and shit can go south pretty fast.

Yes. This is actually how humans work. We are not only social animals, but eusocial - similar to bees and ants. We are unique among primates in that regard, and one of only a few species of mammals that gets that designation (the other two being mole rats).

I respect Daryl Davis enormously and I think in many ways he shows us the best of who we can be.

At the same time, the criticism I heard from (I believe) the person who was an NAACP executive was that Mr. Davis works against racism in retail mode, while organizations like the NAACP work in wholesale mode. It’s good to reach out a hand and change a mind, but these movements - the racists, misogynists, and LGBT-phobic - are recruiting thousands and tens of thousands. They can and should be humanized, but the real battles are being fought in the courts, the halls of government, and the media. I admire him and think he deserves to be elevated and we’d all be the better for it, but there’s a very real fight to be had in addition to reaching out a hand and doing a one at a time conversion.

Both the title and the text of this article are painting with far too broad of a brush.

The evidence, from the remains of 24 individuals from two burial sites in the Peruvian Andes dating to between 9,000 and 6,500 years ago, suggests that wild potatoes and other root vegetables may have been a dominant source of nutrition before the shift to an agricultural lifestyle.

This was one study done on the remains of 24 people from one place. It’s only towards the last paragraphs that the author points that out, and even then it’s both soft-pedaled and linked in with western male biases.

While we still have a lot to learn about the vast varieties of human civilizations from 10k years ago, and while there are always massive cultural biases that need to be criticized and overcome, this is an example of the worst of scientific journalism. They take what’s an interesting study in a very narrow niche field, and instead of communicating it as such or saying how the work could be expanded, they write about it as if the author has managed to flip archeology on its head.

Just for starters, there’s almost never a single paper that changes everything. Science is a process of incremental progress with plenty of false starts and which undergoes constant revision. There’s a reason why it takes decades for a Nobel prize to be awarded - and those researchers are the ones who define and revolutionize their fields. The first author on this paper is a PhD student. I have no reason to question the soundness of their work, but the enthusiasm of the Guardian author (and the student’s advisor) is in excess of the meaningfulness of the study in a way that is frankly gravely concerning.

Some societies were primarily hunters. Some were gatherers. Many never became agricultural societies. Many did. Rather than throwing out every anthropology textbook because of a single paper written by a student from the University of Wyoming based on an analysis of 24 remains from a specific region of the Andes, it would be better to say “Hmm, that’s interesting - I wonder if that applied more broadly to the region,” or even “I wonder how many other regions depended largely on wild tubers.”

For better and for worse, humans (and I mean that term to be inclusive of species other than H sapiens as well) populated almost every ecosystem across the planet. They hunted and gathered and planted and raised livestock. There are fascinating interactions between the modes of subsistence of a culture and cultural norms from family relations to trade and war. In many cases the ecosystems they lived in don’t resemble what we see in those regions today, from weather patterns to flora and fauna. There’s less than no reason to think that populations living in wildly different ecosystems would resemble one another - they simply did not.

I’m very happy that these folks ate a lot of potatoes, and I agree with the more general observation that conventional wisdom is mostly wrong about many things, ranging from evolutionary biology to theoretical physics. I just wouldn’t ride too far on this particular horse.

No.

GOTO Hell is BASIC.