Damn. I’ve got the Mountain Dew drinkers riled up.

“Possibly causes cancer” is sufficient for me to never the touch the stuff. Please stop drinking these things. They’re literally addictive.

I never trusted the stuff. We use to say this matter-of-factly when I was a kid, about thirty years ago. I’m glad to see that my unfounded confidence and speculation turned out to be right!

If I had a dollar for everytime I’ve read a similar story in the last thirty years…

Rendering 3d immersive AI generated deepfake porn is going to be so fucking fast

Very legal. Very cool.

I don’t think that Venter is suggesting intelligent design. He’s claiming, as a result of his research, that it’s not effective to assume simple explanations for genomics and especially for cellular biology.

Every technological improvement in the methods of research has revealed more complexity in organisms and so it behooves us to suspend dogmatic approaches to the genome. That’s the subject of the book discussed in the article.

Craig Venter is very controversial and his statements are provocative. I’m not qualified to critique the science in this field. But I’d recommend you to take a look at the work his team is doing with synthetic chromosomes and engineered cells.

I’m not an expert on the subject. I can only repeat what Venter said: “the only junk DNA is in my colleagues brains”. He claims that all DNA has function and that it should not be referred to as junk just because we don’t know the function yet.

He talks about at intervals in this interview.

Craig Venter, the infamous head of the Human Genome Project and who created the first “synthetic” cell, has been saying this stuff for years. It’s remarkable how ahead of the times he is, perhaps because he’s not beholden to an academic institution.

He claims that a “tree of life” is fallacious, that there is no junk DNA, and that the bare minimum genes necessary for a living cell still can’t be determined even after decades of research.

I hope that the authors of the new Extended Evolutionary Synthesis will admit the deficiency of outdated assumptions and reject dogmatic approaches to the theory, as implied by the author of the book reviewed in this article.

🤞🏼

Every five years the date of the earliest homo sapiens is pushed back five thousand years. They’ll be saying that homo sapiens were writing novels in 200,000 BC by the time I die.

I think it’s because the progressives don’t have a unified front. It’s hard to sell a potential “better tomorrow”. It’s a lot easier to get upset about things that are happening right now. That seems to be the essence of the conservative platform.

Yeah but the poor IDF really need US taxpayers help! Heaven forbid it turns into a fair fight! /s

Seriously, though. Hamas is so ridiculously outgunned that I can’t imagine any good reason to continue supplying weapons to IDF. If they can’t get the job done with what arms have been given then maybe they’re not really trying to get the job done at all.

Almost anything can be addictive, but some things are explicitly designed to be addictive. I don’t think that young kids are capable of regulating their gaming addiction. Someone needs to intervene, most likely the parents.

That’s really embarrassing, but not surprising that a medical institution would lie and cheat. The profit motive is destroying scientific research.

The first line of the Guardian article says, “Two environmental protesters…”

Granted, I did assume that this was the same group that’s been throwing paint onto artwork and corporate headquarters and yachts.

I’m not usually inclined to conspiracy but I honestly think this group is planted by somebody to make environmental activists look bad.

I agree with you. I think this is a result of the New Atheist preaching of guys like Dawkins and Hitchens. They’re rather crude and provacative in their anti-theism and their followers subsequently have a pretty simplistic view of a complex subject.

Of course, there are even more religious fundamentalists doing exactly the same rabble-rousing. It behooves us to ignore all extremists.

There are many forces and powers that cannot be measured. They’re often the most self-evidently desirable things in the world. Love, hate, determination, artistry, joy, generosity, compassion, character, wisdom, justice and beauty, etc. Hence the cute quote from sociologist William Bruce Cameron that “not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted”. Most psychological and sociological phenomena are immeasurable by the strict meaning of the word.

As for physics, we can’t measure the future, for example, though there are interesting equations which could possibly account for an near infinite variety of outcomes in a given system. And there are many theories that we can only measure under ideal, localized conditions. We can only hope that they are ubiquitous throughout the universe.

Then there are problems like the Duhem–Quine underdetermination thesis. This thesis says that the agreement of the empirical consequences of a theory with the available observations is not a sufficient reason for accepting the theory. In other words, logic and experience leave room for conceptually incompatible but empirically equivalent explanatory alternatives. This is especially endemic in biology.

And if you want to be more philosophical, it has been argued by guys like Hume and Locke that there is always a “veil of perception” between us and external objects: we do not have directly measurable access to the world, but instead have an access that is mediated by sensory appearances, the character of which might well depend on all kinds of factors (e.g., condition of sense organs, direct brain stimulation, etc.) besides those features of the external world that our perceptual judgments aim to capture. According to many philosophers, nothing is ever directly present to the mind in perception except perceptual appearances.

My point in all of this is that empiricism is axiomatically limited in it’s scope and potential. All of our chest-thumping and shouting, “Science! Science! Science!” is a bit naive when it ignores core issues of epistemology.

My personal belief is that knowledge is, in it’s first phase, abstract. Only then can it be quantifiable or measurable within a particular system.

The recent trend towards scientism shys away from abstraction, perhaps because they perceive it as a sort of dog-whistle for God.

Thank you for sharing your perspective. I find it very interesting. You’ve given me some things to think about. 🙏🏼

Tell that to the tens of millions killed in the early twentieth century as a result of these ideologies. It wasn’t just the Nazi weirdos. Lots of prominent European and American scientists and politicians were advocating Social Darwinism. Francis Crick is still pushing it, and who knows more about the science than him?