I grew up believing the same until somewhere in high school, when I started taking science seriously.

… a jumble of local maximums and chance.

I really like how you phrased this. I’m totally stealing it.

Oh no, rate of mutation is definitely a thing and is controlled by several factors. A big one is generation time, which is what it sounds like, the time between each generation. The copying of DNA is a source of mutations. This is why many controlled experiments on evolution are done with bacteria, who have super low generation times. For example, depending on temperature, the generation of many salmonella species is around 20-30 minutes. That lets you crank out massive numbers of potential mutations, then introduce a selective pressure, like an antibiotic the species normally isn’t resistant to or an energy source it normally can’t utilize, and see what happens.

To answer your question, yes, a higher mutation rate would confer an advantage. To a point. Most mutations are deleterious and usually lead to death, a few are benign and do nothing (at that point), and a very rare few are immediately advantageous. As long as the rate of mutation isn’t so high that the deleterious mutations combined with whatever other pressures are wiping out the population, more mutation means more chances to have the right trait to deal with a novel pressure or, very rarely, do something better.

To preface, I’m a microbiologist, so I have skin in the science game. I hate how these articles often have science illiterate authors or authors who are imprecise with their wording. They repeat misinformation on basic topics that science educators have been striving to correct for decades, perpetuating the cycle.

…the study shows once again how evolution throws up multiple solutions to basic problems…

In this case, it’s the “mysterious force of evolution that whips up solutions to problems”. Evolution doesn’t create solutions. There is no guiding force behind evolution.

Evolution through natural selection selects for existing solutions that were generated randomly through mutation, increasing the frequency of that trait because those without either die or are outcompeted. What happens if a trait is required for survival but no organisms have it? They all die. That’s why over 99% of all multicellular species that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. If you include microbes, make that 99.99999%.

It’s like having a super power. I remember being stuck in the Santa Fe airport in the late afternoon waiting for my massively delayed flight to arrive. After three hours or so, it’s past dinner time and people start becoming unglued. One family even has pizza delivered and manages to convince airport security to run it through the security gauntlet for them. I had been fasting for awhile so I was fine, where a year prior I would have been scrambling for food with the rest of them.

It was never true and both were originally said by Michael Pollan, an incredibly privileged white man.

For the record, my maternal grandmother heavily utilized canned and processed foods in her cooking. Her mother did the same and all six of her sons died from heart disease in their forties, fifties, and sixties.

My paternal grandmother was similar to my maternal grandmother. Her mother was incredibly poor, so she relied heavily on processed meats and wheat products. All seventeen of her children developed type 2 diabetes, yes ALL of them, the complications of which killed my grandmother and at least three of her siblings. Remember that it was commonly taught that sugar gave you energy and was healthy for you! My nonna and bisnonna loved white bread and sugar in their sauce and it killed them.

It only rings true if you never question its wisdom.

My money is on it being the elemental power of bullshit. It’s likely the same ingredient that makes homeopathy actually ‘do’ anything: time i.e., it would have happened at that point regardless.

This has been true for over thirty years but most people sadly have never heard of them.

Meta: the post itself is mildly infuriating.

Yowza! That’s a lot of easily disproven misinformation. You do realize you’re on the Internet, right? You can actually look up the things you’re claiming and verify they’re not true.

We’ve done this before. We also have an attachment that vacuum seals mason jars and we’ve put two eggs in a small jelly jar, vacuum sealed the lid, and thrown it into the deep freeze.

I agree, it’s not that simple. No relationship I’ve ever been in has compared with how fervently I loved my first love, who was also my first serious adult relationship. I loved her so much it was unhealthy.

We dated for about four years, then split up rather unexpectedly. It took me several years to get over it, even going through another two serious relationships in the meantime. A new relationship doesn’t just erase the experience and the pain. Distract for a time, maybe, but it’s still there until you work it out.

I think different people accept the loss of a relationship differently. I’m a big ol’ nerdy nerd so I had to do it intellectually: I started mapping out what the relationship was actually like versus how I felt it was like. I was surprised to gradually discover it was toxic as hell. I began to see how the ex I loved and practically worshipped was also immature, noncommutative, and manipulative. I also saw their positive attributes for what they were and that, despite my brain screaming at me I’d never find someone like that again, they were actually pretty common. That’s when I really started to understand that my ex was a regular person just like anyone else and I had put her on a pedestal. The intense feelings of longing and loss then gradually subsided with time, especially as these realizations caused me to stop thinking about her as often and especially to stop fantasizing about seeing her again or even getting back together. It wasn’t just that I no longer had the desire to see her again - I actively wanted to never see her again. She was awful.

That’s just my experience, hopefully to give you some additional perspective. I’m an open book if you have any questions.

The poop stool combined with a bidet has been life changing. How did I go so many years pooping like a savage?

Sounds a lot like traveling to me. That’s illegal unless you’re a sovereign citizen; then it’s the basis to all your bat shit legal arguments!

I work next a group of guys who are the “know better” crowd. Just a few days back, I overheard a conversation these dolts were having on diabetes.

According to the latest in bro medical science, diabetes is due to the body losing its sensitivity to sugar, causing it to no longer release insulin. Complex carbohydrates should be avoided as they break down to sugars more slowly, meaning the body is subjected to prolonged spike in blood sugar, leading to sugar insensitivity. Simple sugars are only an issue when people consume them consistently through the day, so it’s safe if you eat a bunch all at once. Furthermore, diabetes can be cured by staying on a keto diet as saturated fat causes your pancreas to release more insulin.

What. The. Fuck.

Ahhh yes, they must have accidentally destroyed every university. Oopsies, right?

/s

I feel the value of negative results is underrated by the scientific community. So they tested one or more hypotheses and achieved negative results. Now the next research team knows what not to do or what to do differently next time.

It’s all knowledge and it’s typically all useful in some way, but society, especially American society, is hyperfocused on achieving results that lend themselves to a marketable product, not the betterment of the quality of life of our species.

Disclaimer: I’m biased as my thesis was one giant dud.

I’m curious, how was the severity of your first infection compared to later infections?

We had a 1x but it was too slow for the new game we bought, Phantasmagoria. Instead of buying a new drive, my father picked up this terrible software that would write portions of the data to the hard drive when the game bogged down. It kind of worked but only after you went through it once, so whoever played the game after you got a smoother experience.

He’s just upset because I called him out for being a douchebag in another post. So he proved my point by downvoting a bunch of my post history and leaving shitty comments on a few of them. It’s pretty sad.

It was the former. I had a bizarre, slightly yet constantly irritating shopping trip. I thought the cart was funny. Then handicap ramp man. What I didn’t post about is how people kept walking in front of me, forcing me to jerk my shopping cart to a halt, and how a major supermarket lost all of their macaroni and cheese. They recently had a remodel and three employees and I couldn’t find it anywhere. It was a weird trip.