The Frogger loves Disney‘s Cinderella, mainly because she thinks Cinderella’s ball gown in pretty, likes dancing, and loves all the cute animals[1,2]. As a result, I have had many opportunities over the past few months to observe this film in great detail, repeatedly. These posts resulted from subjecting the normally active mind, thirsting for stimulation, to triplicate viewings whilst traversing the wintry wastelands of the Midwest, with the first of two presented here, wherein I shall examine what we can infer about the kingdom in Cinderella is set and why you might not want to live in that land of Fairy Tales. Continue reading “Cinde-really? Part 1”
Category: Curiosities of Nature
There are no ancient alien codes in our genome
Even for a physicist, this is bad: Larry Moran, in preparation for the appropriate dose of ridicule that this situation deserves, quotes physicist and pop-science author Paul Davies:
Another physical object with enormous longevity is DNA. Our bodies contain some genes that have remained little changed in 100 million years. An alien expedition to Earth might have used biotechnology to assist with mineral processing, agriculture or environmental projects. If they modified the genomes of some terrestrial organisms for this purpose, or created their own micro-organisms from scratch, the legacy of this tampering might endure to this day, hidden in the biological record.
Which leads to an even more radical proposal. Life on Earth stores genetic information in DNA. A lot of DNA seems to be junk, however. If aliens, or their robotic surrogates, long ago wanted to leave us a message, they need not have used radio waves. They could have uploaded the data into the junk DNA of terrestrial organisms. It would be the modern equivalent of a message in a bottle, with the message being encoded digitally in nucleic acid and the bottle being a living, replicating cell. (It is possible—scientists today have successfully implanted messages of as many as 100 words into the genome of bacteria.) A systematic search for gerrymandered genomes would be relatively cheap and simple. Incredibly, a handful of (unsuccessful) computer searches have already been made for the tell-tale signs of an alien greeting.
(Yes, that’s me you’re now hearing, banging my head against the desk.)
Larry uses this opportunity to pose the obvious question, for his molecular evolution students and everyone else:
Assume that the aliens inserted a 1000 bp message in the same place in the genomes of every member of our ancestral population from five million years ago… If you were to sequence that very same region of your own genome what would the message look like today?
(Go leave your answer in the comments over at Sandwalk.)
Anyone who has the slightest comprehension of natural selection ought to see that the most implausible part of Paul Davies scenario is not the bit about aliens engineering the DNA of terrestrial organisms.
From the context of the full article (go to Sandwalk for the link), it’s not clear how seriously Davies takes this. I’m really, really, really hoping that this does not reflect the biological understanding of a public scientific figure, but I’m afraid it does.
Scientific Method in Decline?
Jonah Leher in The New Yorker about the slipperiness of the scientific method:
“The Truth Wears Off: Is There Something Wrong With The Scientific Method?”
The test of replicability, as it’s known, is the foundation of modern research. Replicability is how the community enforces itself. It’s a safeguard for the creep of subjectivity. Most of the time, scientists know what results they want, and that can influence the results they get. The premise of replicability is that the scientific community can correct for these flaws.
But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain. It’s as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn’t yet have an official name, but it’s occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology.
The piece, dressed up in a bit of mysticism, is essentially a description of some well known (but too rarely acknowledged) biases in science: Unconscious selection of favorable data; the tendency to publish only positive results, and the effects of randomness. Continue reading “Scientific Method in Decline?”
Krugman on the Santa Fe Institute
He captures my feelings nicely (except for that bit about being excited 20 years ago – 10 in my case):
Oh, and about
RogerDoyne Farmer (sorry, Roger!) and Santa Fe and complexity and all that: I was one of the people who got all excited about the possibility of getting somewhere with very detailed agent-based models — but that was 20 years ago. And after all this time, it’s all still manifestos and promises of great things one of these days.
REPOST: Do as You Say, Do as You Do – Fixing Science Communication
Before I tell you how to fix science journalism (super glue, duh), let’s get everyone on the same page. The science journalism problem is really a science communication problem. Science journalism is just a portion of the science communication problem. It just happens to be an especially visible portion because journalists already have a forum and an audience. If we can solve the science communication problem, the science journalism problem becomes irrelevant, although the science journalists might not be happy with the solution.
I’ve actually been listening to a lot of advice from people older, wiser, and more successful than I on this topic. In doing so, I have a learned that the solution to our science communication problem is very simple. All we need to do is exactly what they did. Continue reading “REPOST: Do as You Say, Do as You Do – Fixing Science Communication”
The Finch and Pea 