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Only partially. As we discussed many times before, it was always the case that some folks fell through the cracks. Sex was typically assigned at birth based on external sex organs, which sometimes misaligns with the karyotype, for example. The societal change really is not the definition, it is the desire not to ignore these people anymore.

I think there are some different interpretations of Grimm's folktale where basically Rapunzel's mother wanted to eat the plant from the neighboring garden (which belonged to a sorceress). The plant in question could have been either Feldsalat (Valerianella locusta) or the mentioned Campanula rapunculus. Often folks that it may refer to the former, as it likely was more commonly available, but I think it has never been really clear as "Rapunzel" could have referred to a range of salad plants.

It goes back to the issue that many categories we have are post-hoc. We make kind of groups and then define them based on the differences we see in each category. The key element really is not whether a category is "real" but whether it is useful. It is the same as the all models are wrong situation.

The issue I see here is that many folks conflate the various issues. And suddenly somehow everything is being explained by evolution, like a magic theory for everything. "I am being an arse because evolution made me to do so, please come to my TED talk."

There is a lot of speculation in this thread, but fundamentally these types of research involving humans in any form are addressed by ethics review boards following guidelines set up by major research funding agencies in a given country. The overall guidelines are pretty much the same. First, you have to assess whether there is any potential for harm of the participants. This can include things like distress, ostracization, physical harm and so on. If so, the next thing to assess is whether the harm is beyond minimal (basically more than one expects to encounter in their daily life). For example, if you interview surgeons and want to show them surgery pictures, that should not be distressing as it is part of their jobs. Showing them to non-surgeons or medical professionals could be disturbing. Then, you have to show how you mitigate harm. For example, if you interview folks regarding drug abuse, the knowledge that they participated could be harmful to them. One could mitigate that by ensuring that participation is fully anonymous, or if not, at least confidential. Mild distress could be mitigated by having a counsellor on call and so on. Generally, you need to inform folks of potential harm (e.g. distress), but if necessary, there are guidelines for the use of partial disclosure or deception. Here, the researcher has to demonstrate why deception is necessary and that it does not cause undue harm. Generally you are also required to report back to the participants what the study was really about (i.e. debriefing). At this stage typically participants have to be able to withdraw their consent. However, direct risks associated with the study have to still to be disclosed beforehand.

Also, I have mentioned that many pages back, in paralympics folks have established a many scoring systems for impairments to ensure that in a given categories equivalent athletes compete. This includes team sports which have to have certain compositions in order to compete (e.g. based on available range of motions). In other words, there are already examples for finer and more detailed categories in sports and question is not really whether it is feasible, but more what measures could be used for each athletic activity.

yo.

I think this is one of the many cases where folks misinterpret what evolution is. Evolution is fundamentally the change of the gene pool in a population over time. What individuals do on a day-to-day basis really has little to do with evolution or evolutionary benefits. For example, the ability to vocalize can have evolutionary advantages, but the details of what is being said, is not genetically encoded. Well, there is also slang within areas where jargon is used. In labs, for example we often use informal short hand (or sometimes lab-specific invented words) to refer to stuff which never translates into formal jargon. Scientists, especially when talking informally amongst themselves rarely uses stilted high-brow language. That is mostly for papers and lectures (depending on your style). I think that is just a weird perception folks have.

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There are many (good) classic books also in other sciences, and it is interesting to see that quite a few are not in English (which is almost unthinkable today). Biology has changed a fair bit, but on some of the more complex topics, quite a few old microbiology books still absolutely brilliant (and in many ways surpass modern ones). While most are in English, some have sentence structures that are quite clearly written by a German, which amuses me to no end. Well, until I read my own writing that is. Another funny story is that I learned all of my basic chemistry and physics in Germany, so while I am fluent in biology-English, I sometimes have to convert basic chemistry and physics in my mind from German to English.

No doubt about that. It was really just a niggling thought at the back of my mind in terms of accuracy. But regarding impact and persecution it is of course not relevant. And luckily Germany lost all that talent! If they had been mindful about the way they expressed their ideology (as folks do nowadays), it could have ended way worse.

Not that it is important and (luckily) Germany lost a lot of Jewish scientists, but for some on the list, I am not sure whether they were really Jewish. Most did have some some connection to Judaism, and I may be misremembering stuff (as my infatuation with individual scientists faded a fair bit after high school) but: Niels Bohr had a Jewish mother, but the father was Lutheran, Erwin Schroedinger was in my memory had a somewhat pantheist view (not sure about household religion), Wolfgang Pauli had Jewish heritage but was raised catholic. Again, these are really just nitpicks without real relevance as they did face persecution because of their connections, regardless whether they were practicing Judaism or not.

Same here, though the time commitment is probably a bit of an issue. While the movie is presumably very good, one has to be a big careful about this bit: A movie about a person is probably a very bad way to learn about that person. A primary role of movies is to entertain and not to inform. It invariably is a dramatization of a particular interpretation of a person. A movie is story telling and stories do not have to be truths.

Another important element can be to check whether a person actually has expertise on a given field. Especially in modern sciences, fields tend to be fairly narrow and the more in detail the question is, the more specialist an expert has to be to provide meaningful insights.

One important step, and something that folks are slowly start to agree on (though some voices might say that it is because the opioid pandemic has now also decimated white communities) is that drug abuse should be seen primarily as a public health crisis, and not primarily a criminal one. That is why the measures outlined above make more sense, as they focus on intervention and treatment, rather than punishment.

A bit off topic, but fairly recently there have been many allegations against (male) elite players and chess coaches. A chess champion took the lead and apparently it opened up investigations regarding wide spread harassment and sexual misconduct in chess. I think the idea that cerebral folks are somehow above such behaviours should get tossed onto the pile of bad stereotypes (heck, open sexual harassment in the science community was fairly common for a long time, only to be replaced by covert, and only now may it actually see consequences).

There are a lot of papers out there on phantom traffic jams (i.e. jams by folks breaking which then perpetuates down the line)- a cursory search showed over 1k publications (at the very least). There are also many papers promoting suggestions, which mostly seem to focus on a collaborative system and/or technical devices that can simulate or promote such behaviour. However, the most interesting paper on traffic jam avoidance to me is this one here, for perhaps obvious reasons: https://elifesciences.org/articles/48945

There you have to be careful, too. One has to be very clear what one is actually testing with a given experiment. More often than not, infant experiments are behavioural tests and one uses them to check on developmental cues. The underlying biological basis is often not well understood. Take the mentioned Still-Face experiment, for example. It does indicate that early on infants are able to recognize and react to facial expressions (the first step in the experiment is about setting up a baseline that the infant learns and distinguishes from the neutral expression step). It does not tell us much about the biology except that infants are able to recognize and distinguish facial expressions and that they build up expectations based on interactions and do get distressed when these expectations are not met. How it actually works is unclear and as such the biological basis. A deviation from a particular behaviour does not necessarily mean genetic change, either. Taken from that, all we can basically just say that without training infants are able to: - identify faces - build up expectations based on interactions - have a mechanism to feel distress when expectations are met (I am sure one can break this down even finer, but the overall point is that these are really just general insights that are more conceptual still far removed from the underlying biological mechanisms). Even infant behaviour is often dynamic and responsive to cues and tracing them to a genetic basis (outside of reflexive behaviour) have proven to be very difficult to identify, and there is little in terms of actual "proof" to be found. I am not saying that all hypotheses in this regard are automatically wrong, but rather than we start to realize that that we need a higher level of evidence to actually identify the mechanisms. Especially in humans, these are often lacking.

I should have made it more clear what I thought about the paper, my bad. Similar to the others it does not offer any biological insights, but rather discusses the aspects on a conceptual level linking it to learned behaviour, which is still in the purview of psychological sciences. Towards the end it veers of quite a bit again into the just-so story region, which has become fairly common since the rise (and perhaps also through the fall) of evo-psych. But at least the first part is something that one could discuss about as it stays more within the purview of psychology (i.e. does not venture too far out into the bio realm.). I will also note that the Terrizzi & Shook as well as the Fessler paper have similar issues. I.e. there is a large conceptual framework, or narrative, but data that can be used to test or invalidate hypotheses are lacking (or are very crude and often not robust). In human genetics (in the biological realm) there is increasing realization that our genes alone are much less defining than originally anticipated (to large part caused by the increase of sequencing data and GWAS). As such the field of evo psych is still behind the curve. Again, there is good reason to believe that shame and other behaviour in a moral system can have important social functions. But introducing genetics without actual genetic data, is a big stretch that folks are increasingly skeptical about (and rightfully so). That is basically the issue, the studies speculate about it, but as far as I can see, there is no evidence. Beyond that the basic brain functions are involved. But that is a bit like saying that the system for pottery is genetic as it involves hands and eyes which have a genetic basis. It is not entirely wrong, but also so broad as to be meaningless.

This is most likely factually incorrect. First of all Tomkins is a psychologist and has not worked on any genetic studies that I am aware of. In fact, he is mostly a theorist from what I can see, so there is likely little to any experimental work. As such he can't possibly have confirmed the biological basis of shame. There is a much more appealing suggestion that these traits are part of cultural adaptation based on what some might call non-genetic evolution (i.e. learned behavior). See for example https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2781880/ for a discussion on that subject. Again, note the use of "evolution" in a non-genetic context.

There have been a lot of similar approaches, trying to leverage biology to modify behaviour. Most of these have failed, as the psychological underpinning are poorly understood. I would also advise against conflating psychology and evolution, the field of evolutionary psychology is in a big crisis, as it has largely failed to reproduce many of their claims and there are too many "just so" story arounds in that area. For sake of OP, I would also suggest to focus on one aspect first and really figure out how much we know about it, rather than trying to have large bucket with concepts and try to extrapolate from them. I think, trying to define shame and their origins might be a good start. As shame as a concept is deeply rooted in psychology, but to my knowledge is not really explored biologically, we should avoid confusion with evolutionary or genetic concepts at this point. It also seems to be a high-level concept associated with moral behaviour, suggesting that it might be a learned response.

This does not follow. Not every behaviour, even common ones are hard-coded in DNA. Fundamentally DNA does not carry that level of information density. Rather the whole system is an interplay between the components, that are encoded (e.g. receptors, hormone synthesis pathways etc.) but other elements (e.g. nutrition, but also developmental experiences and learning) affect how the system ultimately works. I.e. it is an oversimplification of many overlapping systems and the conclusions are therefore an overinterpretation. There are many systems involved, which we only partially understand (and which are outside my expertise). That being said, I am not even sure whether the existing framework are sufficiently specific. There are for example examples of altruistic behaviour in bacteria (essentially production of metabolites that are used like common goods or certain suicide pathways). But it is still under discussion whether these are good examples of altruism. Then in animals we got a whole discussion on reward systems in the brain, and how they affect individual behaviour and how they are connected to evolution of various traits. It gets complicated and messy very quickly. Perhaps the simplest criticism on OP could be fact that evolution nor DNA, does determine what things "ought" to be. Either they are or they are not. There is no driving force that determines what should be.

That does not seem like a good comparison, a faster computer is not very likely to accidentally (or purposefully) kill anyone. If the tradeoff to a slower or older CPU could somehow save lives, it may be another argument. I also seriously doubt that there are many folks happy with an old Pentium. Boot times alone are going to drive folks nuts. Also, at least with the early Pentium series, I am not sure whether you can get anything running on it that could access the web nowadays (maybe starting Pentium 4 there might be lightweight Linux distros). Ultimately, there are things that you cannot do with an old CPU anymore. Conversely, for the purposes outlined above (recreation, pest control, etc.) there is little difference between a single-action to a larger magazine rifle. And if lengthy shootouts are somehow part of life, moving may become more attractive at some point. The bigger point is that among certain conservatives in the US being somewhat irrational regarding guns has become part of their identity. The Overton window has shifted so much that reasonable gun control has become a no-go, and it is really not about the need of guns. Paradoxically, the NRA was a champion for gun safety and regulation before deciding to jump the shark (https://time.com/4431356/nra-gun-control-history/).

Renown means nothing, if it is outside their expertise. And in any given field there are established and capable scientists who are mostly unknown to the public.

Well, that is a matter of perspective- all it means is that the outcome of these events cannot be seen in isolation- it is the overall system that determines outcome. And usually there is a clear income-dependent situation. There are few diseases (if any) that affect poor and rich equally.