CharonY

Quite frequently authoritarians are depicted as highly intelligent schemers who somehow seduce the public to give them all the power. Meanwhile, we see how a reality show celebrity stumbles its way to dictatorship while pretty much messing up everything he could on the way. Yet he still gets it handed to him (talking about privilege). Can we cancel reality? After all folks are talking about cancel culture all the time, aren't they?

Hard to tell, as norms are out of the window. I doubt that anyone has enough insights to accurately predict, well, anything at this point. We are so deep in unexplored territory, we should give it a proper name at this point. And I have the weird feeling that things are only going to accelerate.

We really are not unless you do selective comparisons. It is more radiation in all directions (and see what sticks). Nope, especially not on this board that I remember. But intelligence does come at a cost. You have proposed two things (implicitly) a) evolution goes towards higher complexity, which would also include brains with higher intelligence, and b) intelligence provides massive advantages in evolutionary contexts. From there it should follow that over time organisms would be increasingly complex and intelligent. A simple look at current biodiversity clearly indicates that this is not the case. There is one species that managed to get enormous advantages from intelligence, but it is clearly not widely distributed and is therefore not a trend. Or have anything that works for your environment. That can include being smaller, or slower and have smaller brain (thus requiring less energy and nutrients). Fitness is not determined by strength.

At this point I would argue that it not only works but has proven to be the most effective means of manipulating public opinion. The mythical link between immigration (or anything alien) and crime is extremely enduring throughout modern human history, for example. It just works and the only thing you need is that people feel some sort of economic crisis (bonus points if they are real, but they don't even have to be).

Also nope. Sometimes the solution is to go simpler to avoid detection, for example. Or introduce a bit of randomness (e.g. simple point mutations). The mechanisms we see for example to avoid antibiotic resistance is not getting more complicated. Most extreme resistant organisms simply use exporters that pump the drug away from them. They generally do not have huge complicated mechanisms, as there is selective pressure for them to remain efficient. As before, new developments (e.g. an entirely new defence system) can lead to some other developments. Or it can lead to loss of existing functions. Many pathogens (i.e. those specialized in infecting other organisms) have very small genomes and while they may have specialized pathogenicity factors, they often lose other bits and pieces (e.g. traits needed for environmental survival). The way you describe it seems that you think organisms keep accumulating traits of increasing complexity. That is clearly not the case. Edit: it occurs to me that this discussion is getting really far away from the original topic and is more about misconceptions in evolution (and to some degree, biological/ biochemical processes in general).

Yeah, we truly are stuck in the stupid timeline.

Look, it is simple. The presidents cannot do these things, if they wants to stay within confines of laws and accepted norms, as the founders did not explicitly tell them that they could. However, there are no repercussions if they decide to act unlawful and say, force vaccinate folks and shoot people who pollute the environment. The distinction is very important because of reasons. Also, it is great that no candidate would ever even have a shot at the presidency if they openly proclaim that they want leverage the presidency to exact vengeance and end democracy, right? I mean, that would just be too ridiculous to even consider.

The question shows that you are not thinking correctly about the the mechanism. Neuroplasticity is fundamentally related to activity, which in turns can reorganize the brain on multiple levels. I have no idea why that is supposed to be something groundbreaking, it is something we have known for a long time. Other tissues can also do quite a bit of reorganization, following a wide of cues related e.g. to injury, inflammation or all sorts of signals. I have, therefore no idea what difference these tidbit really are supposed to make. The simple organisms still exist. There is no push in a specific direction. The way to think about it, is that certain more complex organisms can occupy niches that were previously inaccessible. But then, they become niches themselves, too and then get colonized by new, but simpler organisms. But the fundamental process on Earth are still driven by the simpler ones. To wit, if all complex organisms disappeared from Earth, there would be still life on it. But if all the simple organisms disappeared, life would eventually cease.

The ramifications are pretty bad and not only for the Jan 6 lawsuits. From Sottomayor's dissent: So for all intents and purpose it seems that the US has now executed a critical blow against functioning democracy. As step, no doubt, other countries will look at very carefully (and probably promptly find ways to emulate).

Based on your logic, countries with regular famines should have expanded beyond our solar system by now.

Dilly argument. What is the carrying capacity of Mars?

1 No some, such as chemical mutations are mostly random. Others, such as splicing are not. Some, such as recombination are slightly random, but follow somewhat predictable patterns. 3 solving a major challenge in a given scientific area usually sweeps through the community rapidly. After all, many many folks are working on it and the moment someone finds the smoking gun, everyone will know.

Yes of course they would. While splicing refers to RNA modification, it does not change ones genes. However, the mechanisms for splicing are inherited. Likewise, there are mechanisms that can change the genomic content, via e.g. recombination. You are talking about two things. One is summarizing (accurately) existing literature and the second is putting a spin on them to make their argument. The tricky bit is spotting where they are still sticking to lit and where they start their spin. It is fairly often that woo doctors start off with a reasonable interpretation of a finding and then somehow convince that doing just X will magically improve health, without actually having data to support that. I am, for example, skeptical that the literature he summarizes actually make a link between thoughts and recept subunit diversity. Relating molecular structures to something seemingly simple as cellular physiology is a challenge already. And then making the step towards higher-level functions is an almost insurmountable jump from the bottom up. If there was a basis for that, the work would be published in high-ranked papers, not on a random website. I will also add that based on the article the author is not taking a metaphysical stance. Quite to the contrary, he argumes mostly from a brain perspective- just being more certain about how it relates to thoughts than the evidence allows.

How would you know? Did you follow up the original papers to see whether he summarized them accurately? And if so, how, if he does not reference them? I can list any a virtually unlimited amount of data, but if you can interpret them any way you want, the data is worthless. You need the right experiments to guide discovery. I have not seen any convincing or coherent example how that would likely work. Why (and how) would you extrapolate from an unknown? But to put it simply, evolution is based on inheritance. If the magic thing is not inherited in any way, it would entail nothing for evolution. If it did, it might, but since we do not know how, it is useless to speculate.

I have not looked at the links but it looks like that the blog you are reading is an MD and not a research scientist. This by itself is not necessarily an issue but just skimming through one of the links I cannot find any references. So at least on the surface there is no way of telling whether whatever is written there is based on actual facts or just assumptions. Generally speaking, a blog is not a reliable source of information.

I have no idea what even theoretically the argument could be. Other than perhaps if we just make life harder for half of the population everything will be better?

That is an interesting point and incidentally something that I feel is happening in e.g. the area of microbiology. DNA sequencing has become so cheap and attractive that is has displaced traditional microbiology from many areas of research and very few younger scientist learn the many tricks you have to do to e.g. cultivate tricky organisms. As a consequence, we have vastly increased our knowledge regarding what is out there (or rather, whose DNA is out there) but our understanding of what they are actually doing is slowing down quite a bit. Somewhat strangely, this also seem to affect the literature. One would assume that once it is out there, knowledge would not be lost, but I do start to see a fair bit of newer publications that apparently ignore or are simply unaware of many older publications, resulting in repeating the same insights, just repeated with more sequencing. I suppose it is not unusual that the shiny next new thing can affect science and research directions but if putting things on backburner results in generational gaps, the impact seems indeed outsized.

I kind of doubt that. Obviously, I can only speculate, but there is no good reason to stick to a human design. There are quite a few solutions in terms of locomotion that can deal with stairs and navigate tight areas without having the difficulties of bipedal locomotion. Are two arms really the optimal solution to everything? How about five fingers? From the images it at least appears that most joints seem to mimic that of humans. Again, not sure whether it is really optimized or just a copy. There are simple remote-controlled service robots in Japan, which can to a range of choirs including cleaning, opening doors, doing laundry etc. but only copy the human shape mostly to appeal to their clients. That being said, there is a big branch in robotics that focuses on humanoid robots not necessarily because of functionality, but because we rather want to be surrounding by something that looks like us. Many older humanoid systems (famously the Asimo) were built specifically with the purpose to mimic human movement more than anything else. The Tesla robot is probably going that route and enhance it with their software (and power) capabilities. But from what I read- to make things general-purpose is still way off and Tesla has not demonstrated a clear path to that yet. I may get it wrong, but it looks to me that the goal was really to mimic human movement first (like Asimo) and then try to figure out how to make use the design to create the desired actions. So a bit like the opposite of a purpose built system, where you start with the desired list of actions and then create a system that can do that. While it does make sense conceptionally, the devil is in the details and which is where all-purpose systems often fail.

Also weird. It sounds like there would be no need for factories as there are too few people able to buy things. So why increase productivity by automation?

Exactly. If it wasn't able to do so, it is not multi-purpose to begin with. Are they actually at the point where the robot can do things without being remotely controlled? One should also point out, that beside the coolness factor, there is no real functional reason to make it look like a human, which would make it likely less functional for certain tasks. But being cool is probably a more important point for Tesla to catch up to competitors.

It does look like starting with a solution and working backward. Also, isn't Tesla kind of way behind with their robotic solutions? This is probably even more problematic as they want to have a general-purpose solution, which probably does not help to get a workable product out.

Didn't stop Watson to propagate the alternate version. Obviously, the idea was important at that point as until then, the idea of gene expression and protein biosynthesis was not coherent. But if anything, our understanding of biology tends to change rapidly (though at the moment it feels that several areas are slowing down, but that might be just weird gut feeling and the consequence of getting old). Things are also fun if watched from the molecular perspective only. Many aspects, such as how the DNA is twisted and/or wrapped around proteins also influence gene expression and there might be other spatial effects related to protein crowding and so on.

In case you are referring to the central dogma of molecular biology, in its original and slightly more accurate form it mostly refers to the information flow from nucleic acids (DNA or RNA) to proteins. Basically it just states that you can derive the protein sequence from the nucleic acid sequence but not the reverse. The issue is that it RNA processing breaks the "dogma" a bit. The alternate version, which is more commonly taught in school refers to DNA->RNA->Protein information flow (usually replication is not part of it but at least in principle could be). But that is also not accurate as there are processes such as reverse transcription that break that rule and if one considers the process itself rather than just the information in form of sequence, the involvement of proteins (and RNA) in synthesis, regulation and so on, it is fair bit more complicated. I am not a big fan (anymore) of calling the process a dogma or paradigm as it is a bit pompous and overinflates what we knew at that time point. Of course that was in the 50s, but there is a reason why we tend not to name things like that in bio that often anymore. It is hard to hold on to specific paradigms when biology tends to do very unexpected things, if you look closely enough. There is a reason why the more I worked in the field, the less I am inclined to assume a certain state of normalcy in biological systems. They are all just different kinds of weird.

There is a lot of signaling going on, but not all (or even most) originates in the brain. Roughly speaking, any metabolite has some potential to influence directly or indirectly gene expression (and thereby protein production). Generally, the signal gets circulated via blood to the various tissues in which the responses are generated. Signals also end up in the brain where it can trigger responses to release signals that goes into the blood and so on. I.e. there is a constant back and forth and not really a hierarchical, central control (in most cases).

I should add that this is not how the current line of though is on that subject. What I hear more frequently is that consciousness (to put a more specific term than mind to it), arises from distributed activities, which are predominantly neural in nature. This is not limited to the brain, but that is where signal across the body accumulates. There are multiple hypotheses regarding how the integration of these signals might arise in consciousness. A problem goes back to the definition of consciousness and how we can empirically measure them to test predictions. Competing theories focus on slightly different aspects, but there is now increasing calls to either unify them and/or test exactly where their predictions diverge. But in order for that to work they need to be measurable outcomes (e.g. brain activities and predictions on which areas should be active upon a given stimulus and for how long given the context). Thus, the strength of all these hypotheses, as opposed to a vague distinction, is that we can actually predict what should happen, design an experiment where the conditions should be valid and then test if it happens. If we claim that there is an unmeasurable metaphysical component, it is akin to stating that we can only keep speculating but never figure it out. Here is a nice perspective paper that provides suggestions how to systematically evaluate competing theories on that matter: https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abj3259