CharonY

I think you might be glamorizing it a bit more. There is something to say regarding better representation. But, in recent times, wedge issues are also immensely successful in disruption these processes. Take the rise of the far-right, for example. They do echo the US situation, while having a very distinct political system. The mixed economic model is probably as a whole better in many areas, especially for folks not swimming money. But there are also distinct issues there. I think in some areas there are clear advantages, but I don't think that they are necessarily to the political system, but based on what folks mange to agree on. Sure bi-partisan system encourages taking sides, but populations are not necessarily passive receivers. The immigrant-averse stance permeating much of the European population is quite at odds with many parties and which has fueled the success of the far-right. They also happen to be more aligned with the GOP, potentially due to the right-wing networks which have sprung up with suspected funding from Russia. Ultimately it is an interplay between system and sentiments in the population. And they often cross-feed each other. If folks did not had the simmering resentments, Trump and the GOP would not be able to profit from them. But once they did, they managed to shift the Overton window to more acceptance of previously considered extreme sentiments. That in terms gave an opening for even more radical changes and so on.

I mean, looking at the ingredients it does not seem too bad. The second one might have different design principles as they used a lot of coloring, potentially suggesting that the ingredients were not of great quality (though this is probably true for all sauce packages). The use of caramel for color is generally not harmful, but should not be found in decent quality soy sauce. It darkens during the fermentation process naturally, so adding colour just makes it appear to have aged longer, without providing the flavour. It is also possible that the production process bleaches out the colour and they restain it, but chances are that this will impact taste, too. But for bloating onion is a good first assumption.

Well, looking at Europe I don't think that representative parties are a clear solution.

Why are people using hammers when screwdrivers are so much better at putting screws into walls? The reason is that different tools are used for different purposes. Logic is helpful to investigate conclusions in relation to a given premise. If the established premise is valid for a given question, the conclusion might also be. Even if the premise is incorrect, it allows for speculative investigations. Logic is a structural element in thinking about a given issue and allows for the creation of nonsensical connections.

Not sure without seeing the whole protocol, but from what I see there no urgent red flags. TCEP being a few year old is not ideal, if it was opened years ago and not stored under nitrogen, or at least well-sealed. That being said, I have used fairly old powder without too much trouble (but used it in excess). As you are using Ni-NTA I presume that there are no metal chelators involved. I would probably run the sample through mass spec to see what I got. I am not a big fan of dialysis, as I tended to lose too much. But then that was decades ago, so perhaps the dialysis systems have improved.

There is collective disapproval, but kids also learn to clean up their classroom. That might also stick.

TCEP is routinely used in Tris under basic conditions. It is less stable in phosphate buffers at neutral Ph. Is your chemical or the solution very old?

Does not matter, selection happens on the individual not on the collective level. Also, the same issue applies. It is about reproduction not only survival. A group entirely composed of mails may survive as many hardships as they want, their gene pool will end with them. Well, that is a semantic issue, something can be either under positive, negative or neutral selection. It does not refer to the mechanism itself under which they are positive, negative or neutral. I think the issue is that you might be have a view on evolution that is not the one used in science. There is no real necessity to see intelligence as a fundamental different trait than, say the ability to use oxygen to create energy, for example.

Even worse, generally speaking affluent folks consume more and produce more garbage. As you noted, they are just better able to pay folks to clean it up and frequently things get dumped into poor areas/countries.

Yes at the time of reproduction, but if you manage to stay alive at the cost of not reproducing you are not contributing. Conversely, if you reproduce and then die, you still contribute. This is like in the example of salmons. If they don't go through the trouble of migration to their spawn sites, they would live a fair bit longer. But they would not contribute to the gene pool. In other words, if there was a mutation that prevents them from conducting that migration, it would improve their survival, but eliminate them from the gene pool and would therefore vanish as trait (negatively selected). Intelligence has shaped our environment, so the contribution to human evolution is indirect. We change selective pressures and that can affect our gene pool. The one part that could be somewhat considered direct is sexual selection. What is considered to be attractive in a mate can be culturally shaped and this could lead to proliferation of specific traits. Evolution and intelligence is harder to assess as we really do not know how it is inherited and estimates of inheritability have been diverging quite a bit. Mostly because it is seemingly a very malleable on top of the inheritable bits. I don't understand what you mean with your last questions. Evolution is not about the origin of life.

You are mixing different things here. Survival does not equal passing on genes. They can increase chances, but very contextually. Conversely, there are multiple species where reproduction is coupled to death. Secondly, improving chance of survival does not necessarily involve intelligence. Effectively one would need go back to the basic definition of evolution, where we ultimately end up with terms like inheritable traits that are under positive selection, for example.

I would argue that this not the case either. Mechanistically shaping the environment one or another might change selective forces acting on an population. But so does virtually any interaction as selective forces are only static in models. And if we call any action changing the selective landscape guiding, then, as others already pointed out, we would expand the term guidance likely to a non-meaningful way. I would probably rather state that guidance requires a sort of intention and goal, which are absent in this cases. I.e. the intent and goals of these actions are related to proximate survival but not with the intention focused on evolution (the only exception I could come up with would be breeding programs with specific goals).

It is like saying that mitochondria are the power plants of eukaryotic cells. Hence evidence for industrial revolution in cells.

I'll contest that. There have been different approaches to creating knowledge and the issue here is that Western science has trouble recognizing other school of thoughts. In fact, quite a few of the early Western science approaches loaned concepts from elsewhere but only over time did it become so successful. One important bit is that it actually did away with the spiritual aspects and became increasingly materialistic. In addition, there are many non-Western religious systems believing in some form of creator, so it really seems like cherry-picking the arguments a bit.

It is fairly simple actually. Having no evolution means that the gene pool does not change from generation to generation. This is a situation we call the Hardy-Weinberg equilibrium https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hardy–Weinberg_principle In order for that to happen it requires certain conditions to be satisfied, such as infinite population size, entirely random mating, no mutations etc. These are obviously not true for human, or in fact almost all populations. In other words, evolution is the normal situation and having no evolution is in fact an extraordinary claim. How would you, for example ensure that the next generation has the same genetic composition as the previous? Simple answer is, you cannot. What you might be thinking about are likely large-scale changes in visually obvious traits, but that is not what happens in the short time humans have been around. Rather, the level of phenotypic change you should be thinking about are things like, the shift in lactose tolerance, pigmentation. A fun study found that shift in folks growing up in the UK were an allele associated with higher nicotine dependency was weeded out because folks died young (due to high smoking habits). In populations where smoking was rare and also in modern times (again, fewer smokers) these alleles are becoming more frequent again (as selective pressure have lessened). In short both theoretical as well as empirical evidence clearly demonstrate ongoing evolution and one might need to revise ones preconception of what evolution is to fully realize that.

Just very quickly and generally (not really specific to the trait in question). We can start at the locus (site) of the mutation that provides the trait of interest and then look at the surrounding regions, which presumably are not under the same selective pressures. If the mutation arose in different persons independently, we would expect to see some variations in those surrounding areas (think of it as different persons providing different backgrounds for the mutation). Blue eyes arose likely not due to a mutation in a gene associated with eye color (OCA2) but in an upstream regulatory element. The interesting bit is that the surrounding area is also conserved in all (tested) folks with blue eyes suggesting that they all share a common ancestor providing this mutation. However, as this analysis relies on testing of folks who are still alive, it obviously cannot tell us if there had been other mutations with the same phenotype or even independent cases of the same mutations. I.e. we can say all currently living folks with blue eyes (who have been tested) have the same common ancestor, we we cannot say that there were no other cases of blue eyes in the past.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

It does not have to be. It is possible that other variants existed, but they vanished with this specific haplotype being the sole survivor.

Your definition for intelligence seems to include simple biochemical processes, as such it does not seem to be a useful definition. I.e. you could as well use the term life or survival instead of intelligence. And none of those are directly linked to evolution. You could survival all you want, but if you do not procreate, it matters little for evolutionary purposes. The premise you seem to make is similarly broad. Everything contributing to survival is consider guidance. This is not only overly broad but also seems to suggest that there is a target that is being guided towards to, without specifying it. Together, these definitions are immensely unhelpful to discuss evolution, as it mostly ignores the actual connection to evolution, focuses on individuals rather than populations and largely ignores environmental selective pressures as well as stochastic mechanisms of evolution in favour of sliding the term "guided" in. Not sure what you mean, but I want to emphasize that evolution happens on the population level (i.e. the composition of the gene pool of a given population). Generations.

Not really, evolution is the change in the total genetic composition (i.e. gene pool) over time. Even if no traits are changed, the gene pool can. However, selection happens on heritable traits, which is what you are thinking about. But this is only one aspect of evolution and not the only one. And what parents transmit to the next generation are not identical traits, it is the genetic material. This is an important distinction as depending on the mix the next generation(s) receive, the traits might be quite different from those of the parents.

Well, the way it is going, college-aged people will sound like chat GPT, because all the writing comes from there (or will be soon). Probably a bit off-topic, but we will likely see fewer folks writing more complex texts with their own voice. Mostly, because they never learn to do so.

I think a fundamental challenge is building trust between the groups. And from what I see, these happen mostly on the ground with local association and between activists. But Oct. 7 put a heavy strain on these initiatives. And the political entities in this conflict are very apt in leveraging the distrust.

I think the seminal undergrad text book on evolution is still Futuyma. The 1-2% with chimpanzees is a different type of count, and was really base on looking at genes (i.e. excluding large non-coding areas) and even then it was based on a subset of genes. In addition, I believe they were based on substitutions. For example, let's say humans have a stretch of DNA being GCTTA and chimpanzees at the same locus it would be GGTTA then there would be one substitution (C->G). But there are also regions with deletions and insertions. E.g. GCTTA becomes GCAAGCGCTTA, the question is how you quantify the additional AAGCGC (or the missing part, depending on perspective). The original 1-2% differences simply ignored them. I believe lining up the genomes and matching the bases would still yield something like 80% match, but not entirely, memory gets a bit hazy.

Yeah, I used that paper to tell my wife that she is more Neanderthal than me. Did not go over well at all. Typical Neanderthal!

I saw another depressing poll (somewhere) showing that folks believe that Trump would be better to handle the Gaza conflict (well actually handling anything would be stretch). Here is a tracker on the litigations, though most likely it all hinges on SCOTUS. https://www.lawfaremedia.org/current-projects/the-trump-trials/section-3-litigation-tracker