>became

Science has always been political however, and is likely to forever remain so. There was never some apolitical yester-year from which it has descended into menial politics, it has always been that way.

Nature did a pretty good 3-part podcast on the subject re: the Journal’s history with and approach to where science and politics meet.

“Which ones” is probably not a super stellar question because they probably have quite boring technical names, and the list of ones we actually have found and named is likely much smaller than the list of potential causative agents.

References 4-7 of the linked text:

> 4. Boller K, Konig H, Sauter M, et al. Evidence that HERV-K is the endogenous retrovirus sequence that codes for the human teratocarcinoma-derived retrovirus HTDV. Virology 1993;196:349–53. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

>5. Lower R, Boller K, Hasenmaier B, et al. Identification of human endogenous retroviruses with complex mRNA expression and particle formation. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 1993;90:4480–4. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

>6. Nelson PN. Retroviruses in rheumatic diseases. Ann Rheum Dis 1995;55:441–2. [PMC free article] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

>7. Nelson PN, Lever AML, Smith S, et al. Molecular investigations implicate human endogenous retroviruses as mediators of anti-retroviral antibodies in autoimmune rheumatic disease. Immunol Invest 1999;28:277–89. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]

Some rheumatic conditions and at least one cancer have been at least linked to expression of human ERV’s, if not necessarily the causative agents of such.

They might carry it, sure, but I’d argue it was likely their great-grandparent^nth that was actually infected.

I think this line of inquiry is more about re-emergence of previously-dormant ERVs. As a human, some ~1-8% of my DNA is ERVs, depending on who you ask, but I’m pretty confident that I was never infected by any of them myself. I was just born carrying them.

Even risking dysentery isn’t worse than dying of dehydration.

Doctor can fix dysentery. Can’t fix dead.

If it’s uninsured it is not the “family vehicle” it is the “family liability”.

>same system

These systems are much, much bigger than you’re thinking of.

The Hawaiian islands are volcanic islands created by the same “hotspot” plume in the mantle as the overlying plate moved over it. They were created in sequence by volcanic eruptions from that same upwelling. It makes perfect sense for all the islands to be related, so for multiple volcanoes on one island to be related is a no-brainer.

The matching mineral composition and timing of those eruptions indicate they are related. Kīlauea and Mauna Loa’s eruptions are linked to decreases in the other’s activity for a while. Given all the evidence, there’s no need to guess; the volcanoes that make up the island of Hawai’i are linked. It would be far more difficult to adequately explain how they weren’t, if that were true.

Yes. But involving parties without their consent is where it crosses the line.

I understand that.

I don’t understand peeping your phone camera under stalls when the internet has so much quality filth easily available.

Some part of this fucker enjoyed having power, of doing it without their consent, and that’s never okay.

The difference in air pressure between a pressurized cabin and sea level is not really enough to make that much of a difference.

Now, if you teleported right into outer space, you could expect that gas to find the path of least resistance out of you, probably the incision, but you’re not going to “blow up”.

Slime molds can, without your definition of “think”, design more parsimonious subway networks than I can, and I have a whole advanced primate brain I think with all the time.

Where do you draw the line between thought and intelligence? Abstract thought? Because no amount of abstract thought will make me better at designing the Tokyo subway system.

We have two kidneys not so that one of them can be a spare, but because they evolved from structures that were already pairs. We never gained an “extra” kidney… we still have two kidneys. In most organisms with dedicated kidney-like-organs, you will find these in pairs along the body, probably due to bilateral symmetry during embryogenesis.

Why don’t we have two of other things, for redundancy? Well, unfortunately, the best response to evolution questions is often: ”why would we?” The benefit of evolving an extra of a given organ would have to outweigh the cost. That’s putting energy and time into something that the organism ideally will never need.

Two kidneys for a human-sized organism is pretty cheap, evolutionarily speaking, for your osmotic-filtering-needs. Annelid worms have two nephridia per segment. But two stomachs, two hearts, four lungs? The “cost” rises very quickly for these structures.

That cost is very high when the only time you would need a spare is a life-threatening injury. The only benefit it confers is a higher chance of survival upon taking catastrophic damage. Organisms that sustain life-threatening injuries don’t often survive them - if you’ve taken enough damage to irreparably damage an organ, the chances of you surviving that are not particularly high, even if you have a spare.

>happening.

Idk about this word. We never actually have the discussion, and I can tell, because the word “reparations” is still a bogeyman.

No, I think this discussion keeps getting hinted at, and you’re tired of the hints. Because if we actually ever had the conversation, you’d have much more immediately relevant things to complain about.

Oh yeah. If you smoke, a noticeable effect size is basically guaranteed!

Life is the process of homeostasis, or preventing your equilibria from shifting.

You die before any of your equilibria shift very much, because that’s what dying is.

Neurons are tiny. The capacity for intelligence seems to be linked much more with how they are connected than how large the resulting structure is.

We would only expect to see intelligence evolve in an organism to the degree that it improves their fitness. Intelligence is not a universally good trait; it is expensive to maintain.

Koalas are drop dead stupid because they’ve gotten themselves stuck in a valley on the fitness surface, not benefitting from intelligence. Ants don’t need to be individual geniuses, because the colony’s intelligence is an emergent property arising from many much less complicated little nodes.

The death penalty is a waste of everybody’s time and money while provably providing no benefit to society, which you would know if you were basing your comments on any evidence. It costs more than life imprisonment, tying up state resources in endless appeals, it does not function as a deterrent on crime, does not improve the mental health outcomes of victims’ families, and some percentage of those convicted are innocent and they get murdered anyway. No benefit, all costs, but you aren’t attacking that.

Instead, you’re in here awfully blasé about basing your assessment on when the state should end peoples’ lives on your own arbitrary emotional criteria.

Takes one to know one 😎

I think the problem lies with your model/question. You’re taking it for granted that the math is 2^n , because that works for a couple generations at a time that a human can hold in their brain at once. I think that’s leading you astray. The concept of “generations” is also tenuous and mostly only works for a limited number of generations of specific individual ancestors of one specific single organism you’re looking at. As boomer/millennial discourse has proven, generations are not actually, like, a thing, they’re just these constructs we use to explain things. What makes sense to describe a 30yr period in your own life as you relate to your parents and children does not work very well for describing a 300yr period where the timing of births is all over the place.

When you compare two separate peoples’ family trees, they don’t align neatly, you just get a forest. It’s not like the human population just iterates forwards as a group every so many ticks like in Conway’s Game of Life.

You can perform this simple check on your model: If the population has grown, that means at any instant, the “moment of birth rate”, if you will, will on average be positive. There are more babies being born than people dying. How then can the number get larger as you go back? There were always fewer people each year back. We know that because there are always more people each year forward.

Unrelated to substances, but I wanted to piggyback because one of my favorite facts is that Earth is also the location of the coldest known places in the universe.

Labs on Earth have created systems closer to absolute zero than anything we have yet observed off-Earth.

Plenty of polymers can form spontaneously.

Cellulose is special because of the specificity of its linkages, and wood is special because of the complex entropy-fighting necessary to order it that way.

I think you are underestimating several very large quantities. Surface area of the earth covered in water, volume of the atmosphere, the amount of water in the atmosphere at any given time, and the sheer amount of energy striking the surface of the Earth every second. These are big, huge, human-brain-defying concepts and our minds can only reify numbers on paper to a certain degree.

The Earth is, generally speaking, BIG. Precipitation may feel like a purely local phenomenon, because we generally perceive it ourselves in a very limited area around us, but I think you’re underestimating the interconnectedness of the water cycle and globe-spanning air/ocean currents.

The oceans are likewise big, like break-your-brain-massive. Forget volume for a moment; the surface area alone is a mind-boggling 70% of the globe. The surfaces of Earth’s oceans are our main source of evaporation for the water cycle, and preventing your local canal from evaporating is not going to make a dent. By comparison, the surface of the ocean is also our main source of oxygen, but you don’t seem too worried about that.

We have plenty of water. The H2O molecule is not in short supply. The problem with local water sources is never the amount of water on the planet, it is having usable/drinkable freshwater nearby. Preventing your reservoir from evaporating quite as fast is not going to mean the local farmers won’t get rain.

TLDR: the reason storms roll in is because the water in those clouds is from somewhere else.

Yeah, humans aren’t plants. We can’t just ignore dose-dependence when it comes to our expression.

How is it not?

Do not forget his freakish, block-shaped torso.

Ribs like a fucking pet crate.

Nope. By the time you have symptoms you are already dead. There is no treatment at that point; the prognosis is a wooden box.

The treatment for rabies is the vaccine, because that prevents the disease from progressing from the exposure part to the “you’re already dead” part.