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Comment Threads

• brucecohenpdx commented on Helplessly dominant
  Let's go further: the term "gene" has outlived its use. Heated agreement. Now that molecular biologists have finally accepted that information theory and the thermodynamics of information are useful concepts when applied to genetics1, maybe we can get agreement on some fresh concepts of what the genome is composed of. One of the more hilarious interviews I've read in the last few years was one with Crick, in which he admitted that he really hadn't meant to call it the "Central Dogma of Molecular Biology", but he couldn't think of another word at the time. So a proposal that he...
• brucecohenpdx commented on Helplessly dominant
  What the article doesn't mention is that fruit roll-ups are full of sugar, too. As an old person (64 at the moment) who has been diagnosed with ADD and has probably had it since age 12 or 13, and who has raised two children, one diagnosed at age 12 with ADHD and the other not diagnosed but probably having ADD, I can testify from long experience that sugar can have extreme effects on children. Hyperactivity, stomach upset, mood swings, and the list of symptoms goes on. Long term effects? Almost certainly, but that's much harder to tease out from anecdotal...
• Greg. Tingey commented on Helplessly dominant
  heteromeles @ 145 Interesting idea. I come at that from the opposite side - my training is in science and engineeering, yet I'm still amazed at the number of people who treat "Machines" with no sense or respect, and are then suprised when said machines fail. I don't mean faulty design or poor manufacture, either. The simplest example I can think of is the htousands of people who can't wait for the last few drops to fall out of a water-tap, and screw down the top even tighter - thius causing it to fail, in short order. Car-drivers are another...
• mike.hamerski commented on Helplessly dominant
  Slightly strange to put forward the case for the existance of proximate empathy by referencing research which displays a singular lack thereof, inter-species or not. "... scientists injected acetic acid into one or both of each pair of same-sex adult mice they were studying, causing them to writhe in pain, and allowed them to observe each other. An injected mouse writhed more if its partner was also writhing, but only if the mouse had previously shared a cage with its partner for more than 14 days." You might want to look up why Alexander Shulgin, pharmacologist and the rediscoverer of...
• brucecohenpdx commented on Helplessly dominant
  Sorry to be so long in replying; I've been dealing with taxes and business matters in Real Life. It's been quite some time since I read Dawkins' The Selfish Gene and The Extended Phenotype, so it's possible I'm exaggerating his position somewhat, but I don't think I'm distorting it beyond recognition. And my take on him is to some extent colored by the debates of the time of his writing (the late 1970s and early 1980s). Aside from the primary argument of gene selection versus group selection, in which Dawkins pushed gene selection very hard as an alternative to group...