jonathansizz

This isn't true. Almost all mutations are either harmful or neutral, so any such gene grouping would be selected against.

Maybe Twitter could use the hashtag system to accomplish this?

2. Make replies work better. Relax the character limit for replies to several hundred characters, make replies threaded, make low-quality replies go away, and high-quality replies float to the top (just like HN). Remove the line noise by having @ and # symbols not show up in the feed. Hashtags and mentions also shouldn't use up any characters. If all this happens, it will become reasonable to have actual conversations on Twitter.

3. Stop showing me duplicate tweets. Once I've seen a tweet, I shouldn't see it again if it's reposted (something many media outlets tend to do frequently).

Actions like this will make Twitter a better experience for regular users, and should help to kickstart growth.

4. Charge whales (those with the most followers, who disproportionately benefit from using Twitter) actual monthly fees.

They'll just say the new images are faked, just as they say the original missions were.

At present, clickbait works because it makes money by driving ad impressions. Many readers don't even mind wasting time on such content, and those who do quickly move on. The downside to the publications churning out clickbait is minimal, because the readers have little investment in the product.

But once people are paying their own money to read articles (even a nominal amount), their attitude to clickbait will change. After they've been burned a couple of times by a particular outlet, they won't pay them for any more of their articles. But they will return to those outlets that provide value for money.

Presumably, most people will still stick to low quality but free sources, but I think there's a potentially substantial market for high quality content, if the price is right.

The big question is, will the amount people are willing to pay cover the costs? Real journalism can be expensive.

# https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/pu...

90% of our genome is unconserved, meaning that it is not under selection. Most of this consists of dead viruses and mobile elements. Such DNA was present for its own purposes while it was active but is long since dead. A tiny proportion of this junk is later co-opted by the host organism.

The null hypothesis is that junk DNA is junk. It survives in the genomes of species with small effective population size because its selection coefficient is too small for it to be purged.

The alternative hypothesis you gave would need evidence to support it, otherwise it's another 'just so' story. Ask yourself, if this junk is beneficial for adaptation as you hypothesize, why don't bacteria have any? More broadly, why is the amount of junk DNA indirectly proportional to the effective population size (as the null hypothesis predicts)?

Junk DNA is real, although it also serves as a broad canvas on which selection can subsequently act. Pervasive transcription doesn't mean pervasive genomic adaptation.

A significant number (perhaps even a majority) of biologists seem to hold views akin to a naive adaptationist outlook, which demonstrably leads them astray in their interpretation of data. The proportion of the educated public holding these views is even higher. Richard Dawkins has a lot to answer for.

Above all, a simplistic adaptationist view of evolution is not only inaccurate, ignoring the last half-century of developments in the field of population genetics, but also misses a lot of the (often subtle) detail that makes evolutionary biology so interesting.

In general, I hypothesise that the more a system is automated, the less awareness is demanded of the operator and thus the more likely the operator is to get into some kind of trouble, whether this stems from development of a lazy habit, rustiness or just not being able to recover the situation if the automation abruptly fails. In fact, we've seen several plane crashes attributed to pilot error related to increasing automation in aircraft.

1) Why do you think their results would get better if more people use their engine?

2) If their results really are better than Google, as you claim, why is their user base so small after all these years?

3) Why should we trust them any more than Google? How do you know they're not actually collecting your data or passing it on to the third party engines they use?

https://www.fws.gov/birds/bird-enthusiasts/threats-to-birds....

I also thought it wouldn't be allowed, but apparently it is. If they just released a separate free version there'd be no problem.

I guess the developers reasoning is they can get as many suckers as possible to pay for the full game after initial launch, then after a couple of months they squeeze more money out of it by changing to a pay-to-win format which hugely increases their user base.

It's a disgraceful approach and I certainly won't deal ever again with any devs who do this. Unfortunately, such devs don't really get much shaming so they probably get away with it.

What's direct about that? Companies are directly accountable to their shareholders, accountable to the general population via the government, and very indirectly accountable to their customers.

And nobody has got you since the 90s. When will it happen? And when it does, what will 'it' be?

In your original post, you state:

Central dogma reminder: DNA -> RNA -> Protein

and what I'm actually arguing with is your description of what the central dogma is stating. Because it actually states

Nucleic Acid --> Protein

My criticism was a technical one regarding information flow, and I wasn't trying to argue against the importance of developmental factors downstream of genes to the production of complexity.

Sorry if I seem pedantic, but we have to be careful with our terminology, because otherwise as soon as someone learns about reverse transcription they write an article saying how the central dogma is dead.

That's not the central dogma; it's the misinterpretation of what the central dogma states, which I pointed out in my above comment.

Please follow the link I gave in my earlier comment. I'll quote the pertinent section here for you:

The Central Dogma: "Once information has got into protein it can't get out again".

Here's a follow-up article by Crick, from 1970 (which he wrote in response to repeated misinterpretations of what he'd originally stated):

http://www.dna.caltech.edu/courses/cs191/paperscs191/CrickCe...

So if you want to diagram it, it would be DNA/RNA --> Protein, where the arrow represents information flow.

Note that (rather ironically!) it was actually Watson who popularized the misinterpretation, in his college textbook. The reason I point this out is that there are many known violations of the Watson version of the central dogma, but none of the Crick version.

Also, I'd take issue with your claim that genes are like a blueprint. I'd say they're more like a recipe, as stated in the article (and I think your comment implies this anyway).

The larger point (that the article mostly ignores) centers around human vanity: we're actually not really much more complicated than many other species, especially our close relatives like the apes. Most of the differences between us and them are developmental, and you don't need many genes to produce such changes.

^ Crick 1956, 'Ideas on Protein Synthesis'. http://profiles.nlm.nih.gov/SC/B/B/F/T/_/scbbft.pdf

But it's comforting to know that you wouldn't force sterilization upon them, but instead merely encourage their children to reproach them for having brought them into the world.

Maybe these children could also volunteer for euthanization to reduce the burden on society imposed by such worthless individuals? This would also have the benefit of making the idiotic, conformist parents remorseful for having indulged in their mindless rutting.

I think it's much more likely that many existing programming jobs will also be automated away.

It's saying that a 20-year old conservative is necessarily heartless, and a 50-year old liberal is necessarily stupid. I don't see how either of these follows; I know plenty of young conservatives who care deeply about other people, and old liberals who are very smart.

It's just a lazy meme.

New Scientist was always aimed at the general reader, but like many other publications they've gone downhill in the web era, aiming for clicks above all else. The freeloading public must share the blame for this. If you find a magazine you like, please subscribe so they can pay their bills.