82 karma · joined April 7, 2022
It's not a technical skillset issue, it's a case of lacking resources, leadership changing priorities and changing requirements mid-development, causing a lot of work to be redone.
We still have highly skilled developers working in this area, if we can just actually be allowed to do (and keep) we work we have.
2) The organism(s) affected by this gene transfer would need to be under some evolutionary pressure that would benefit from extra genetic variance. Genetic variance in itself is not a driver of evolution, evolutionary pressure is, which does need the variance to actually do anything. Pressure is the sculptor and variance is the clay, without one of those there won't be a statue.
Also, normally most random mutations are either negative or neutral (there's a lot more ways an organism can be dead than alive), so I would suspect this might also be true of gene transfers. Though gene transfers from environmental DNA isn't as random as direct genetic mutation, so perhaps there's something interesting happening there. But I wouldn't be surprised to find out that the risk of cancer or viral infections would be higher.
0: The name comes from the example: the rabbit runs faster than the fox, because the rabbit is running for its life, while the fox is running for its dinner.
Swiss German is not regarded as a its own language by any nation, though from a purely linguistic perspective it could very well be classified as its own language. What is deemed a language vs. a dialect usually comes down to politics. The saying usually goes something like: "A language is just a dialect with an army".
0: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palatalization_(sound_change)
It's also okay to have opinions about language of course. I just often see people confidently stating, that they're speak the right way, and those others (from that other city, country, those young people, those poor people, those black people, etc.) speak the wrong way. And it often boils down to either ignorance about how languages actual work and evolve, or just elitism/classism (or worse).
And as somebody who cares a lot about languages, this just rubs me the wrong way, and I see it so often. Hence my previous response, pardon the snark:)
I can highly recommend watching their presentation on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFb5wNj2ztM
The argument you're making would be the same as this: "It's easier for an English-speaker to learn Finnish because it uses the Latin alphabet". The only reason that helps is that you don't also have to learn to decipher a new set of squiggles. It doesn't actually help you understand spoken language or speak it.
1: Mandarin is a Sino-Tibetan language, while Japanese is a Japonic language. These two language families are not related in any ancestral way known to modern linguistics.