sbratman.bsky.social
Author of Spontaneous Order and the Origin of Life, Cooperation and the Evolution of Human Nature and What Evolution Learns. Inventor of "orthorexia." Amateur landscape photographer.
30 posts
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34 following
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Dunbar theorized this based on what amounts to a back of the envelope calculation in 1992, with no real evidence, and no supporting followup, and plenty of contrary information; nonetheless, it has subsequently become a "fact."
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There's no easy way to estimate such numbers, and you have to take a grain of salt with figures given out by sponsors. This attempt came up with figures much lower than that (but still impressively high) www.gelliottmorris.com/p/no-kings-d...
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I would love this to be true but I have not seen any reliable reporting above 3-5 million.
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To understand the profound Russian history of this kind of statement, and the casual slaughter of Russian soldiers in war, see the excellent book "Russia: The Story of War." I found it quite eye opening.
www.amazon.com/dp/0674972481
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Yep.
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Without commenting on Polymarket specifically, this is a rather simplistic take on betting markets. The correlation between their predictions and what occurs is surprisingly good. Simply put, forcing people to put money on their predictions forces them to work harder at making accurate predictions.
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I follow your work closely. I recently wrote a popular science book on facilitated variation, largely inspired by papers written by Tobias Uller, and Richard A Watson. Tobias (and Watson) very kindly looked through it and made suggestions.
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The folks I mean are all in evo-devo, but when they told me this and I checked, I found this new usage elsewhere too.
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When I tried to tell them that most people still regard genes as pc-g plus non translated RNA, they disagreed. My own "polling suggests otherwise, but they do seem to be correct that common usage in research post about 2015 uses "gene" to mean any portion of DNA that is active.
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They occupy much more space on DNA than pc-genes and mutations in cis-regulatory regions may be more commonly a source of evolutionary change than mutations in pc-g. To avoid circumlocations like "mutations in genes or cis-reg regions" they use "mutations in genes" to mean both.
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It seems that they are being called genes too, according to the evolutionary biologists whose work I recently "translated" into a popular science book, although not everyone has caught on. It seems to have happened post 2015 or so
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And also for cis regulatory sequences? They seem to occupy a lot of DNA territory
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I have noticed that the meaning of the term "gene" has been quietly shifted so that it now encompasses both non-coding and coding sequences. Few people outside of biology are aware of this.
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Is it really an issue of mandate or popularity? It would seem more significant that he's now willing to punish institutions in painful ways, which he didn't do in 2017. (I'm nonetheless greatly in favor of them standing up to him.)
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Calling it an annual loss seems questionable given the extreme fungibility of oil sales; China is now buying oil that others were buying, and some of those others will buy US oil. Or am I missing something?
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it was obnoxious elementary school level humor. Just dumb. SNL does that sometimes.
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If there were universal agreement on this, or if we could just declare you dictator of the Democrats, things would be simple.😍 But people in our big coalition have a big basket of ideas.
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I think it's psychologically instructive to write "we" instead of "they," because writing "they" makes it someone else's problem. One reason we Democrats are feckless about it is that the right course is far from obvious.
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It just hourglasses when I try it.
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That conclusion seems to be about known forms of sexual signaling, etc., on land, but how much do we know about sexual signaling, etc., in the oceans 500 million years ago? I don't think we know anything much at all about that, do we?
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Couldn't sexual signalling and warning coloration have occured in the ocean, which is where animals were 500 million years ago? But, yes, since fruits didn't exist yet, that rather had to be an exaptation.😀
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Also, the fact that mammal ancestors lost color vision suggests that the capacity must be maintained under selection to persist, no?
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Sure, but at the very least it is also not possible to claim that early color vision neutrally adaptive. It is also reasonable to assume that complex traits did come under selection until shown otherwise; the known examples of non-adaptive complex traits are comparatively rarer.
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It would seem that color vision must have had *some* adaptive significance prior to the emergence of colorful fruit, etc. It's far too complex to be just a spandrel. The dating places it land animals emerged. It must have been of some use to marine animals.
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The fact that shark-like morphology has remained quite consistent in many respects for so long, and in a single lineage, suggests that it must be a remarkably optimized design, not capable of much more improvement, and so sucessful that it has remained continously competitive with other species.
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(This is probably in your book, which I have not read, mostly because I already agree with the thesis.)
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When I wrote a popsci book on Kim Sterelny's ideas of human evolution (BTW he eschews stating the sex of the hunters in this theories), I discovered that Fongoli chimps hunt with sharpened sticks, and it the females who do it, not the males.
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And, if you create a sphere around the sun with a diameter equal to that of Neptune's orbit, you can fit all the stars in the Milky Way within it. Same conclusion.