DNA animation

Big /solutions/ need falsifiable hypotheses and tests.

(So do small solutions)

Being American, he may not understand what is meant by a "just so" stories.

I once viewed a house for sale where I had to duck going between some rooms. I'm 5'3"/1.6m tall :)

When you said he wasn't published because he "was on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain" I thought dialectical materialism must be the reason, but it was because of scientific dogma and not scientific socialism dogma.

They made two movies about it, and as of 1984 they were supposed to be "soon available in the West" but probably not on Netflix any time soon.

It sounds a lot simpler to repeat than some discoveries but nobody at the journals bothered. The article only mentions two rejections and implies they were both in the USSR. He gave up the idea of publishing before trying foreign journals.

A much more likely source of big change is the modified selection pressure from the environment we have changed.

I completely agree. I've progressed far enough in my thinking that I believe we have a *moral imperative* to diversify our own germ line, creating many sub-species of specialists and hybridising with animal genetics. Yes, that's much more than just "a step too far" for most folk, rather it transplants the dialog onto another planet. I've been brewing up a novel about it for well over a decade now.

Clifford Heath.

Well, all life relies on its environment - at the very least an energy source. The question is at what level of development is the specific environment. Humans need plants - and we rely on some chemicals they make (essential amino acids) but don't directly use any of their high-level machinery. Viruses do - but it's just a question of level.

As I said elsewhere: life is a quine, that also outputs its own machine. The machine must operate on "ambient factors" so we're down to deciding on the allowed sophistication of those factors. I think it's fair to say that it's only "life" if the required factors are *less* sophisticated than the life form that requires them.

That would disqualify viruses, which are clearly less sophisticated than their required medium.

Clifford Heath

That's a dumb thing to say. I've made significant contributions to DUV and EUV lithography, tomographic atom probing, jet engine development, laser fusion, ICCD cameras, all sorts of non-electronic stuff.

I think that the theory and tools and tricks that we use to design electronic systems is excellent training to think about other, non-electronic dynamic systems. I don't know of any other discipline that might be better.

Signals and systems, control theory, general circuit tricks... all educational.

Everything is electronic these days.

Or we may be inventing other life forms for fun.

Because science keeps being blindsided by astounding discoveries.

Exactly what problem are you trying to solve, with the origin of life?

We do a lot of small stuff every day.

I mean that one might well find some intelligence at Harvard.

Huh? Science is NOT blind to possibilities, those discoveries are the result of planning and careful work.

I was very surprised when it came out that flight navigation was possible by means of interpretive dance, but the scientist who was studying those bees recognized it with no trouble; the scientist SAW THE POSSIBILITY, it's everyone else who was blind to it.

Everyone who notices something new, is doing science; that observation isn't just a feature of 'science', it's the definition of it. Astounded, occasionally. Blindsided, no.

hen

ant

Page down to "Synthetic Genomics".

"On March 25, 2016 Venter reported the creation of Syn 3.0, a synthetic gen ome having the fewest genes of any freely living organism (473 genes). Thei r aim was to strip away all nonessential genes, leaving only the minimal se t necessary to support life."

Google is helpful if you know what you are looking for.

In this what is required is to recognise that you are asking the wrong ques tion. Barking up the wrong tree isn't a useful activity.

Some of us have seen the good ideas patented. There are lots more bad ideas than good ideas, and people who come up with lots of ideas get good at thr owing out the duds, and equally good at separating bad ideas from good idea s that other people have come up with.

"Not invented here" is problem, but less so for people who have come up wit h at least a few good ideas.

Your problem is that you seem to have a lot more bad ideas than good ones ( which is pretty common), aren't much good at separating them for yourself ( which is a weakness), and take it hard when other people do it for you (whi ch is an unattractive character trait).

That's the difference between plausible and implausible ideas. You should t ry to develop your capacity to differentiate between them.

Charles Lutwidge Dodgson was being satirical about a particularly Victorian mode of self-improvement. As a mathematician (an expert in symbolic logic) he had a better grasp than most of what "impossible" actually meant.

It's an English usage. Lots of what Americans say strikes users of the Engl ish and Australian dialects of English as really funny. "Donald Trump is pr esident of the United States" has a huge comic content. Of course, at the c ircus the clown car stays safely inside the tent.

Probably untrue. Genetic engineering offers the possibility of intelligent design, letting us step over to some completely different local minimum sa y from retina at the back to retina at the front eye design.

Hybridising with animal genetics sound nuts. Pinching useful sequences from other species DNA may work, but they'd probably have to be reworked so ext ensively before they'd work in us that "hybridisation" isn't remotely the r ight word.

A little more background reading would seem to be in order.

I've read a lot of science-fiction - if you felt like e-mailing me a chunk of the text I might be able to give you comments.

Name one.

But then again there's Dan, who seems to think that having gone through Harvard absolves him from having to exhibit actual intelligence.

Not where discoveries /convince/ other people because of their /evidence/.

That excludes many "discoveries" that turn out to have no basis in fact, e.g. N-rays, phlogiston, and all the free energy claims, etc, etc.

No it doesn't. Science will always adopt any new evidence that comes to light and incorporate it into the established theories. It is the scientists who are looking very carefully to see how nature works.

We are quite literally in a golden age of observational techniques today with the ability to detect cosmic rays, neutrinos, gravitational waves as well as imaging in almost the entire electromagnetic spectrum.

Experiments or observations that seriously challenge the status quo are the stuff of Nobel Prizes if they are reproducible and convincing.

The first inkling of radioactivity was a bit of a surprise to everyone and the fact that multiple allotropes of carbon remained to be found when I was still at school is a bit of a surprise too. But science adopts and adapts anything new that comes along. Anyone could have isolated the fullerenes from soot using benzene but no-one did and anyone could have used Sellotape on graphite to get a monolayer.

The laws of physics and chemistry are determined by experiment and there have been some very elegant experiments done to test and break the existing paradigms. Scientists are human so there can be large egos involved the Hoyle vs Ryle debacle over the Steady State vs Big Bang cosmologies (a derisive name Hoyle coined for Einstein-de Sitter expanding universes which stuck) was particularly bitter. The last guard of the old paradigm sometimes never accept that they were wrong.

However, you are rather prone to picking up nonsensical gibberish and trying to push it as a valid idea in what is nominally a science group.

How did it get started? Where should be be looking for other life?

We may even be able to use DNA or similar molecules to solve certain combinatorial problems. There has been some interesting work done on recasting certain problems into a form where they can be computed by manipulating designer DNA sequences in wet chemistry. eg.

There is an optimum size of difficulty of problems that can be tackled with today's available resources. So long as Moore's Law holds you can prove that for some hard computational problems the fastest way to the solution is to go surfing on the beach for a couple of years and then start building your hardware using the latest fastest CPUs and memory.

This may change now that we are getting awfully close to the limits of what feature detail resolution you can sensibly etch into silicon and still have it work. We must be close to the point where Moore's Law runs into the buffers - at least for a while on limitations of atomic scale.

Perhaps the wrong word. Pinching genes is less than I mean; I mean pinching phenotypic structures.

Thanks for telling me that I'm not the person who knows the most about what I have or haven't been reading :P

I could share the plot outline. There are still some big "story-telling" aspects that I haven't figured out how to do.

Basically it looks back two generations on the aftermath of an accidental escape of a private experiment by an idealistic viro-ceutical researcher.

Clifford Heath