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Why the Earth Has Fewer Species Than We Think
- ggm 8y agoI don't read as much biosciences as I used to but neo-lamarckism used to be a term of abuse. He's writing it non ironically as a recognised label!
- Nomentatus 8y agoRight. I remember writing with such epigenetic-ish ideas about inheritable DNA modifications to Jacques Monod, decades ago. He didn't even deign to reply; such nonsense did not even merit politeness.
- fouc 8y agoSuper fascinating. It seems like there's hardly any need for DNA/gene hacking when we can probably do most of it from tinkering with epigenetics.
- Tloewald 8y agoMore like he’s extrapolating from differing bumps on two populations of nautilus that evolution is less important than individual variation.
- lugg 8y agoSimilar to the dinosaur situation [1]. I wonder what kind of error rate we have? [1] https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_shape_shifting_dinosaurs/ https://www.ted.com/talks/jack_horner_shape_shifting_dinosau...
- andrewflnr 8y agoIt's news to me that methylation is "usually unwelcome". I had gotten the idea that it was just another built in general regulation mechanism. Would it be beneficial to somehow strip off all methylation?
- amelius 8y agoI'm not a biologist but this link [1] seems to say that folate intake increases methylation, which then reduces risk of certain conditions. [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16251634 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16251634
- ajeet_dhaliwal 8y agoInteresting, surprising and unsurprising all at once. We can all probably think of a bunch of animals that morphologically or phenotypically appear different but are the same species. An alien observer may at first glance may even think this of humans, when looking at a growth stunted person very short/skinny person (perhaps due to malnutrition or other reasons) and a morbidly obese person.
- ummonk 8y agoOr just different skin tones, hair colors and textures, facial features such as skin around the eyes, body shapes, etc. If alien biologists were trying to discover a bunch of new species (as human biologists do), they would be classifying humans as a bunch of different species.
- jabgrabdthrow 8y agoThe another alien biologist would discredit the first by pointing out they are in fact different subspecies but all the same species, by definition of species and subspecies
- onychomys 8y agoA counterpoint that suggests that his nautilus example is bunk: https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/epigenetics-the-return-of-lamarck-not-so-fast/ https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2018/08/26/epigenet...
- kjeetgill 8y agoIf anyone head always found the whole species terminology to be a little vague and lacking: check out this video by brainscoop[0]. Most explanations really fail to bridge the gap between terms like species, breeds, races, subspecies etc. The fact that a number of different "species concepts" exist was a big eye opener. 0: https://youtu.be/9fOfFlMe6ek https://youtu.be/9fOfFlMe6ek