Ah well, no advice that I offer* to obstinate politicos, pundits or AI-inventors ever gets past the Cliché Protection Barrier that's established to firmly keep out any ideas (and I got a million of em) that are Not-Invented-Here. Should I take a hint and stay in my lane?
Naw. But one way to keep defending this incredible, miraculously creative, anomalous Enlightenment Civilization is to keep pointing out how wonderful science truly is! And hence...
== The Wonderful World of Nature and Biology! ==
First... some great sites:
Anton Petrov's science podcast is a favorite. (Though I occasionally catch some small error; it's half the fun!) This time: using micro black holes for energy purposes on Earth. Izat familiar? Tis, if you read my eponymous novel Earth. And this happens almost exactly on the timeline I projected, for that story's dramatic arc.
My friend - and 25-year host of the Closer to Truth sci-philosophy TV series - Robert Lawrence Kuhn - just published a comprehensive survey of theories of consciousness — A Landscape of Consciousness: Toward a Taxonomy of Explanations and Implications. A balanced survey of the core philosophical issue of our time.
Drinking water directly from the air? A concept predicted in one of the Out of Time novels… Boondoggle by Tom Easton and Torion Oey, which will soon be published by Amazing Stories. Now a real life product!
== Tracing the hidden history of life ==
Moreover – "But what is really interesting is that it's clear it possessed an early immune system, showing that even by 4.2 billion years ago, our ancestor was engaging in an arms race with viruses."
How much of the evolution of biochemistry is lost to time? "We might never know exactly, but our research yielded an important piece of evidence: only eight new reactions, all reminiscent of common biochemical reactions, are needed to bridge geochemistry and biochemistry.”
And yes, I expect the Drake factor f(L) to prove trivially large, as did f(P). Planets and life, everywhere... but f(i) very small and f(c) - true civilizations that escape the male reproductive strategy called feudalism, in order to become creative and civilized enough to reach the stars? Vanishingly small.
== But let's cheer up! ==
Much later… a stress event in the early Jurassic may have driven many bird-hipped and two-legged dinosaurs to higher latitudes where they had to develop feathers and warm-bloodedness to survive, while the poor lizard-hipper giants had to make do in more arid lands. Yay bird-hippers! (And the furry little mammals who followed them into the hills.)
A hilarious and insightfully informative video - How Cats Broke the Game - that explores the biology and anthropology of humanity's partnership with cats... told entirely in GAMER PLAY terms, e.g. build-points and skill-sets and power-ups, terminology that winds up making surprisingly solid sense. In fact, it's new-gen speak that actually rather impressed me.
(Though humans bred terriers and other dog types who are also great ratters. And much more loyal.)
And in news from deeper time… This particular posting by Anton Petrov is especially interesting, re the impudent proposal that complex (multicellular) life forms had a brief start during an oxygenization event around 2.1 billion years ago, only to die off, leaving only single celled life till at least a billion years later, when it got rolling again. Naturally, it seems slim... though without any killer refutations, so far. And... well... interesting!
== Peering at human bottlenecks ==
New evidence indicates that humans left Africa earlier than thought.... "The Neanderthal Y chromosome, for example, is more similar to the Y chromosome found in living humans than it is to the rest of the Neanderthal genome. In 2020, researchers offered an explanation: Neanderthal males inherited a new Y chromosome from humans between 370,000 and 100,000 years ago. But that would have made sense only if a wave of Africans had expanded out of the continent much earlier than scientists had thought."
"But why do the early migrations out of Africa seem to have fizzled away? Was there something different about the people in the last wave?"
Well, yeah, I talk about it in Existence.
A more recent bio mystery that’s been discussed a lot right here, in this blog’s lively comment community (below) has been the Great Big Y-Chromosome Bottleneck, from about 7000 to 5000 years ago, which appears to have started – and ended – rather suddenly, especially From Europe to South Asia. This article describes it pretty well.
But how do you get a situation in which nearly all healthy females got to breed, but only one male in 17? And why would it happen (and stop) all across Eurasia with such brutal suddenness?
My own theory. It began with the arrival of larger farming villages, in which old tribal democracy could no longer function. No longer hold local 'lordly' bullies in check. Not when those top bullies could gather an 'army' of 20+ pals, call themselves demigods and simply take the widows of any men they killed. (That era also coincides with the arrival of large scale beer brewing; ponder that.)
And the Y-Chromosome Bottleneck ended just as quickly! Pretty much as soon as some of those large villages gathered into even larger town- and city-based kingdoms. Those bigger-scale kings -- from Ur to the Indus to the Nile -- needed law and order! They also needed men for their armies, in struggles against other big kings. And hence they would have commanded local lords to stop wholesale slaughter of other local men!
Those events would fit the order and sequence of the chromosomal evidence perfectly! Though... yes... that is a long way from proof.
And further DNA sleuthing opens such a window into a Scandinavian village 5000 years ago, tracing seven generations of 100 related individuals, 17% of whom had… the Plague. Which may have accounted for population declines. Which leads us to…
== Preparing for the next pandemic? ==
I have yet to see a single person, even one, point out the real, topmost effect of the Covid-19 epidemic. That it was a spectacularly effective and relatively mild wakeup call and training exercise, for when we must deal with the real thing. A real ‘pandemic.’
All of what I just said may offend those of you who lost one or more people to that nasty disease… or if you claim that both government and society bungled the response. True enough. Still, I am not deterred from calling em as I see em.
For example, while millions died, when you factor in remaining lifespan (most fatalities were elderly), the number of lost human years doesn’t rank anywhere in the top rank of plagues.
(Well… worst in total deaths, sure. Though not as a fraction of the population or in seismic effects upon civilization. But sure. way-way worse than anything we the living have seen.)
This is small comfort to those who lost loved ones, or who still suffer from Long Covid. (I know several and it’s a nasty syndrome that must be fought with science!) And I am well aware how consensus is shifting, re: the disease’s origins -- toward a verdict that this was no ‘accident.’ At least not completely.
Still, I expect future generations will deem the whole episode to have been ‘innoculatory’… leaving us much better prepared for something truly worse.
Like (perhaps) the H5N1 Bird Flu that’s now spreading among mammals, killing (for example) thousands of elephant seals and spreading through dairy and beef cattle*. With signs of seeping into pigs and thence maybe human-to-human… though let's emphasize that experts still rank it as ‘low risk.’
== More blessings from Covid-19? ==
A few – very few – have openly marveled over the incredible speed with which RNA-based vaccines arrived, saving millions and leading to even better/quicker skills. Stockpiles of medical supplies and apparatus are far improved and bureaucracies finer tuned. Even the mistakes that were made in the initial covid-panic led to better understanding.
For example, next time we’ll likely know within mere days whether a pathogen can be transmitted by ‘fomites’, by non-living surfaces. So, no bleaching your store packages or produce, or microwaving your mail. Though hand washing proved-out as a very, very good thing.** And fer gosh sakes stay home with your sniffles and coughs!
Surveillance and detection, while at 1% of what experts say we should be funding, are at least a hundred-fold better than before, e.g. sampling viral loads in city waste water ‘sewersheds.’
Of course, none of this is helped by anti-science manias like the new U.S. Defense Secretary appointee, who proudly declared: "I don't believe in germs and I haven't washed my hands in a decade!"
... or vaccine denialism by loons, who romanticize the 1950s as some whitebread paradise era, while ignoring the myriad ways that things were far more wretched then – and reasons why – during that decade, as I well recall – the most-adored person in America was named Jonas Salk.
If science-haters truly carry out their open plans, we could be in big trouble (as described chillingly in these few paragraphs by Robert Heinlein). Or even if they remain the raving impediments that they currently are.
None of this is meant to minimize. In fact, my job is to look ahead at possibilities, both bright and dark. And both future-view and history suggest 'pandemics' can get far, far worse than Covid-19. And while we are certainly unprepared, we are definitely less unprepared than we were.
(* Thorough cooking does kill the virus, so maybe rare steaks should be off the menu, for a while. Pasteurized milk seems to be fine.)
Then there’s this on the history of vaccines.
== Final tidbits ==
‘Researchers have uncovered what might be the world’s oldest solar calendar at Göbekli Tepe, a 12,000-year-old archaeological site in southern Turkey.’ The implications of very pre-literate sophistication are so interesting.
Does putting Neosporin in your nose help fend off covid? Surprisingly, there’s preliminary evidence that it does.
And finally this bit of genuine wisdom to cancel your incel rage junkie....
"He's just mad because he was abandoned by wolves and raised by his parents."
-- Robin Williams
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* Though again, Joe Biden has two weeks to do one thing.
One thing easily within his power, that might shatter the worst madness, infection and treason among the US political and aristocratic castes.
He could do this. He could... though his factotums will ensure that he won't.
