It’s not the alt-right! It’s just…*proceeds to regurgitate bog-standard alt-right talking points*

FTFY

They went mask off so fast that I’m surprised we didn’t hear a sonic boom.

Tl;dr: imagine the success and continuity of not only your career but the careers of your employees had a significant element of random chance involved. Welcome to research.

Now former scientist here. I see the typical “people would do this anyways” comments but I’d wager they don’t understand what it’s like to work in science and academia. It’s publish or perish. In the United States, it’s an absolute capitalist meat grinder and it can be brutal.

As a lead researcher, you are dependent on securing grant money not only to keep your job, but to keep the jobs of your co-workers and the very lab itself afloat.

How do you secure grants? By showing you have the experience and ability to complete the research.

How do you show you have the required experience and ability? By your lab’s record of publishing the results of successful research.

What is successful research? In an ideal world, it would be what was found at the end of an investigation, regardless of if it disproves the null hypothesis or not. In reality, it’s the results of research that have further application, either in industry or that disprove the null hypothesis and act as a step to get you further related grants.

What happens when an investigation flounders? So you didn’t disprove the null hypothesis. In an ideal world, you publish a paper explaining what happened and everyone knows what not to do in the future. In reality, it’s basically unpublishable as journals want what will make them money. Your lab now has the research equivalent of a gap in your resume. You continue with other research and hope it is publishable. If your lab has a streak of bad luck and multiple projects crap out, now it’s harder to secure grants. The downward spiral begins.

Is what this researcher did wrong? Absolutely, but I get it. I 100% get it.

We need serious reform that removes the profit motive. A functional research system would better catch fabricated results before they’re published. It would alleviate the pressures that drive good people to do bad things in the pursuit of doing further good. It would actually enhance scientific discovery as ALL results would be published and without parasitic publishers as unnecessary middlemen.

Have you checked out United Allergy Services? They claim to have self-administered allergy shots.

So Google Search, even back in 2000, was an AI?

Linkin Park… 2000… Middle school?!

Fuck, I got old.

TIL agriculture = capitalism. I bet they think the free market is exclusive to capitalism too.

This whole exchange is hilarious as the DK is strong in your counterpart. The best part is how smug and condescending they are (winter child lolol) despite clearly having no idea what they’re talking about. My money is on him being a libertarian.

Edit: hoooooly shit, I was right!

And it’s SUCH a good game. I got through it with the DLC and cried at the end.

Please stop spreading misinformation. You’re on the internet. Kindly fact check yourself in the future. It’s better for everyone, including you!

Seriously. As a biologist, my education was general enough that I learned how little I know about everything, instead giving me an inferiority complex.

I know they make terrible shirts.

Whoa, that post history. Now I have to wonder if this is a fetish or if OP has an obsessive/compulsive disorder.

I looked up the page and it gets worse.

You will need to shop for a car inverter. Find one that is at least 1,500 watts, and it will help you power your refrigerator for up to five hours—usually without damaging your car battery. Considering how much food we keep in our refrigerators, a $200 car inverter is a bargain!

I grew up believing the same until somewhere in high school, when I started taking science seriously.

… a jumble of local maximums and chance.

I really like how you phrased this. I’m totally stealing it.

Oh no, rate of mutation is definitely a thing and is controlled by several factors. A big one is generation time, which is what it sounds like, the time between each generation. The copying of DNA is a source of mutations. This is why many controlled experiments on evolution are done with bacteria, who have super low generation times. For example, depending on temperature, the generation of many salmonella species is around 20-30 minutes. That lets you crank out massive numbers of potential mutations, then introduce a selective pressure, like an antibiotic the species normally isn’t resistant to or an energy source it normally can’t utilize, and see what happens.

To answer your question, yes, a higher mutation rate would confer an advantage. To a point. Most mutations are deleterious and usually lead to death, a few are benign and do nothing (at that point), and a very rare few are immediately advantageous. As long as the rate of mutation isn’t so high that the deleterious mutations combined with whatever other pressures are wiping out the population, more mutation means more chances to have the right trait to deal with a novel pressure or, very rarely, do something better.

To preface, I’m a microbiologist, so I have skin in the science game. I hate how these articles often have science illiterate authors or authors who are imprecise with their wording. They repeat misinformation on basic topics that science educators have been striving to correct for decades, perpetuating the cycle.

…the study shows once again how evolution throws up multiple solutions to basic problems…

In this case, it’s the “mysterious force of evolution that whips up solutions to problems”. Evolution doesn’t create solutions. There is no guiding force behind evolution.

Evolution through natural selection selects for existing solutions that were generated randomly through mutation, increasing the frequency of that trait because those without either die or are outcompeted. What happens if a trait is required for survival but no organisms have it? They all die. That’s why over 99% of all multicellular species that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. If you include microbes, make that 99.99999%.

It’s not. I’m guessing they did a Google search, looked at a few misleading article titles, and then decided they were a scientist.

On average, the hole has been shrinking, but 2023’s hole was the 12th biggest on record. The eruption of Hunga-Tonga was thought to be the main factor.

The mass die-off reference likely refers to penguin chicks dying because climate change is causing sea ice to melt earlier than before. The poor little guys are falling into the ocean and drowning. It’s not ozone layer related, though

I like that you’re thinking of alternatives, though! Don’t ever lose that, it’s less common than you might think.

I’d imagine an increasingly hostile world economy coupled with a then-looming but now beginning climate crisis might have a huge impact there.

It’d be bad. Real bad. An algae bloom of massive proportions. It has one huge issue.

Enough algae to make the rivers run green will use up enough oxygen at night to kill off fish and oxygen hungry invertebrates, starting a chain reaction of death.

Now you have a river full of dead organisms, so they start decomposing thanks to microbes. You know what many types of bacteria love? Oxygen. So they start using up oxygen, multiplying all the while. Night hits and the algae need to use oxygen, but a bunch die because there’s not enough. Now the river is full of literally hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of decomposing matter. The river largely goes anoxic (meaning there’s no oxygen) so things start dying left and right. A bunch of those bacteria can live with and without oxygen, so they use up what they can and keep on chugging without.

Now we’ve moved from aerobic respiration to anaerobic. You know what the primary byproducts of anaerobic respiration are? Organic acids and alcohols, which smell. The river begins to smell like an infected wound. It’s no longer green but deep, murky brown from the suspension of decomposing organisms. This continues until the river flushes everything out, but it kills what’s downstream as it continues until it hits the ocean, where it likely continues to kill everything in the vicinity until it becomes dilute enough.

I’m a microbiologist and worked with algae and cyanobacteria as an undergrad. Never underestimate the impact of uncountable billions of trillions of living organisms.