I'm Karl. Host of the long running Conspiracy Skeptic podcast (http://www.yrad.com/cs). My covid project was writing The Skeptic's Book of Lists. I'm currently working on a follow up called The Conspiracy Skeptic's Book of Lists.
I use this account for the following purposes
Post samples of my book to inform, delight, and entice y'all to buy the softcover or eBook format.
Post original #subgenius content. I love making crazy Subgenius posters and hanging them up around my Toronto area bedroom community. Epater les bourgeois! And praise #Bob!
Love analyzing bad creationist arguments. #evolution
Hoping to be one drop contributing to a flood of refugees from Musk Twitter. #twitter#musktwitter
"What is a woman? In Eve, Cat Bohannon traces the development of female bodies back 200 million years. A writer with a doctorate in the evolution of narrative and cognition, Bohannon offers a refreshing and lively corrective to a story that has focused mainly on male evolution." #Evolution#Females
Happy to share the latest manuscript from our lab, in which we propose that eukaryotes evolved from a genomic chimera of Asgard archaea and giant viruses.
As bizarre as this all sounds, I believe we have strong phylogenetic evidence supporting this model. Importantly, this model has also been proposed before by Phil Bell based on first principles or eukaryotic organization and similarities between the nucleus and virus factories formed by viruses during infection
How cool is that. Been looking for a paper I read 15 or 20 years ago proposing a viral theory of DNA origin, whereby an inserted DNA virus on an RNA genome would then replicate the whole bacterial genome as DNA, and the bacterium became dependent on that insertion from then on. Will read yours and Phil Bell’s to see if I can find a reference to it.
“W. Jason Morgan, Who Developed Theory of Plate #Tectonics, Dies at 87
His framework offered a new way to think about continental drift and revolutionized the study of #earthquakes, #volcanoes and #evolution.”
Also a reminder that this paradigm shift in the #geosciences did not happen that long ago!
@jascha yay, once again I get to strongly recommend the Pulitzer winning book Annals Of The Former World by John McPhee, one of the very finest nonfiction works I've ever read, up there with the best of Studs Terkel etc. It is a large four part survey of #geology and geologists in the late 20th century, with a heavy focus on not just explaining plate tectonics but also its emergence as theory and the debates around it, which were still very current when it was written. A masterpiece.
I'm going to catch us up on some interesting science for a couple of days. A break from the daily horror show.
"Survival of the nicest: have we got evolution the wrong way round?
How humans, animals and even single-celled organisms cooperate to survive suggests there’s more to life than just competition, argues a cheering study of evolutionary biology." #cooperation#evolution https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00999-5
My "Fourth Perspective" essay on why the basic unit of evolution is a complete life cycle, and thus an organismic agent, and why that really matters for evolutionary theory, is officially out today!
@yoginho
Well said. What sorts of things are you thinking of (as alternatives to feces-hurling)? To play on the analogy, if a tweet is turd throwing, a paper or a book is ... (I'm guessing that's not where you are heading here but I'm not sure what you are thinking).
🤣 I love a solid disagreement about scientific or philosophical matters more than anyone, as long as we don't just lecture past each other or only engage in self-promotion and posturing. There is so much of the latter today, so little true engagement.
Such pseudo-debates qualify as bullshit, in the philosophical sense defined by Harry Frankfurt. They are not even about the truth, they are only about promoting the bullshitter.
Journal of Systematics and Evolution is on Mastodon (as I just discovered). If you're a plant scientist or just interested in #Botany and #Evolution, give it a follow! @plantscience
Read on to find out how their research team developed a neutralizing antibody solution (injection & nose spray) that works with all current variants, including the older SARS1 virus from 2003 and the currently globally dominant BA.2.86 Pirola clan of variants. 2/
Instead of basing vaccines on already existing naturally occurring variants, design them based on mutation prediction from current variants to determine what the most likely mutations are going to be so that when the vaccines are deployed they are more likely to still be protective against the circulating variants at that time.
Hopefully vaccine manufacturers will start using better strategies like this in the future than always chasing variants and being left behind. 16/
'.. human parents ...aren't psychologically adapted for this isolation, a new study with a group of hunter-gatherers in the Congo suggests. A "mismatch" likely exists between the conditions in which humans evolved to care for babies and the situation many parents find themselves in today, says Deniz Salali, who contributed to the study.'
(NB Deniz Salali will be talking for Radical Anthropology in February)
