So the story should soon make it to the National Enquirer and similar rags. The cancer thing should pop up then.
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I agree it’s the thrust of what you say, but since we don’t have any other life with which to compare that of Earth’s, you can say that we should expect completely different amino acids and whatnot. It could well be that life is prevalent AND the only way it works is with these amino acids and whatnot. We simply do not know, so we can’t say which is more likely or even what he odds are.
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No one could possibly figure that an animal tracing back to the Cambrian, which has high intelligence, is adaptive, a relatively short lifespan (most species) thereby compressing generations, and has between a few hundred to a few thousand offspring at one time, could evolve so quickly!
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At the Mountains of Madness
Created by: I.N.J. Culbard
ISBN: 1906838127 (Amazon)
http://goodokbad.com/index.php/reviews/at_the_mountains_of_madness_review
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That is very true. One of the reasons I get defensive about genomes is that often DNA factoids are given in context of chromosome counts, which says nothing about the overall DNA content, but distorts the perception of plant genome size. For example, C. elegans can be thought of as having thousands of chromosomes, as endonucleases cleave the post-replication DNA into individual genes. But its overall genome size is unremarkable.
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That said, the article is an accurate representation of the paper, although a lack of a link to the paper is stupid.
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Maybe the paper itself is behind some sort of paywall?
I’ll ask Mr Hawking the last next time I see him.
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Nope! It’s actually open access through Elsevier. PDF available and everything
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No paywall. Here it is: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610718300798
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Also acceptable if you’re feeling classical, but maybe a tad pretentious.
I think they may have confused parsimony for parsley.
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I’d say it’s time for them to do the apology dance.
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This is the same site that published the execrable paper linking higher melanin content of skin to things like violence and antisocial behavior. Not buying it. Sorry.
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Linking ≠ Endorsing
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OK, so I’ve read the source, and while I understand what Ozymandias was trying to do, I’m not crazy about his methods.
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Link to cited paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0191886912000840 for any who, rightfully, would like to believe crap like this could not possibly make it into the scientific literature.
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Ah (and @Logolepsy)! That is usually the case (paywall), but seems like it’s not this time.
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Glad they brought it up; that’s pretty much the opposite of parsimony.
The thing they’re seeking to explain is that the calamari genome doesn’t seem especially closely linked with the handful of other glimpses we have into the vast corpus of terrestrial genetics over the past billion years. The proposed explanation – that there is a whole other corpus out there – is pretty much the definition of needless entity multiplication.
It’s like reading two random pages from War and Peace, and concluding that since page 13 features different characters to page 320, it’s probably from some other book, despite having just read both pages in the same book.
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Mind Flayers were here. They ate all the brains and gtfo.
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