admin

“Whereas Dr Wildman’s team find that chimps and humans are 99.4% similar, other researchers last year put the similarity at around 95%; the figure you get depends on precisely which genetic differences you look at.” DNA mechanisms for reproduction are not a blueprint but a recipe. This BBC article does not mention that the 95% figure for chimp vs. human comparison takes into account how the recipe is followed and therefore may make more sense. i.e. it does not merely look at the ingredients of the recipe, the DNA sequences, which have usually indicated more than 98% concordance. BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Chimps genetically close to humans via Kottke

“Contrary to popular myth, Walt Disney did not choose to be frozen, though Dick Clair, a writer for “The Carol Burnett Show,” did.” MEME 5.01

In case anyone misinterprets the previous post defending Matt Ridley’s attack on those (such as Bill Joy) who see absolute dangers in innovation such as nanotechnology and concludes somehow that I am against environmentalist causes. 1. It is scientists who are arguing, backed up by solid evidence that we need to cut back pollution. 2. It is politicians, particularly those with religious beliefs that fly in the face of scientific evidence, that refuse to believe evidence for issues such as global warming. 3. Although industry is the product of a technological society and is the cause for most pollution: a. there is a difference between science and the abuse of its innovation; b. contrary to popular opinion, non-industrial societies can be environmentally damaging; c. some scientific innovations would seem to be a very plausible way to reduce the environmentally damaging effect of industrialized society (for example, information technology increases opportunities…

Matt Ridley very sensibly rebuffs the Bill Joy like hysteria in the latest doom mongering book, ‘The Final Century’: “Consider what would have happened, for instance, if we had somehow waved a magic wand and prevented the invention of agriculture. Evidence suggests that increasingly efficient hunter-gatherers would have continued their extinction of prey species – they had already devastated the fauna of Australia, the Americas and many islands – stopping only when the last tree in the last rain forest was felled. Rees admits in passing that “the most dramatic engines of current economic growth – miniaturisation and information technology – are environmentally benign”, but then fails to follow this thought.” Telegraph | Arts | Prophet or pessimist?

Back from the UK so the current hiatus here should be over. Despite the evidence from stocky hirsute Scotsmen like myself recent DNA analysis has all but proved that Human’s did not interbreed with Neanderthals. Blow to “human-Neanderthal inter-breeding” theory