Modern Mongolia, perhaps. The Golden Horde of Genghis Khan was not so tolerant!

Also please don’t look at it

My point exactly.

Perhaps we’re just not as interesting as we think. Maybe aliens don’t want to contact us for the same reason I don’t want to contact kids playing in the park: I’m simply uninterested in whatever they’re doing.

Kinky

Publish or perish

Descartes warned us but we didn’t listen

Devolution confirmed

One historian described him as an “anxiety-ridden nerd”.

TIL that Charles Darwin hated everybody and everything!

Is dark matter still a thing?

Not just microbes. HGT has been observed in carnivorous plants as well. It could be much more prevalent than we think.

The discovery of horizontal gene transfer implies that it’s more like a web than a tree.

"Biologist Johann Peter Gogarten suggests “the original metaphor of a tree no longer fits the data from recent genome research” therefore “biologists should use the metaphor of a mosaic to describe the different histories combined in individual genomes and use the metaphor of a net to visualize the rich exchange and cooperative effects of HGT among microbes”.

I look forward to this dinosaur = chicken colloquialism being inevitably discarded.

What is the information?

Trees hella smart.

What is a species? What is a genus or a taxa? It seems like the lines become more blurry the closer you look at it.

dck

Scientism is the dogmatic belief that empirical science is the only source of knowledge. It’s not arguing in bad faith to say that this is a dangerously flawed ideology.

The inconvenient truth about scientific research is that 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘮𝘦𝘢𝘯𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘰𝘧 𝘥𝘢𝘵𝘢 𝘪𝘴 𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘴𝘦𝘭𝘧-𝘦𝘷𝘪𝘥𝘦𝘯𝘵. Information requires a metaphysical framework in order to be interpreted in way that makes sense.

Lacking a philosophical foundation, scientism produces dangerous results, like when Hitler and his ilk explicitly referred to Darwinism as their justification for the Holocaust.

Interesting read. I’m familiar with the Arthur C Clarke quote…

You know what I mean, brother. There’s a huge scope of difference between applied sciences and natural philosophy. Our technological advancements fail to resolve fundamental questions about the human condition. Scientists rarely study epistemology or philosophy in order to attain our degrees and I think it shows in the public trend toward scientism.