flyos

@flyos@jlai.lu

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  I was merely jesting at the refusal we (the French) had of Darwinian evolution, because we chauvinistically preferred Lamarck. The text on the statue is basically this: the (childish) attempt of French biologists at making Lamarck rather than Darwin the true hero of the story.

  But, yeah if I need to support my take, I don’t think he can be called the “father of the doctrine of evolution”. First, because “evolution” is a term strongly associated with Darwinism, rather than “transformism”. The former is a radical version of the latter, whereby all species come from a common ancestor, which is not at all Larmack’s view. Second, Lamarck wasn’t the first transformist, many other people suggested species could (like Buffon, although he was very careful about it, or… Erasmus Darwin). What he was, certainly, was the first to provide an auto-cohesive transformist theory. The problem was, his theory was most just that, auto-cohesive. Lamarck lacked Darwin drive to anchor his theory firmly into biological facts, and Darwin actually had little consideration for Lamarck’s work because of that. He certainly didn’t “build” on Lamarck, this is has been made quite clear by historians. This would be my third point.

  A last thing is that I see a lot Lamarck associated with inheritance of acquired characteristics, but he’s not. Or, rather, it’s nothing specific to Lamarck. It was a very common thing to assume at the time, and Darwin’s theory of heredity (pangenesis) was compatible with inheritance of acquired characteristics. And Lamarck’s theory bears little with modern epigenetics (or rather this idea of environmentally-induced epigenetic inheritance which we call “neo-lamarckism” for reasons beyond me), because it was not the environment that induces change for Lamarck, but an internal driving force akin to a habit.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨[deleted]⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago⁩:

  But, but, but, the text under the statue says that Lamarck is the “father of the doctrine of evolution”. Was I lied to? 😶

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨o Christmas tree⁩ ⁨⁨4⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago⁩:

  I don’t get the Poincaré one?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Megaladon't⁩ ⁨⁨11⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago⁩:

  Would have been slightly funnier and nerdier with the Dimetrodon IMHO.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨sexy time⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  As a whole? Basically none. It’s advantageous for the males though, it’s something that evolve in a context of sexual conflicts (males and females have contradictory evolutionary optima). Here the males advantage is to have a many mates as possible while the female is advantaged by being choosy regarding its mate(s).

  Evolution is not always about optimising things for a whole species.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Just Terrible⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  So, I’m not alone… Thank you!

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Miracle cures⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  If it kills your cells, it can’t be bad, right?

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Miracle cures⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Reminds me of this website happily reporting that you should eat curcuma because curcumin was shown (?) to be a possible cellular anti-proliferating… 🤦

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨We live in a meritocracy.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  Some people did, look up the Peer Community Journal. Backed up by more and more organisations.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Effective decolonization requires a radical transformation that can only be realized through a radical praxis.⁩ ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩:

  That’s exactly the goal of Peer Community In: you put your paper on some archive, you ask a “Recommender” to recommend the paper, they select reviewers and the lot, and they decide to recommend or not your paper after some iteration of the process (classical peer review I’d say). Then you can update your paper in a final version, with a kind of stamped version saying it was recommended by XXX (the peer review process is published along as well, I believe).

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evolution is not as random as previously thought, finds new study⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago⁩:

  Not only mutations, genetic drift as well, which by definition, purely at random.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evolution is not as random as previously thought, finds new study⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago⁩:

  This article was posted a few days ago FYI.

• ⁨Comment⁩ on ⁨Evolution is not as random as previously thought, finds new study⁩ ⁨⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago⁩:

  What the…

  OK. First, nobody “previously thought” that evolution happens at random… Parts of it, yes, sure, like mutations or genetic drift. But selection is not “at random” in any reasonable meaning of the word.

  Second, the paper results are basically about how selections shapes the co-occurring of genes within a genome, in the context of e.g. gene transfer. Interesting, yes. Revolutionary, certainly not. Most biologists would have predicted that outcome… Of course, selection is going to constrain the co-occuring of some gene families, why would this be surprising?

  Anyway, look into the study, it looks interesting but you can spare reading the article, it does a very bad job (sorry OP) at placing the idea in its scientific context and the authors are not helping with their bragging about “revolutionary” discovery.