Claims

10 claims in “biology”

All creatures fight; nature is not peaceful

Violence and conflict are pervasive throughout nature, not unique to humans; the jungle is constant murder and death among plants and animals, so human propensity for fighting is not unusual.

factualbiology — Elon Musk

pending

Cancer Plays A Shorter Game Than The Organism

Cancer is an organism playing a shorter game than the regular organism; because cancer cannot procreate beyond the organism, it typically dies together with the organism it destroys, illustrating that destroying the larger system you depend on is the failure mode of playing a short game.

factualbiology — Joscha Bach

pending

C. elegans wiring is over-complicated and unexplained

The C. elegans wiring diagram is far more complicated than it needs to be; a human engineer designing a 300-neuron behavioral network would not produce something like it, and most of its many wires have no known purpose.

factualbiology — Jeff Lichtman

pending

C. elegans is highly evolved despite 300 neurons

C. elegans is not primitive despite having only 300 neurons; it is a highly evolved animal that has solved how to produce a complete survival behavioral repertoire with minimal neurons, and is far older as a lineage (about a billion years) than humans (300,000 years).

factualbiology — Jeff Lichtman

pending

Even sex is not a clean given binary

The sex binary is not simply given: there is a broad spectrum of bodies, intersex people, people who in different cultures count as neither category, and the very definition of sex is socially variable — so sex itself is partly socially categorized, complicating the simple sex/gender distinction.

factualbiology — Sally Haslanger

pending

Major evolutionary transitions are about information transmission

Szathmary and Maynard Smith's 'Major Evolutionary Transitions' identifies moments creating new modes of living (prokaryotes to eukaryotes, single-celled to multicellular, up to language), and the common thread uniting them is the use and transmission of information, even if the original identification was based on qualitative judgment rather than rigorous quantification.

factualbiology — Sean Carroll

pending

Genome space too vast to search exhaustively

The space of possible genomes is far too large to search comprehensively: even if all 10^88 particles in the observable universe were turned into DNA base pairs and reshuffled a billion times per second for the age of the universe, one could only exhaustively check strands of about 180 base pairs, whereas the human genome is three billion base pairs, which is why natural selection must proceed by random mutation and culling rather than comprehensive search.

factualbiology — Sean Carroll

pending

Schrodinger predicted DNA as an aperiodic crystal

Schrodinger reasoned that heredity requires atoms arranged to store information stably: a gas or fluid is too random and a regular crystal carries no new information (each atom predicts the next), so genetic material must be an 'aperiodic crystal' where successive units are not predictable from the current one — a prediction realized by DNA.

factualbiology — Sean Carroll

pending

Moving onto land enabled planning over reaction

When fish moved onto land, the long attenuation length of light in air (versus meters in water) opened a new mode of information use: instead of merely seeing and reacting to nearby threats, land animals could see far-off things and plan, contemplating hypothetical future scenarios — a more sophisticated use of the information resource that costs energy but confers survival advantage.

causalbiology — Sean Carroll

pending

Life maintains stability by exploiting information resource

A living being is distinguished from non-living matter by its ability to exploit its low-entropy, information-rich environment to persist — Schrodinger's quip that life keeps moving long after it should have stopped — and bacterial chemotaxis confirms this, since bacteria carry interior proteins holding mutual information with the external nutrient gradient rather than merely responding mindlessly to it.

causalbiology — Sean Carroll

pending