I am always blown away when a teacher tells me that something, that I would have previously considered heresy in the scientific sense, is now being considered as plausible due to new innovations of modern science. It really completes the circular nature of things. These ideas that seem common sense, we complicate a little bit. Then they become impractical. But we study further, and then they become inevitable. It’s a remarkable testament to human ingenuity that so many ideas follow this pattern.
Just last quarter Jean-Baptiste la Marck was someone who we looked at just last quarter as someone who imposed a foolish idea on our modern scientific view of descent with modification. He proposed that traits and attributes acquired by an individual would then be passed on to it’s offspring. We learned that this was not the case according to modern evolutionary theory. Evolution happens because a gene pool withing a species becomes sufficiently varied and eventually part of the species is split and isolated from the rest of the population. Through inbreeding, traits emerge over generations in an event called speciation from genes already present in the gene pool. If these traits are beneficial then these populations will survive and a new species is created.
A very specific notation was made here noting that traits acquired after the initial gene combination that results in the organisms DNA is inconsequential in the traits of the offspring. LaMarck was proven incorrect. But my teacher told me about an emerging field in genetics called epigenetics in which genes can be turned on and off in response to the environment, and this can be passed on to future generations. Now he warned that this does not really mean that someone who has an arm cut off is not going to have 1 armed off-spring. If that were the case, LaMarck would never have been discounted. The idea is that stimulus that effects plascicity and neural connections, can in fact be directly passed down.
I looked into it and an interesting experiment was performed at MIT and published in the Journal of Neuroscience. Mice were genetically modified to have decreased brain activity and memory. They were then placed in a stimulating environment and given excersises to increase their memory. Now obviously this helped the mice as singular organisms, but the unexpected result was that the offspring which shared the genetic predisposition to decreased mental activity actually had retained the increased mental activity acquired by their parents.
I think that this has broad implications on the importance of nurture in conjunction with nature to give traits to organisms that are capable of lasting generations.
Not totally sure where this guy is headed, but he makes some pretty good points. Pablo Picasso said “All children paint like geniuses. What do we do to them that so quickly dulls this ability?” Wish it didn’t end with an iPhone endorsement.
I recently attended a lecture by the Chief Editor of Science News, Tom Siegfried here in Portland discussing probability and it’s uses and misuses science today. Every once in a while I see or hear a new idea that really sticks out to me as having a lot of large implications in the way things work.
I have never really found any interest in statistics or probability as it always appeared to me as an esoteric reduction of humanity into numbers in some sort of attempt to maximize profit margins. The mathematical persuit of misers.
It actually started with the philosopher Blaise Pascal, whom we all know is a gambling man. His friend wanted him to come up with a mathematical description of the probabilities in card games. Of course Pascal was happy to oblige, and what resulted after several generations of alterations is what we now come to know as Game Theory. The statistics that drive economic interactions between competing powers.
Pretty early on, people became interested in the applications of probabilities to modern science, especially within the last 100 years, as quantum theory has taken apart classical mechanics into something that can not be engaged with directly, but only with degrees of certainty. These degrees of certainty had convenient ties to the probabilistic work done driving the forces of economics, and so they were adopted unanimously across all scientific practices as research became less static.
Calculating what is referred to as a P-Value is an essential part of all modern scientific research, and this is the intriguing idea that was introduced to me. Read on below.
Morphine is a painkiller derived from the poppy plant. The naturally derived form of morphine from the poppy plant is what defines it as an opiate. For the last 200 years morphine has been used as one of the most effective painkillers we know of, interacting directly with the central nervous systems pain receptors.
Posted in Art, Science at 5:45 am by Administrator
I started my first batch of beer last night with a recently acquired home brew set-up. It took about 3 hours start to finish, and the end product one month from now, will be 5 gallons of chocolate porter. It came from a basic starter recipe the guy at the brew shop recommended to me. Here’s the rundown of the process in the manner to which my organic chemistry class has made me accustomed.
