AbouBenAdhem

Many sequences of rRNA remain pretty much the same across all known animals. But Han noticed something unusual in those from the octopus: an unexpected gap that broke what’s usually one rRNA fragment in other creatures into two.

Given how widespread and highly conserved ribosomal RNA is, and how simple the mutation appears to be, it seems unlikely that this is the first time it’s arisen in the whole history of animal life. There must be some other tradeoff that octopuses found a workaround for—maybe it’s related to why they’re so short-lived?

It’s important to distinguish between predictive models and explanatory models, and between local models and global models.

The title implies an issue with global explanatory models, but the article describes issues with local predictive models.

The pre-Hispanic field systems of La Mojana in the Colombian Caribbean are so vast that they can be seen from a plane at high altitude.

Is “pre-Hispanic” a new replacement for “pre-Columbian”, or is it just used in Colombia to avoid confusion with the country name?

Specifically, an organism has to store latent information that’s unobservable to anything it interacts with (i.e., its ecosystem)—or at least, anything with an interest in predicting and controlling it. Otherwise, it has no possibility of independent behavior, and it’s effectively part of a colony organism (or an organ of another organism). It also has no differential behavior for natural selection to act on, so it can’t evolve in a Darwinian sense.

To take your example of bacteria, we don’t know and control the entirety of each individual bacterium’s behavior, but it has happened: it’s how mitochondria ceased to be independent organisms.

My personal definition of life includes the propagation of latent information—meaning that a “child” inherits something from its “parent” that isn’t visible to an observer but that nevertheless affects its potential behavior.

Assuming we can see the size and chemical composition of the gas cloud out of which a star condenses, our current theory is that this completely determines the future behavior of the star. If that’s so, then the star wouldn’t be alive by my definition. But if there’s some unobservable quality that the star inherits from its parent and that does affect its behavior, I’d be willing to reconsider.

If the plague started in Siberia and spread west for a few hundred years before decimating the early European farming communities, that might explain why steppe herders moved in from the east to repopulate: they would already have recovered from the plague a generation or two earlier.

“Generally, the Bashplemi inscription does not repeat any script known to us; however, most of the symbols used therein resemble ones found in the scripts of the Middle East, as well as those of geographically remote countries such as India, Egypt and West Iberia,” wrote Shengelia.

So it resembles practically everything except Chinese?