According to 23andme’s Twitter
Image reads,
Approximately 8% of DNA is originally from viruses, which infected your ancestors and became integrated into their cells.
.. Should a retrovirus happen to infect a germ line cell – i.e., a sperm or an ovum – the retroviral DNA will be copied into the offspring’s DNA. And their offspring. That’s called an “endogenous retrovirus”. Some cause or contribute to cancers – and sometimes (for example) that DNA even gets co-opted for a useful purpose.
.. Estimates vary – many of the retroviral sequences have been modified by mutation over the aeons, making it hard to find them all – but recent estimates do come to about 8% of the human genome having a retroviral origin. There’s a fair chunk of virus in all of us.
Most Popular Theories of Consciousness Are Worse Than Wrong
If you bundle enough information into a computer, creating a big enough connected mass of data, it’ll wake up and start to act conscious, like Skynet.
.. And yet it doesn’t actually explain anything. What exactly is the mechanism that leads from integrated information in the brain to a person who ups and claims, “Hey, I have a conscious experience of all that integrated information!” There isn’t one.
.. This type of thinking leads straight to a mystical theory called panpsychism, the claim that everything in the universe is conscious, each in its own way, since everything contains at least some information. Rocks, trees, rivers, stars.
.. Consciousness has a specific, practical impact on brain function. If you want to understand how the brain works, you need to understand that part of the machine.
.. The explanation is sound enough that in principle, one could build the machine. Give it fifty years, and I think we’ll get there. Computer scientists already know how to construct a computing device that takes in information, that constructs models or simulations, and that draws on those simulations to arrive at conclusions and guide behavior.
Francis Collins: The Scientist as Believer
Horgan: As a scientist who looks for natural explanations of things and demands evidence, how can you also believe in miracles, like the resurrection?
Collins: I don’t have a problem with the concept that miracles might occasionally occur at moments of great significance, where there is a message being transmitted to us by God Almighty. But as a scientist I set my standards for miracles very high.
Horgan: The problem I have with miracles is not just that they violate what science tells us about how the world works. They also make God seem too capricious. For example, many people believe that if they pray hard enough God will intercede to heal them or a loved one. But does that mean that all those who don’t get better aren’t worthy?
.. I’m trying to figure out what I should be doing rather than telling Almighty God what he should be doing. Look at the Lord’s Prayer. It says, “Thy will be done.” It wasn’t, “Our Father who art in Heaven, please get me a parking space.”
.. But we shouldn’t judge the pure truths of faith by the way they are applied any more than we should judge the pure truth of love by an abusive marriage.
.. First of all, if our ultimate goal is to grow, learn, and discover things about ourselves and things about God, then unfortunately a life of ease is probably not the way to get there. I know I have learned very little about myself or God when everything is going well. Also, a lot of the pain and suffering in the world we cannot lay at God’s feet. God gave us free will, and we may choose to exercise it in ways that end up hurting other people.
.. The harder question is when suffering seems to have come about through no human ill action. A child with cancer, a natural disaster, a tornado or tsunami. Why would God not prevent those things from happening?
.. Horgan: I’m an agnostic, and I was bothered when in your book you called agnosticism a “cop-out.” Agnosticism doesn’t mean you’re lazy or don’t care. It means you aren’t satisfied with any answers for what after all are ultimate mysteries.
That Time in 1927 When SCOTUS OK’d Sterilizing ‘Imbeciles’
One of the primary arguments that the Nazis raised in their defense was the fact that they had largely lifted those policies from the United States where more than half the state legislatures had passed forced sterilization laws, where states had already carried out tens of thousands of such sterilizations, and where the Supreme Court in a 1927 case called Buck v. Bell said it was perfectly legal to do so.
.. The president of Harvard was a eugenicist. There were two major geneticists at Harvard writing in a positive way about eugenics. Medical journals were filled with pro-eugenics sterilization articles. The American Bar Association president endorsed a eugenics law in Connecticut. The thought leaders thought it was a great idea that would lift up humanity.
.. In 2016, it seems like an Italian or a Jewish person from the Ukraine seems a lot like another Caucasian, but back then there were very big distinctions. Jews and Italians were regarded as very other and not all that white. I was shocked reading the way people spoke in the 1920s — including members of Congress — about Italians and Jews. It was incredibly raw and bigoted
.. She was taken in by a foster family in Charlottesville, Virginia. She did OK there until a nephew rapes her and she’s pregnant out of wedlock. This was a day and age when that was not acceptable, and the family was possibly worried that the nephew would be prosecuted.
Rather than send her to a home for unwed mothers, they had her declared feebleminded which wasn’t hard to do for a woman pregnant out of wedlock.
.. The Nazis were adopting their own eugenic sterilization modeled largely on our program. The more people associated eugenics with this idea of building a master race and anti-Semitism and racism, it came to be seen as un-American.
.. The other was reading how Oliver Wendell Holmes thought. I had learned about him as this great justice, and the degree to which he was incredibly bigoted and condescending toward people who weren’t of his so-called high birth made him in many ways a terrible judge.