kanated
kanated t1_ircm4po wrote
Reply to comment by ClarkFable in Mitochondrial DNA Is Working Its Way Into the Human Genome by molrose96
>that mitochondrial DNA is printed from some subset of the 46 chromosomes
It's not.
Don't think of mitochondria as just another organelle. Think of them as something similar to a parasite that lives inside your cells, except it's beneficial.
They have their own DNA, they reproduce independently. They aren't formed in the zygote, they already come inside the egg. They spread from mother to child this way for billions of years. Each time a cell divides, some of them go along.
kanated t1_iqxr0lb wrote
Reply to comment by Individual-Jaguar885 in TIL a German scientist named Alfred Wegener was ridiculed in 1912 for advancing the idea that the continents were adrift. Ridiculed as having “wandering pole plague.” or “Germanic pseudo-science” and accused Wegener of toying with the evidence to spin himself into “a state of auto-intoxication." by Hot----------Dog
>wasn’t as effective as we were initially led to believe.
What were we "initially led to believe"?
I was initially led to believe that the vaccine was highly effective at preventing serious cases and that the virus was highly mutable. So far everything checks out.
kanated t1_its7oz4 wrote
Reply to comment by jawfish2 in Eli5: I don't understand why there seems to be a general consensus that gdp will continue a trend of growth, and why this would be beneficial, considering the cyclical nature of economies and empires rising and falling. Isn't economic downturn on some level unavoidable or even beneficial? by candymannequin
>Classical economics expects growth, forever. Many scientists have complained that this is absurd, and untested, and unprovable, given the laws of thermodynamics and a finite planet. Indeed any observer can see today that our population requirements are bumping up against resource limits and global warming.
It's not absurd at all because economic models never claimed to be able to predict anything at the time scale where the laws of thermodynamics become the upper limit to growth.
We're hitting resource limits and global warming but all of that has solutions. We could do a full turn towards renewable energy sources right now and economies would still grow. They just wouldn't grow as much, so short term greed doesn't allow it.
None of that is preventing growth. Quite the opposite, right now growth rates are a source of the problem, not a consequence.
>Ancient empires grew until they exhausted local resources and then collapsed
This didn't really happen very often. Ancient empires didn't really have the production capacity to exhaust big resource reserves.
The more common case is that ancient empires collapsed because the resources themselves decreased due to outside factors. War, disease, drought, floods, etc...
You can advocate for slow and sustainable growth all you want. No one's going to say it's not a worthy cause. However, a system that works contrary to human nature is bound to fail and therefore pointless. The solution lies in playing along with human nature, and not against it. Research leads to technological advances that make sustainable energy sources cheaper, and therefore better for both growth and sustainability. Vote for that.