Category: Science
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You Generate More Energy Than the Sun: A Fermi Calculation
According to the second law of thermodynamics, the amount of disorder or entropy in the universe can only ever increase. There are pockets of order…
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An Answer to Jimmy Carter: Life is common, intelligence is rare
In Bully for Brontosaurus, evolutionary biologist quotes this letter he received from president Jimmy Carter in response to one of his essays. You seem to…
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The Enemy is Abstraction: Keep it specific
When someone explains an idea or a concept to me and I don’t understand, I like to ask, can you give me an example? This…
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Narcissistic Injuries: Probably not caused by science
Sigmund Freud proposed that we have suffered three major blows to our self-image over the last few centuries: The Copernican Revolution showed us that we…
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Talent as Cognitive Attitude: It’s not what you have, but what you do with it
The differences in cognitive ability we see between people are too large to be explained by genetics. A lot of the difference is due to…
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Marmorkrebs: It’s neither nature nor nurture
I like the story of the marmorkrebs, a kind of crayfish that reproduces pathogenetically. Because of this, they’re genetically identical, so all of the many…
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An Old and Wild Absurdity: We keep making the wrong assumptions about evolution
Some ways of thinking about evolution and natural history don’t go away, no matter how forcefully they get refuted. In my dentist’s waiting room earlier…
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Counting is Hard: You’d think we know how many people there are, but we don’t
One of the most basic ways to understand the world is to count something. Often, that’s easier said than done. A lot of my recent…
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The Narrow Beam of Consciousness: Why don’t we have more mental bandwidth?
Why is the beam of our conscious attention so narrow? We can only consciously perceive very little at any given time, even though our senses…
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Anemones: They look like they’re from another planet
There are no better places than tide pools to find alien-like creatures. Sea anemones are predatory animals, but you wouldn’t know it looking at them.
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My Maximum Likelihood Solution to the Fermi Paradox: Not new but probably true
By far the most likely resolution to the Fermi Paradox is that there aren’t any aliens capable of interstellar travel or even interstellar communication (radio…
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No Dangerous Knowledge: We can handle the truth
If belief in evolutionary theory made us demonstrably behave worse, should we protect people from learning about it? If a factually incorrect religious belief made…
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Elephant Seals: Men should try not to be like them
Animals don’t exist as cautionary tales for humans, but if they did, elephant seals would’ve clearly been created to tell men how not to behave.…
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Gateway: A sci fi novel from 1977 that has aged well
Gateway by Frederik Pohl won both the Nebula award and the Hugo, which was a bigger deal back when it came out almost 50 years…
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Shingles Vaccine and Dementia: Good news, but only because we got lucky
Shingles, also known as herpes zoster, is a viral disease that causes a painful rash as well as pain and general malaise. There is a…
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Mathematica: Learning math means training your intuition
Mathematician David Bessis has written a book about what we do when we do mathematics. It’s one of the best books I’ve read recently. One…
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Feynman vs. The Abacus: Sometimes intuition wins over processing power
This is an anecdote from Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman! It nicely shows what genius actually consists of: Not raw processing power (that’s what the…
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LLMs Are Not High IQ: AI doesn’t perform well in some intelligence tests
Practicing for intelligence tests doesn’t improve performance much. IQ tests really seem to measure some innate ability that is relatively unresponsive to training. Processing speed…
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Santa: Reality is magical
This time of the year makes me reflective and sentimental, so here’s my thought for today: My kids met Santa in front of the supermarket…
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The Higher Cause Delusion: Some of the best writing has no hidden depth
In the most recent episode of Old School, Shilo Brooks and Richard Dawkins talk about humorist P. G. Wodehouse. Towards the end, Brooks contrasts the…
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Big in 2025: Findings that could make a difference
Here is a list of scientific and engineering news of 2025, ranked by potential impact. I like the idea of considering both the probability that a…
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Edge.org: A formative resource for me, but yikes
For more than a decade, John Brockman’s Edge was one of my favorite websites. I’d visit every few days to check for new posts by…
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The Importance of Stupidity in Scientific Research: An article I’ve remembered for 16 years
This article was recommended to me by the PhD advisor of my PhD advisor’s PhD advisor, or, as I like to think of him, my…
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Aristocracy and Ability: Two very different things
We’re not smart. We don’t work hard. We’re just posh. President of a Viennese private bank catering to the aristocracy I dislike of the concept…
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Photo of an Exoplanet: A discovery made by looking at old pictures
Initially, it was only possible to infer the presence from exoplanets indirectly from the way they made their star wobble, or when they transited in…
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Can Pharma Scale? It’s not like tech
Pharma and tech are different industries. For example, tech benefits from network effects (if everyone uses LinkedIn it makes more sense to join), pharma doesn’t.…
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From Ole Worm to Christian Vibe: Connected by narwhals, the unicorns of the sea
Slime Mold Time Mold, on their blog, mentions Ole Worm, a Danish Renaissance naturalist. In 1638, he was one of the first to recognize that…
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The Malleability of Intuition: How I got possessed by a benevolent spirit
Something within me takes control of my right hand and writes down the solution to the problem I have been thinking about. I don’t understand…
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Unedited: The smarter you are the easier it is to fool yourself
Donald E. Carr points out that the sense impressions of one-celled animals are not edited for the brain: “This is philosophically interesting in a rather…
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Genome Counter: We have sequenced more than 100,000 eukaryotic species
The Human Genome project took 13 years and cost $3 billion. It was completed in 2003, although some gaps took until 2022 to be filled.…
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Causation Does Not Imply Variation: Just because it’s causative doesn’t mean it’s important
As everyone knows in the abstract but sometimes forgets in the heat of the moment, correlation does not imply causation. John Cochrane reminds us that…
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Pharma Ads: They don’t make for great dinner conversation
My wive and I had dinner at a noisy hot pot restaurant on Geary Boulevard. The restaurant was packed. When my wive went to get…
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Kári Stefánsson: Cantankerous and inspiring
None of the encounters I’ve had with Kári Stefánsson have been pleasant. I remember taking a walk with him in Heidelberg many years ago, when…
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Wrangel Island Mammoths: The last ones died 4,000 years ago
For hundreds of years after the pyramids of Giza had been completed, mammoths still roamed Wrangel Island off the northern coast of Siberia. Around the…
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Disappearing Polymorphs: Highly contagious crystals
Some chemical substances assemble in different crystal structures without changing their composition. Those alternative structures are called polymorphs. Polymorphs can act as seed crystals, causing…
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Child of Freedom, Parent of Prosperity: It’s innovation
How much should the government spend on science? One view is that it should spend a lot, since every dollar pays back many times over.…
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The Evolution of Everything: Creation is overrated
The Evolution of Everything isn’t Matt Ridley’s best book, but it has sections that are among the most thought-provoking writing I’ve come across. The theme…
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The Funny Side of Cancer: JBS Haldane’s poem on colorectal cancer
He – literally – dove into danger to study life’s mysteries, from the depths of the sea to the edge of the stars. His mind…
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Things Don’t Happen for a Reason: This is hard to accept
We want to know why. My career is built around finding the causes for rare diseases. Human genetics, the field I trained and work in,…
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Birds, Sex & Beauty: Matt Ridley’s new book on sexual selection
We’ve been on earth all these years and we still don’t know for certain why birds sing […] If the lyric is simply “mine mine…
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Mammals are Prose; Birds are Poetry
It dawned on me that my species probably does not really know the half of it about beauty. Not like the birds do and other…
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The Algernon Argument
If there were an intervention that would result in enhanced intelligence, why have we not already evolved that way? The answer is the Algernon argument.…
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Great Argus
Charles Darwin included an illustration of the feathers of the great argus pheasant in The Descent of Man. The pattern on great argus feathers seem…
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Selective Breeding for Longevity: A long-term experiment on the genetics of lifespan
In his science fiction novel Methuselah’s Children, Robert Heinlein described a clan whose members become unusually old without showing signs of frailty. Later in the…
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Free Energy
The 1990s were the golden age of free energy: Technologies that, through new or underappreciated physics, generated abundant and clean electricity. It wasn’t about boring…
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The Soviet Space Shuttle
The Soviet Union had its own space shuttle program called Buran. It looked and operated similarly to the U.S. Space Shuttle. One Buran shuttle was…
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Personality Transplants
A spooky phenomenon: People who receive heart transplants sometimes change in a way that makes them resemble the donor. In some cases, they seem to…
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Life on Mars
In 1996, Bill Clinton announced that we had found signs pointing to life on Mars. A meteorite called Allan Hills 84001, originating from Mars, contained…
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Terminal Lucidity
People experiencing terminal lucidity have typically suffered from dementia for a long time. Often they are gone so far they can’t talk or recognize their…
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More on Assembly Theory
I recently posted on Assembly Theory. I’ve read up on it some more since then and found this review of the theory by philosopher Johannes…
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Amber Inclusions
Seeing a perfectly preserved insect that flew around some long-gone forest tens of millions years ago right in front of your eyes, right now in…
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Assembly Theory: A new way to think about evolutionary history
Assembly Theory (AT) is a way to think about evolution and complexity. It applies to organisms but can also be used to think about artifacts,…
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Scientists are Weird
Derek Lowe on his blog, In the Pipeline, on the scientific worldview: [It] is not a mindset that most people naturally find comfortable. Or comforting.…
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Spinning Sun-Powered Space Catapult
For years now, I’ve been following what’s happening in the field of interstellar travel. Not closely, but close enough to know what kinds of technology…
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All That Is Earth Has Once Been Sky
Among the hills a meteorite Lies huge; and moss has overgrown, And wind and rain with touches light Made soft, the contours of the stone.…
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The Moon Landing as Signaling
Signaling, as in virtue signaling, has a bad reputation. This essay by Malmesbury on Telescopic Turnip makes the point that signaling can also involve great…
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Meadows
This is a mountain meadow in Lower Austria. Comparable meadows in the Sierra Nevada have fewer wildflowers and fewer insects, both in terms of absolute…
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Drafts
According to a pervasive belief in the German-speaking world, it’s essential to avoid drafts. They cause all kinds of diseases, including muscle stiffness and colds.…
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Visual Thinking
This is one of the books that influenced me as a kid but that I had forgotten about since. I only re-discovered it because I…
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Gabonionta: Probably just pseudofossils
The Natural History Museum in Vienna has an exhibit on the Gabonionta, also known as Francevillian biota. They were multicellular organisms that appeared 2.1 billion…
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Doubting Twin Studies
As a statistical geneticist, I used to think that the heritability estimates from twin studies are broadly correct. They suggest that variance in traits like…
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Unfathomable Intricacy
Creation is so much more complex than it needs to be. The universe doesn’t just appear to be fine-tuned to support life but fine-tuned to…
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Bigger Brains
To a first approximation, bigger brains = more neurons = smarter. Dig deeper, and it turns out to be more complicated than that. Honeybees have…
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Ineffective Alternatives
I don’t get anything out of cold medications. By the time my symptoms are severe enough that I take something, it’s already too late. The…
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Bees and Fish
Insects, for all their evolutionary success, aren’t smart. Take dragonflies for example. There are 3,000 extant species, so they’re doing alright, but they’re not geniuses:…
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Information Content of the Genome
On Asimov Press, Dynomight asks how information there is in DNA. How should we define the “information content” of DNA? I propose a definition I call the…
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AI Rationalizations
AIs like ChatGPT’s o3 take time to think before they answer. While doing so, o3 provides some commentary on its thinking process. For example, it…
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Bad Advice to a Young Scientist
Freeman Dyson, in 2007: Sixty years ago, when I was a young and arrogant physicist, I tried to predict the future of physics and biology.…
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The Hero-Jackass Continuum
The thing with self-experimentation is that, depending on the observer’s vantage point, your daredevilry makes you look either like a hero or like a jackass.…
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Intelligence and Race
It’s hard to have a good faith discussion about human intelligence with anyone, especially about the genetics of intelligence. This 2019 blog post by Ewan…
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Questions about Intelligence
Do we understand intelligence enough to formalize it in mathematical or computer science terms? We don’t, because otherwise there’d be no need for AI benchmarking.…
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X and Y
It’s a remarkable coincidence that the X and Y chromosomes, named that way because those are the only letters that describe their shapes, sit together…
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Of p Values and Effect Sizes
Scientists are obsessed with p values, and since I work in a particularly quantitative field, I’m more obsessed than most. When you run a statistical…
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Biosignature
Paul Gister on Centauri Dreams and Eric Hoel on The Intrinsic Perspective have good posts about the new data strengthening the case for a biosignature…
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Questions about Appearance
Observing someone, watching them smile or frown or hesitate or eat or walk, we can’t help form an opinion about them. Doing so may be…
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We Invented Ourselves
We invented ourselves. I contend this is our greatest invention. Neither fire, the wheel, steam power, nor anti-biotics or AI is the greatest invention of…
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AI Benchmarking
A month ago, I observed that out of three big magazines dedicated to literature, none had a recent discussion of AI and what it means…
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Why We Die
In Why We Die, Venki Ramakrishnan looks at longevity, and whether there may be a way to extend it. I’ve talked with Ramakrishnan a few…
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Genetic Drift on Generation Ships
On Centauri Dreams, Alex Tolley writes about the challenges a generation ship would face. He mentions one potential problem that I find particularly interesting, even…
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When Being Smart is Not Enough
What kinds of problems can be solved with more intelligence, and for which is intelligence not sufficient? Dynomight speculates that a superintelligent AI could solve…
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Coalescence
Coalescent theory is a population genetics approach to reconstructing the history of populations. This paper by Trevor Cousins, Aylwyn Scally and Richard Durbin applies an…
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Terraforming
Getting to Mars is hard and may take longer than we anticipate. Terraforming it in any meaningful way is going to be even harder and…
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Decimal Time
For anyone like me who is familiar with both inches and centimeters, it’s obvious that the metric system is superior. I have done anything from…
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The Egely Wheel: It fooled me
As a kid, I had a device that proved that I had the ability to move physical objects with my mind. It consisted of a…
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Why are More Neurons Better?
This is an excellent question whose answer is only obvious at first glance, asked by Scott Alexander on Astral Codex Ten. The correlation between the…
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Placebo Controlled Self-Experimentation
I have previously thought about how I’d do a placebo-controlled trial on myself. How could I create identical-looking pills – some with the substance I…
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Questions about Domestication
There are 3,900 species of mammals outside of rodents, yet we have only domesticated 15-20. Similarly, there are 12,000 species of grass, yet we have…
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Neanderthal News
Stone Age Herbalist lists what we have recently learned about Neanderthals. Here are the most interesting developments:
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AI in Biology
AI will soon design effective and safe drugs for any ailment. At least that’s commonly assumed, and on the surface it’s a reasonable prediction. After…
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The Game of Life
The board game Go is famous for having extremely simple rules yet having an almost unlimited number of ways to play it. The mathematician John…
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