Nehaveigur

Category: Biology

  • Aristocracy and Ability

    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 of aristocracy, but is it possible that having an aristocracy is beneficial to a society? If we assume that it’s a good idea to put…

  • From Ole Worm to Christian Vibe

    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 the horns previously thought to originate from unicorns actually came from narwhals. With that name and a research interest in horns I’m sure there’s a…

  • Genome Counter

    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. We have since sequenced the genomes of many other species. GOLD, the database that tracks this, reports 108,358 eukaryotic genomes. This number will keep going…

  • Causation Does Not Imply Variation

    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 in addition, causation does not imply variation. Just because something is causative doesn’t mean it’s particularly important. In my field of genetics, genome-wide association studies…

  • Kári Stefánsson

    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 I was a PhD student. The weather was foul. He was grumpier than the drizzle and my questions about the talk he had just given…

  • Wrangel Island Mammoths

    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 time the last ones died, the palace of Minos in Crete was being built. The cause of the extinction of the Wrangel Island mammoths is…

  • One Argument is Better than Two

    People have to eat, and some of what they eat is meat. As with everything, there’s a tradeoff, in this case between animal welfare and meat prices. Liv Boeree in Palladium magazine makes a convincing case that current law prioritizes low meat prices too much and animal welfare too little.…

  • The Evolution of Everything

    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 is the insight that a lot of good things aren’t created but evolve. For example, is education important for economic growth? According to Ridley, not…

  • The Funny Side of 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 unraveled the secret code of evolution while his heart laughed at fear. He once said: The universe is not only queerer than we imagine, but…

  • Things Don’t Happen For A Reason

    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, is well suited for this. Germline mutations cause traits and diseases, but never the other way round, which means that human genetics can disentangle correlation…

  • Birds, Sex & Beauty

    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 mine,” then why the extravagance of the score? Annie Dillard: Pilgrim at Tinker Creek Natural selection, defined by genes that benefit survival becoming more frequent,…

  • 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 dinosaurs did. They have been experimenting with bright colors for a hundred million years. I’m a mammal and mammals don’t do beauty much. We mammals…

  • 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. Either there’s no simple improvement that’s possible, or there are trade-offs that make such improvements a bad idea. It’s a long blog post but it’s…

  • 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 to depict three-dimensional “pebbles“, showing the extent to which sexual selection will go.

  • Selective Breeding for Longevity

    In his Science Fiction novel Methuselah’s Children, Robert Heinlein described a clan whose members become unusually old without showing signs of frailty. They arrived there by selective breeding for old age. What would it take to actually breed a population to maximize its life span? Doing this in humans isn’t…

  • 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 acquire memories of events that happened to the donor. I’m skeptical, but it’s interesting to think about ways in which this could happen if it…

  • 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 family any more. Yet a few hours before their death, they regain the ability to speak for a few hours and may even be able…

  • 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 Jäger helpful. Recursivity makes the dynamics of the model historically contingent. In the end, the kinds of objects that you actually can assemble are not…

  • 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 2025, is an interesting experience. Most fossils, somewhere between bone and rock, are too different from the original animal or the plant to fully engage…

  • Assembly Theory

    In April, Sara Imari Walker gave a talk (video, essay) at the Long Now Foundation. It was about Assembly theory, developed by chemist Lee Cronin and extended by Walker and others. I still struggle to decide if she and Cronin are on to something. A combination of causal depth (did…

  • 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 count and in terms of the number of species. The advantage Sierra Nevada meadows have is their wilderness, especially those that have never been grazed…

  • 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. This is why houses and especially sleeping areas must be kept draft free. I have not encountered this belief elsewhere and there is next to…

  • Gabonionta

    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 years ago but then died out due to decreasing atmospheric oxygen levels. The current form of multicellular life didn’t take off until the Cambrian explosion…

  • 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 height and intelligence is mostly due to genetic variation between individuals. The limitations of twin studies have been studied extensively for decades, and no flaws…

  • 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: [Insects’] failure to adapt, however, are dazzling. Howard Ensign Evans tells of dragonflies trying to lay eggs on the shining hoods of cars. Other dragonflies…

  • 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 “phenotypic Kolmogorov complexity”. Roughly speaking, this is how short you could make DNA and still get a “human” […] So what would this number be? My guess is that you…

  • 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 Birney and others is the best I’ve come across on the subject so far. For most traits, including IQ, it is not only unclear that…

  • 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 in man’s cells, defining their maleness, just as they sit next to each other in the alphabet, and that those two letters are also the…

  • 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 humankind. Our greatest invention is our humanity. And we are not done inventing ourselves yet. This is Kevin Kelly, writing on the blog of the…

  • 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 for writers. Since then, Paul Taylor has published a piece on DeepSeek in the London Review of Books. He mentions how the performance of AIs…

  • 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 times when I did my PhD at the same Institute where he solved the structure of the ribosome. Remembering those conversations, it occurs to me…

  • 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 though I’m not convinced of its seriousness: Genetic drift. Over the quarter millennium voyage, there will be evolution as the organisms adapt to the ship’s…

  • 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 advanced coalescent model to humans to infer our demographic history. We already knew that Neanderthals and non-African modern humans interbred 45,000 to 49,000 years ago,…

  • 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 would take centuries. The challenges are outlined here. Proponents of terraforming often focus on changing a planet’s environment to make it friendlier to humans and…

  • 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 only domesticated 50-60, including wheat, rice and corn. Here are some questions about the choices we have made about domestication:

  • Neanderthal News

    Stone Age Herbalist lists what we have recently learned about Neanderthals. Here are the most interesting developments:

  • 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 all, AI can already predict protein structures and sometimes even the effects of genetic variants. Having worked in drug development for a decade and having…

  • Kraken

    Colossal squids are probably the world’s largest invertebrates and we know next to nothing about them. We have only ever caught about a dozen complete specimen, although the beaks of several more have been found in sperm whale stomachs, indicating that the two species fight. There is no image or…

  • A Great Time to Be Large

    I’d have loved to see Pleistocene megafauna like the mammoth with my own eyes, and maybe one day I will. In the meantime, I am happy in the knowledge that right now, I share the planet with both the largest animal and the largest plant that ever existed.

  • The Sorcerer II

    Around the time I was doing my PhD, J. Craig Venter was one of the most talked about scientists on the planet. At some point, he came to give a talk at my research lab and the lecture theatre was packed. Everyone knew about him, but not everyone liked him.…

  • Life Prefers Ice

    Robert Frost holds with those who say the world will end in fire. Freeman Dyson was agnostic on whether the world will end in fire or ice, but he thought that ice would be preferable. Cold environments are fundamentally more hospitable to complex forms of life than hot environments. Life…

  • Our Biotech Future that Didn’t Happen

    I once attended a week-long meeting in Heidelberg. The topic was Science and Society and the organizer was Sheila Jasanoff, an academic whose work focuses on the social and political influences on scientific research. Most of the attendants were academics in the life sciences from the U.S. and Europe, and…

  • The Coffee Ban

    Swedes drink a lot of coffee, and at all times of the day. One of the few fragments of Swedish I remember from my time there is ingår påtår?, which means, are refills included? It’s important to know if the café you’re considering is going to give you free coffee…

  • California: Great for Trees

    Why does California have the tallest, biggest and oldest trees? Coastal redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens) are the tallest trees on Earth, reaching 116 meters. Their range is coastal Northern California. Giant redwoods (Sequoiadendron giganteum) are the most massive trees on Earth, reaching 1,487 cubic meters. Their range is the Western slope…

  • Give Chance a Chance

    Heart disease, kidney disease and diabetes kill many of us and are highly heritable, yet identical twins rarely die of the same cause, even though they share the same genetics. How can that be? One reason is that there are a lot of causes of death, and while cumulatively their…

  • Where Is It Like to Be an Octopus?

    Octopuses are the only smart invertebrate animals. Their brains are quite different from that of vertebrates like us: Rather than being centralised and profoundly integrated, the octopus nervous system is distributed into components with considerable functional autonomy from each other. Of particular note is the arm nervous system: when severed,…

  • Other Minds

    My five-year-old daughter said that spiders are insects and I was almost sure that they weren’t until she showed me a worksheet her kindergarten teacher had given her that claims not only spiders but also centipedes, scorpions and snails for the insect class. Anyway, this is about a science book…

  • Arsenic for Longevity

    In an essay first published in 1877 in Waldheimat, Austrian writer Peter Rosegger describes his encounter with peasants in Styria using arsenic as an anti-aging drug. This is a translation by Copilot, with some editing for readability: On one of the trips I took as I student, I stopped at…

  • Wanted: Time

    So much universe, and so little time Terry Pratchett Here are three observations that’d I’d love to spend a few weeks to investigate further, spending a few weeks on each, but can’t because I have a family and a job:

  • Against Epigenetics

    In the 1960s, biologist James McConnell conditioned worms to respond to light flashes, then ground them up and fed them to other worms. He reported that those cannibalistic worms learned to respond to flashes faster than non-cannibalistic control worms, suggesting that memory transfer had taken place. Others couldn’t fully replicate…

  • Bionumbers

    I’m a geneticist by profession, but too often, I realize that I don’t know some of the basic facts. How many RNA molecules are there in a typical mammalian cell? I don’t even know the order of magnitude. The Bionumbers database is great for looking up this sort of thing.…

  • Coherence Tradeoffs

    There is an optimal intermediate degree of fragmentation, that a too-unified society is a disadvantage, and a too-fragmented society is also a disadvantage Jared Diamond Previously, I have written about the idea that singletons are hard to achieve. Singletons are agents that can enact their goals and maintain a high…

  • Adaptationism

    The next time you’re in a room full of biologists and you want to start a shouting match, ask them about junk DNA. While everyone agrees on the importance of protein coding genes and the regulatory sequences that control their expression, there is little consensus if the majority of the…

  • Why Do We Like Music?

    Why do we like the things we like? For some, such as food or sex, the answer is obvious. Without them, we wouldn’t survive or reproduce. In order to make sure we comply with its wishes; our body uses a carrot and stick management approach consisting of rewards (e.g. sweet taste) and punishments…

  • Sunspots and Influenza

    Fred Hoyle was an accomplished astronomer but also came up with a few controversial theories that didn’t take off, not that there’s anything wrong with that. For example, he proposed that the archeopteryx fossils are forgeries and that flu pandemics are caused by solar winds driving interstellar virus particles towards…

  • The Paleobiology Database

    In every way (except responsiveness) superior to the map of California fossil sites I’ve previously made: https://paleobiodb.org/navigator/

  • Of Ants and Men

    The 2015 documentary Of Ants and Men (PBS) on Edward O. Wilson is beautiful. He was a biologist connected to nature not only intellectually but also, as the documentary reveals, on a deeper, emotional level. One of the biggest scientific controversies of Wilson’s life was due to his advocacy of…

  • Map of California Fossil Sites

    I made an interactive map of California fossil sites based on data by Don Kenney.

  • Spiders on Drugs

    Effect of different drugs on cobwebs

  • Improbable Destinies

    Is there such a thing as destiny? How resilient are outcomes to changed starting conditions? This was the question that Stephen Jay Gould asked in his 1989 book Wonderful Life. If we travelled back in time to the Precambrian period before animals were a thing and restarted the tape of life, the kind of…