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story see chris christie on baby boomers the fact that old politicians can consistently get re elected in america is not the fault of american baby boomers it s a systemic problem with american politics and i m pretty sure that 20 years from now chris christie will be complaining about old gen x and millenial politicians but there s another problem with chris christie s remarks he s mad at certain members of his generation but instead of focusing his criticism on those individuals he slanders an entire generation most baby boomers know that s not right it wasn t right when talking about blacks jews women muslims or people from new jearsey and it s not right when talking about an entire generation posted by larry moran at saturday april 11 2026 email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest 1 comments labels politics friday april 10 2026 how can we combat the spread of misinformation this is a serious question we sandwalk readers know that there s a lot of science misinformation being spread in the popular science literature 1 so far scientists have been spectacularly unsuccessful in stopping it the misinformation covers all aspects of science but my particular bugaboos are evolution genomes and junk dna i m going to quote the first few paragraphs from an article on the knowable magazine website it seems to be associated with annual reviews and it certainly looks like it should be a credible source of science information the article is the silent majority rnas that don t make proteins the author is christina szalinski and here s how she describes herself on her website i know science i became a science writer in 2013 after finishing my phd in cell biology at the university of pittsburgh so when it comes to writing i can shake out the molecular tangles unravel the cellular threads and wade through the formidable details of scientific studies is it wrong to specifically identify science writers who are spreading misinformation is it cruel or mean to imply that they don t understand their subject do other science writers and their organizations have any obligation to police their own discipline to ensure scientific accuracy does anybody have any good ideas on how to clean up this mess here s an excerpt from the article i don t think i need to explain what s wrong when scientists first cracked the genetic code they expected a simple story dna makes rna and that rna known as messenger rna makes proteins proteins would do all the important work building tissues fighting infections digesting food but when the dna of our genome was finally sequenced researchers encountered a head scratcher the 20 000 plus genes that carry instructions for making our proteins account for less than 2 percent of our dna what was the rest of it good for for years the remaining 98 percent was dismissed as junk dna evolutionary debris filler but as sequencing technology improved a startling picture emerged our cells were busy making rna copies of all those expanses not just making messenger rna or mrna from the protein coding genes they were churning out vast quantities of rna molecules with no known purpose the question became why would cells waste so much energy on copying that junk today however the importance of this non coding rna the catchall term for rna molecules that don t carry instructions for proteins is undeniable non coding rnas turn out to regulate everything from embryonic development to immune responses to brain function they help determine which genes get turned on and off and when they can promote cancer or suppress it i contacted the author last week to warn her that i was about to publish this post i asked if she wished to comment or to provide the source of her information on the history of the field i did not get a reply the problem with this kind of description is that it misrepresents the way science is done most scientific models are due to slow and steady incremental advances building on previous studies that kind of science is usually self correcting when new information becomes available the old models are revised the picture that is being presented to the general public is that old scientists were pretty stupid because they thought there was only one kind of gene protein coding and that everything else in the genome 98 had to be junk according to that false history the old fuddy duddies were shown to be totally wrong when the human genome was sequenced and thousands of non coding genes were discovered for the first time that disproves junk dna according to the false history is there a way of writing the true history in a way that s accessible to the general public i don t know but i thought i would give it a try in order to try and show modern science writers how it coould be done it s not easy read my attempt below and let me know if it works scientists were actively working out the functions of dna back in the 1950s and 1960s by the mid 1960s they had discovered two kinds of genes the majority encoded proteins but there were also non coding genes that specified important rnas such as ribosomal rna rrna and transfer rna trna that were used in protein synthesis scientists also established that dna contained regulatory elements that controlled the expression of those two types of genes other functional dna elements were also identified at this time most of this work was done in bacteria and their viruses where genes took up a very large percentage of the dna in their chromosomes however it soon became apparent that this was not the case in humans where the coding regions of the protein coding genes seemed to account for only 2 of the genome the genome is the total amount of dna in all chromosomes other functional elements such as non coding genes and regulatory sequences only accounted for a bit more of the genome this gave rise to a model developed by the leading experts of the time including several nobel laureates they proposed that only 10 of the human genome is functional and 90 is junk dna based on a lot of experimental data they estimated that there were about 30 000 genes in the human genome additional non coding genes specifying regulatory rnas were identified at this time early 1970s but the biggest advance in this area ocurred in the 1980s with the discovery of a host of genes specifying various new rnas some of these new non coding genes specified rnas that acted like protein enzymes to catalyze biochemical reactions others were involved in regulating gene expression and still others were structural components of large cellular complexes these results and others from the 1990s raised the number of non coding genes in humans to as many as several thousand but they still only accounted for a fraction of the total number of protein coding genes the first draft of the human genome was published 25 years ago and it confirmed the model developed more than 50 years ago there were about 30 000 genes just as the experts had predicted and most of the human genome was junk subsequent work on identifying features of the human genome have by and large confirmed this model but there are scientists who are skeptical most of the human genome is transcribed into rnas a fact that was known 50 years ago but many of the leading experts concluded that most of those rnas were probably junk rna of various sorts the idea here is that the human genome is very messy and it gives rise to lots of spurious accidental rnas that are not biologically relevant most of those rnas are present in small amounts and they are rapidly degraded they are not conserved in our closest relatives sequence conservation is a good indication of function and lack of sequence conservation is a good indication of junk the skeptics on the other hand argue that most of those rnas have a function and there are far more non coding genes than protein coding genes the debate continues to this day 1 and unfortutnately in the legitimate scientific literature posted by larry moran at friday april 10 2026 email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest 17 comments labels junk dna science monday april 06 2026 how can philosophy contribute to science i ve written quite a bit about the perceived conflict between science and philosophy and defended my view that science is best described in broad terms as a way of knowing that requires evidence skepticism and rational thinking as far as i know there is no other way of knowing that has produced true knowledge in this sense the proper practice of philosophy has to involve science and by that i mean evidence if the results are going to produce knowledge there s lots to debate on this topic including discussions about the meaning of knowledge is science the only way of knowing but that s not what i want to talk about today today s topic is about the contribution that philosophers can make to science i ll focus on philosophers of biology and on scientific topics that i m knowledgeable about and i ll assume that most philosophers agree with elisabeth lloyd when she says as a philosopher of science i have always been oriented towards addressing problems that scientists have not so much problems that philosophers have that is how to do good philosophy of science 1 now let me be clear about the issue it is blindingly obvious that philosophers could use their deep understanding of logic and argumentation to make significant contributions to biology especially in cases where scientists are misusing logic the question is not whether philosophy is incapable of ever contributing to biology but whether it is actually fulfilling that potential read more posted by larry moran at monday april 06 2026 email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest 7 comments labels philosophy of science science sunday april 05 2026 is the american president the leader of the free world i was intrigued by a recent article by carlos lozade in the new york times america has become a dangerous nation the opening paragraph sets the stage we had a good run some eight decades or so but it is clear by now that the united states has ceased to be the leader of the free world a successor for that post has not been named and it appears unlikely that the european union or nato or whatever constitutes the west these days will promote from within the job might even be eliminated one more reduction in force courtesy of president trump here s the problem i m a canadian i think canada is part of the free world but it s not a term that canadians use very often i also don t think it s popular in european countries but i d like to hear from europeans do the people of france think of themselves as being part of the free world using the french translation i remember the 1960s when the united states was bogged down in vietnam and i don t recall thinking of either johnson or nixon as any kind of a leader of canada or of similar countries such as sweden australia or switzerland let alone japan or south korea ronald reagan may have been a good president for americans but i never thought of him as the leader of the free world in spite of the fact that americans give him credit for the downfall of the soviet union he would not have been a very good leader in canada i think canadians have enjoyed freedom for a very long time and so have many countries in europe and elsewhere we don t owe that freedom to the united states and we don t look to the united states as the standard of freedom if that s what it means to be the leader of the free world then it s a term that doesn t resonate outside of the usa the lozade article implies that the president of the united states has been the de facto leader of the free world for eight decades and it s only in the past year or so that he has lost that title that s an interesting claim it suggests that canadians australians swedes etc looked upon george w bush as some kind of leader when american invaded iraq and afghanistan to my way of thinking leaders are those who improve the lives of their citizens by promoting universal health care income equality the rights of women and minorities and safety securtity i e crime and gun control i admire world leaders who promote those values i don t look to american presidents as world leaders from that perspective i think the view of americans is that military might is the important criterion since the united states is the toughest kid in school then it is the de facto leader since nobody wants to be on their bad side americans assume that their country always uses that military might for the good of the free world and that s they think that for the past eight decades the people of new zealand mexico and india might have looked to the president as the leader of the free world i d like to suggest that viewing the president of the united states as the leader of the free world is mostly an american myth that s not shared by people in other countries to any great extent america is the most powerful country in nato and and so it dominates military considerations within that alliance i think that americans view nato as the free world when they use that expression i view the united states as a powerful partner in nato but i think of nato as an alliance where every country is important i don t see america as the leader in nato any more than i see canada as the leader what do you think i d especially like to hear from non americans about whether they have always viewed the president of the united states as the leader of the free world posted by larry moran at sunday april 05 2026 email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest 10 comments labels politics saturday march 28 2026 do the indigenous people of british columbia have a special way of knowing that s better than science i once participated in a discussion about introducing indigenous ways of knowing in the ontario science curriculum the idea was to have high school students visit local indigenous first nation communities and talk to the wise elders of the community in order to learn their insights into topics such as evolution i pointed out that one of the main goals of education is to teach critical thinking and reasonable skepticism if we are succeeding in that goal then we should expect our students to ask embarrassing questions such as what evidence to the elders have to support their myths about evolution and any other ways of knowing that conflict with science the proposal was dropped read more posted by larry moran at saturday march 28 2026 email this blogthis share to x share to facebook share to pinterest 9 comments labels science science and religion friday march 27 2026 philosophers and definitions of evolution and allele one of my facebook friends posted a link to an article on genetic drift on the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy website genetic drift the author is roberta millstein and the article is a recent update to an older version that i questioned ten year...