Oh, neat! I hadn't heard of modern species with trilateral symmetry before, I wonder if it's a mutation or developmental defect?
Well predicted, and I'm glad to entertain. :-) The Marshall paper I link to at the beginning of the paper covers the vast majority of sentences here that would require a citation, and itself is a review paper if you want to follow the breadcrumbs for these and many other related ideas. The Darwin quote is just the Origin, and you can find one example of a cool paper trying to use molecular clock to debunk the explosion here.
My understanding of Hox genes is definitely shallow, but I don't think I managed to mangle the ideas entirely beyond recognition. If anyone familiar with the subject would like to explain it from a more informed perspective, it'd be welcome.
On my screen, it shows up as an indented text block, which generally doesn't require separate quote marks. Is it not showing up that way for you?
Yeah, my language is *at best* imprecise here, mostly in the interests of legibility and not dumping too much information in a sentence that was meant to direct your attention elsewhere. The technical term I was dancing around was "amniotes", animals that develop an amniotic sac. Even that would have been wrong because it's only concerned with vertebrate clades, which I wasn't even thinking of at the time, so I appreciate you pointing that out and I've tweaked it slightly
(One brief correction, mosses and vascular ferns do indeed require standing water for reproduction- although they can take advantage of transient puddles and such when they have to. This limits them to low-lying areas, and it's a primary reason that you don't see fern forests around today the way you did back in the Carboniferous.)
Much appreciated.
Chalk one up for the site design, by the way. I ended up feeling much more comfortable tossing this up on a semi-personal blog than I would have been starting a new topic in a public message board.
The implied moral principle here (assign zero value to the welfare of people that you wouldn't be friends with) would lead to some seriously deranged behaviors if broadly applied. But even if that were a workable system, you and your friends are still likely to benefit from a high-trust society that assumes mutual prosocial compromises. If you don't treat non-friends as agents capable of tit-for-tat behavior in the service of their own interests, and plan social interactions with them accordingly, then you and your friends probably won't have satisfactory outcomes.
It's a fascinating piece of Earth history for sure! If you can figure it out, let me know.
(This is a loose adaptation of a talk I sometimes give on the Cambrian Explosion, smoothed a bit for popular consumption. That talk, in turn, draws heavily from a 2006 paper by Charles Marshall, titled “Explaining the Cambrian ‘Explosion’ of Animals”. It can be read in full here. I’m mostly just trying to test out the new site with an essay I had lying around, be moderately entertaining, and maybe try to suggest this event as a topic of interest for those who care about intelligence explosions and cognitive emergence. If I succeed in all three, then I encourage you to start with Marshall for the more technical,
There are definitely domains where this isn't a problem at all- for example, geology terms like 'tufa' or 'shale' seem basically static on the relevant timescales. So it's probably possible to completely solve the dilution problem, it at least some cases.
There are at least a few relevant structural differences between social justice and geology, but I'm not sure which ones are the most important. The main three advantages for geology's stability that I can think of are A) Rocks are boring, and not emotionally charged by tribes and sex and so forth. People are rarely motivated to stretch definitions to cover their preferred cases B) There's a structured
Understood, sounds like that information won't be in for a while. I look forward to hearing about your results in a few months!
To be honest, I'm not entirely sure that anyone is a consequentialist.
I do use consequentialism a lot, but almost always in combination with an intuitive sort of 'sanity check'- I will try to assign values to different outcomes and try to maximize that value in the usual way, but I instinctively shrink from any answer that tends to involve things like "start a war" or "murder hundreds of people."
For example, consider a secret lottery where doctors quietly murder one out of every [n] thousand patients, in order to harvest their organs and save more lives than they take. There are consequentialist arguments against this, such as the risk of