Posts by Bart Janssen
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to BenWilson,
What’s the desired output of biology?
To make more of me.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to BenWilson,
against overly zealous applications of Occam’s razor, rather than the principle itself
Yeah I'm probably guilty of some hyperbole.
That said I was once told by one of the best plant molecular biologists in the world that he was shocked by how much NZ scientists followed the principle that the simplest solution must be right.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to 3410,
I guess my other point is that you can only call a biological system inefficient if you can show that it *could* have been some other way, and how can you do that?
Like Chekov, running full tit through The Enterprise screaming “I can do that, I can do that”
Really we can. Sometimes. It is possible to take a biological pathway and delete a gene and see if it makes a difference, we can do it easily with bacteria and yeast, with some difficulty for some animals and plants. It is a standard tool in the kit of a molecular biologist.
A disappointingly common outcome is nothing happens. You completely remove a gene that is demonstrably producing a protein that carries out what should be an essential process and nothing happens, apart from swearing up and down the corridors of academia. Usually nothing happens because there is another gene or completely separate pathway that appears to be exist as a “spare”. Sometimes it’s more complicated, heh. How is that efficient? Sure it makes sense to have a spare tyre but a spare passenger seat? Or spare towbar?
So not only can you show that it could exist some other way you can actually see the other way – or three other ways plus ten more that are sort of the same but different.
Yes you can always argue that the alternatives exist for specific conditions, and sometimes they really do, but as I said before such arguments tend spiral down in ever decreasing circles. The reasonable conclusion is is biology is not efficient and Occam was wrong.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to NBH,
with non-response being consequently very high for Census at about 12% I think
I think Jedi was counted as a non-response.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
My PhD project involves, shock, horror, culture-based data. This….confuses some people.
You'll never get funding unless you start using the next buzz-method, you should be doing systems biology or building a virtual fruit, if you can't use the most expensive latest technology it must be bad science. And as everyone knows you should stop trying to find new things out anyway and just do translational research to innovate and stimulate transformative changes to our industries.
We, shock horror, look at our plants!!!!
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
(Oh, microarrays, you mislead us so. And yet we keep coming back to you.)
But never fear now we can get the same misleading data at much greater expense using RNAseq!
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to 3410,
Isn’t it the case that we can judge the efficiency or inefficiency only if we know what the goal is, which we don’t?
Again nah. There are lots of examples now of biological systems that have no purpose that anyone can figure out. Sure you can always argue that it has a purpose which we haven't tested but that eventually becomes kinda silly.
Complexity has a value in biological systems but there are cases where the complexity exists because of the way it evolved and now simply remains because there is no driver to make an "efficient" system.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
Sometimes it seems that evolution selects for the most inefficient solutions.
Hell yeah!
I love it when folks say “look that gene is expressed there it MUST be doing something important” whereas it usually turns out to be doing nothing, there was just no reason to turn it off. Like saying “the light is on there must be someone in the room”.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to BenWilson,
they value a principle like Occam’s Razor very highly
Yeah, nah.
I'm a plant developmental biologist. That means I try and figure out how you go from seed to plant and back, my personal question of interest is how does a plant choose which bud grows out to make a branch - someday I might try and explain that all here :).
In my field it is absolutely unquestionably clear that Occam was a moron who knew nothing about the real world. As we understand more and more about how organisms work it is clear that simple is irrelevant. Complex networks with multiple redundancy and legacy elements that serve no current purpose are the rule not the exception. Every possible method of regulation we can think of exists and new ones we'd never thought of are constantly being unravelled. Efficiency means almost nothing, evolution is amazing but it is far from efficient.
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Hard News: Belief Media, in reply to Steve Barnes,
would have “faith” in the ability of the scientific process to find all, eventually
For everyone it's a different balance. Hebe is exactly right, it's about shades of grey and a continuum of experience and belief.
For me there is an unpleasant dissonance in the idea of looking for evidence and basing decision making on evidence and the faith involved in religion. But that is for me, there are many scientists for whom that dissonance does not exist at all or exists to a different degree.
But to be picky, it is often said that scientists have a "faith" in the scientific process. Again for some that may be true but the more common understanding is that the scientific method and science as a whole is about discovery of facts, testing of hypotheses, observing results and basing new hypotheses only on valid observations. The only reason we use that method is because it works pretty well, that I'm writing this on a computer and you are probably reading this on an LCD is a direct product of that approach to the universe.
That isn't a faith, it is an approach to dealing with the unknown. Instead of making up a story about the unknown the scientific approach says "we don't know" and leaves it at that. We can postulate hypotheses but their only purpose is to define the next experimental test. Scientists don't (or shouldn't) "have faith" in a hypothesis, far from it, we instead try our damdest to punch holes in the hypothesis.
That's where my personal discomfort with religion lies.