Pretty impressive long-term charts, and dramatic surge in the last years. Of course there are lot of other relevant details (e.g. more people own capital, and this is pre-tax numbers). But overall this seems pretty consistent with the story Piketty tells in Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
n=15, but this is still an impressive example of gene therapy, especially since it doesn't addresses a rare single-gene disease, but the usual case of a much more complex genetic and metabolic system.
>15 patients received a one-time infusion of lipid nanoparticles, essentially fat bubbles, carrying gene-editing machinery to their livers. That machinery was programmed to snip and disable a gene involved in cholesterol metabolism called ANGPTL3.
>The experiment was inspired, in part, by the discovery that there are people who have naturally occurring versions of the ANGPTL3 gene that aren’t functional. Those people have very low levels of cholesterol and triglycerides and a lower risk of cardiovascular disease.
I've long been a fan of this view (though i do think some aging is also essentially entropy).
Natural selection favors organisms with a lifecycle time that is optimized and not random. Some organisms will benefit from shorter lifecycle times, e.g. to adapt faster. Others will benefit from a longer one, e.g. when fitness increases with experience. At some point, if your organism is no longer contributing to the future success of the genes (not necessarily by mating, you could be an awesome orca grandma, imparting wisdom), you might as well get it our of the way. A striking example is how some octopus species waste away after giving birth.
So it shouldn't be a surprise that there is a fitness advantage to controlling this process.
That said, if we altered this program to increase lifespan, I'd expect we'd start to run into more entropy-driven aging.
Not a happy message:
>the aggregate sentience losses of animals in the past half century outstrip the sentience gains to humans from population growth by at least 10,000-fold. Breaking even in welfare terms requires assigning a correspondingly small welfare weight to animals.
But, since I think of myself as mostly utilitarian, I do need to take such arguments seriously. Either I need a good counterargument to this paper, or I should question my moral philosophy
In addition, I devour biology anecdotes, and everything I hear increases my belief that animals are more sentient & intelligent than our common sense suggests. E.g. consider how sophisticated hermit crabs are in trading off pain vs. a valuable home:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00033...
With over 40 pages, I only barely skimmed this paper so far. My reactions are:
Tactical:
1) Are they really measuring biodiversity (vs. biomass)? I'm skeptical that weighted biomass has decreased so much.
2) The effect is bigger the further you get from humans taxonomically. e.g. it's all about the shrimp ;-P3) The assumptions highlight how little we actually understand about welfare and sentience, in any animal, including us. Neuron counts and cognitive tests are poor measures.
Philosophical:
1) This highlights our uncertainty about sentience and welfare in nature. This uncertainty provides some justification for the status quo. But it also argues we should work to reduce it.
2) Arguments like this highlight that one should be skeptical of utilitarian arguments that are scaled so far.
3) But overall, the utilitarian approach is better than others, and thus this question is important to ask. The lack of a good answer doesn't invalidate the question. It should drive us to improve the answer.
Of course there are external / uncontrollable factors behind this, but I also buy the article's opinion, that peace is not about eliminating the enemy, but about creating incentives that favor nonviolent strategies to achieve your political goals:
>The real victory over an insurgency does not come when every insurgent disappears. It comes when the gunman decides he would rather be a politician.
The data here is suspect, since the poll was administered by supporters of the idea. But even so, I believe the gist of the results. And I think anything we can do to shift attention to fixing the system is a good idea (vs. just focusing on tribal rage, the horse race, or self-indulgent doomerism).
Having read a lot about symbiosis, I still found a bunch of novel interesting stuff here. e.g. how acacia makes ants dependent on them:
>These acacias are quite notorious for another reason: The nectar they provide contains an enzyme that makes it harder for the ants to digest the nectar of other plants. Yes, the nectar contains an enzyme, chitinase, that makes the ant’s invertase, a sucrose-cleaving enzyme, inefficient. This essentially forces the ant to feed on the acacia’s nectar, which is poor in sucrose, rather than foraging on other nectars.
This is a continuation of many findings in this direction. It's wonderful to imagine the many societies humans have created, and sad that we'll be able to learn so little about them.
I've always been confused by the idea that we know all civilisation that has happened on earth, human or otherwise. Written record doesn't go back very far at all, and even archeological evidence is lacking.
Its believed that homo sapiens have been around for at least 300,000 years and yet we think almost all of that was entirely without civilization.
We find fossil records of dinosaurs but we have little to no evidence of what would have been before them, presumably there was an extinction event prior to them as well.
It seems foolish to think we are the latest incarnation of the only chain of civilization that had ever happened on Earth.
> Its believed that homo sapiens have been around for at least 300,000 years and yet we think almost all of that was entirely without civilization.
Depends what you call civilization. If there was a civilization what happened to it and why did it leave no trace.
> We find fossil records of dinosaurs but we have little to no evidence of what would have been before them, presumably there was an extinction event prior to them as well.
Actually we do have evidence of what came before them, and there were extinction events.
> It seems foolish to think we are the latest incarnation of the only chain of civilization that had ever happened on Earth.
We might not know about previous civilizations (that is the point of the Silurian Hypothesis - a lot of traces will disappear over time) but we have no evidence that there was any previous civilization, or of any sufficiently intelligent animal to build one. The oldest stone tools we have found are only about 3m years old.
You would like the book "Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber.
It does a lot to talk about modern anthropological studies that corrected a lot of misconceptions about early humans. Really fascinating book, basically postulates that humans have always been imaginative social creatures that were routinely well travelled; and the idea that early humans weren't also politically or culturally advance is wrong. In fact some societies were purposely designed to ensure things like hierarchy wouldn't exist for example; these societies persisted for thousands of years.
Yes exactly. The myths of native people being hyperegalitarian, one-with-nature types started because colonists came upon cultures in the North East woodlands. Those same people, just a few decades before that were living in Cahokia which was at one point larger than any city in Europe. It was a massive urban city that was also very hierarchical. The hyperegalitarian Algonquian and Haudenosaunee/Iroquois people were basically the result of a successful political revolution that decided to organize themselves like that in response to the hierarchies they experienced.
While many Amerindians had impressive achievements considering their almost complete isolation from the rest of the world, your claim seems misleading.
> At its apex around 1100 AD, the city [Cahokia] covered about 6 square miles (16 km2), included about 120 earthworks in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and functions, and had a population of between 15,000 and 20,000 people.[5][a]
> During the 1st and 2nd centuries CE, the population of the city of Rome is conventionally estimated at one million inhabitants.
And there are much better examples according to some sources of large cities in the Americas than Cahokia.
> Hernan Cortés arrived in Tenochtitlan on 8 November 1519. Although there are no precise numbers, the city's population has been estimated at between 200,000 and 400,000 inhabitants,[27] placing Tenochtitlan among the largest cities in the world at that time.[28] Compared to the cities of Europe, only Paris, Venice and Constantinople might have rivaled it.
> In the 9th and 10th centuries, Constantinople had a population of between 500,000 and 800,000.[60]
> With the restoration of firm central government, the empire became fabulously wealthy. The population was rising (estimates for Constantinople in the 12th century vary from some 100,000 to 500,000), and towns and cities across the realm flourished.
> Kaifeng-Dongjing became largest and most prosperous city in China, with a population of over 400,000 living both inside and outside the city wall. The historian Jacques Gernet provides a lively picture of life in this period in his Daily Life in China on the Eve of the Mongol Invasion, 1250-1276, which often draws on Dongjing Meng Hua Lu, a nostalgic memoir of the city.[14]
> Around 750 AD, Chang'an was called a "million-man city" in Chinese records; most modern estimates put the population within the walls of the Tang city at around 800,000–1,000,000.[1]
The Iroquois did not have slaves. You might be thinking of individuals that were sometimes taken as compensation for people killed in battle. However, these people were then fully assimilated into the society with all the rights and obligations of anyone in the clan (in most cases, they would even take the name of the deceased). To call these people "slaves" is much more revealing of the Western civilization than that of First Nations.
>To modern Westerners, the use of such a kinship metaphor suggests and is believed to reflect genuine nurturing and closeness; however, in Africa and elsewhere it conveys an entirely different meaning: authority and subordination.
>Villagers, forming a gauntlet and armed with clubs, fire-brands, sticks, and other weapons, greeted the prisoners and rained down on these hapless individuals blows designed to inflict pain but not to kill This was often followed by torture and public humiliation and then deliverance to the grieving families, whose "matrons then chose either to adopt or to execute them," or both
If you look at pages 11-13, there's a discussion of ritual torture to prevent captives from escaping. 13-14 deal with the torture and execution of unruly captives. 15-16 deal with the etymological relationship between "slave" and "pet/livestock" in Iroquonian languages like Mohawk. Pages 17 and 18 discuss people preferring suicide to capture and the sexual exploitation of female captives.
I put much more credence into lived experiences than into academic journals. There's plethora of examples in which children/teens of the settlers taken by First Nations would refuse to go back (especially females, which had little rights in the American society back then). Conversely, First Nations children/teens that were taken by the settlers would almost without exception risk life and limb to escape their newfound circumstances.
There are a plethora of examples of slavery as well....
>The ways in which captives were treated differed widely among Native American groups. Captives could be enslaved for life, killed, or adopted. In some cases, captives were only adopted after a period of slavery. For example, the Iroquoian peoples (not just the Iroquois tribes) often adopted captives, but for religious reasons there was a process, procedures, and many seasons when such adoptions were delayed until the proper spiritual times.
>In the cultural practices of the Iroquoian peoples, also rooted in a matrilineal system with men and women having equal value, any child would have the status determined by the woman's clan. More typically, tribes took women and children captives for adoption, as they tended to adapt more easily into new ways.
You know there were lived experiences of black people who didn't mind being slaves as well and were able to roam freely? There is a reason we don't just go by anecdotes, anecdotally white people were very nice to their slaves and never did anything bad to them and let them do whatever they want.
The Haudenosaunee are radically democratic, place a very strong focus on gender equality, and possess then-unmatched levels of horizontal power-sharing
Rigveda would be around 1500Bce. Even Sumerian cuneiform would be far older at 3000 bce. If you want oldest oral records, some Australian aboriginal stories would be the ones at 8000 bce
The Rigveda is the the earliest unbroken kept record.
The Sumerian tablets are likely older, but they were forgotten and then re-deciphered. The transliterations still carry educated choices made by a scholar (there's only so much you can do when the record breaks for a long time).
Meanwhile, we know exactly how people spoke those early vedas because there is a tradition that keeps chanting it, without stopping, since before it was written down. That chanting has error correction mechanisms, redundancy and other impressive features that further place the Rigveda in a unique place among earlier works.
Can you share some thing to read up on this. Most of these claims do sound fantastical. I am not even sure how would one verify that Rigveda is an "unbroken" oral recitation over thousands of years.
> The oral tradition of the Vedas (Śruti) consists of several pathas, "recitations" or ways of chanting the Vedic mantras. Such traditions of Vedic chant are often considered the oldest unbroken oral tradition in existence, the fixation of the Vedic texts (samhitas) as preserved dating to roughly the time of Homer (early Iron Age or 800 BC).
> The value of this tradition lies not only in the rich content of its oral literature but also in the ingenious techniques employed by the Brahmin priests in preserving the texts intact over thousands of years. To ensure that the sound of each word remains unaltered, practitioners are taught from childhood complex recitation techniques that are based on tonal accents, a unique manner of pronouncing each letter and specific speech combinations.
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It's not some obscure thing, a web search will yield tons of quality information about it.
Oh and some researchers are putting down the story of "seven sisters"/pleiades to around 100k years ago, back when the 7th star in the constellation was visible
The recovery of a possible oral tradition regarding this is likely drawn from comparative mythology techniques, which is super interesting (I'm fascinated by it, personally), but in another category.
A couple million years and your surface will be forever lost under a subduction zone. There is little sign of a global civilisation predating humans, but there is plenty spacetime for smaller societies that would have completely disappeared without a trace.
That there were non-human civilizations before the dinosaurs?
Do you consider ants/bees to have civilizations or is it just humans currently?
Or do you mean that there were human civilizations in the prehistory? And what do you mean by that – is it foolish to think that they were hunter gatherers for hundreds of years?
I don't mean to make strawmans, that's why I'm asking.
Well for starters I'd say my basic point is that its foolish to assume nothing came before what we do know about. There could have been past human civilizations, with enough time any natural building materials would effectively vanish. More interesting to me, though, would be non-human civilizations that could have existed well before humans ever came around.
I don't consider animals to have civilizations simply for having complex groups (ants or bees, for example). Though separately they do absolutely have emotions, family bonds, and long memories. My cows have proven that, each one is a different personality with their own clicks among the herd, and each cow treats the me and my wife differently so its not like "this one's always mean, this one wants to be petted" etc.
Pretty impressive long-term charts, and dramatic surge in the last years. Of course there are lot of other relevant details (e.g. more people own capital, and this is pre-tax numbers). But overall this seems pretty consistent with the story Piketty tells in Capital in the Twenty-First Century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_in_the_Twenty-First_Ce...
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