We Asked 100 Scientists About Unsolved Problems In Their Fields...

Epistemological Modesty, my friend. Epistemological Modesty! 

Beautiful list and stupid me, I thought we knew the answers to a few of these questions and some, I didn't even know it was a "question". 

There are so many unknown questions about animals and biology in general than physics. I am glad that many minds are working on these. 

• How did the first Indigenous people enter the Americas? - Michael Waters, geoarchaeologist, Center for the Study of the First Americans, Texas A&M University

• A million years ago, how did earlier human species colonize remote and previously uninhabited islands in Southeast Asia? - Adam Brumm, archaeologist, Griffith University, Australia

• What kind of information — about people, places and other dogs can dogs acquire through smell - Alexandra Horowitz, cognitive scientist, Dog Cognition Lab, Barnard College

• How do birds migrate with such energy efficiency? - David Lentink, engineer and biologist, University of Groningen, the Netherlands

• How many undiscovered animal species live in the deep sea, and do they matter? - Lisa Levin, marine ecologist, Scripps Institution of Oceanography, University of California, San Diego

• Which other animals dream, and how similar are their dreams to ours? - Benjamin Scott, neuroscientist, Boston University

• Why do animals that fly live longer? - Elinor Karlsson, vertebrate geneticist, UMass Chan Medical School and Broad Institute

• Why are humans the only species with a chin? - Daniel Lieberman, evolutionary biologist, Harvard University

• How did the building blocks of life, like proteins and nucleic acid, first organize into a living cell? - Steve Brusatte, paleontologist, University of Edinburgh

• When does a cell become destined to develop into cancer? - Dr. Kimryn Rathmell, physician-scientist, The Ohio State University Comprehensive Cancer Center, The Arthur G. James Cancer Hospital

• Blue whales are the biggest animals ever to exist on Earth. Where are their babies born? - Helen Scales, marine biologist

• Most cancers are not genetic, so why do they occur? - Dr. Mehra Golshan, cancer surgeon, Yale School of Medicine

• Why does the immune system in some people, and not others, control cancers and viruses? - Dr. Sharon Lewin, infectious diseases physician, the Peter Doherty Institute for Infection and Immunity, University of Melbourne, Australia

• Why do the viruses that cause colds and flu spread so much more easily in winter? - Linsey Marr, environmental engineer, Virginia Tech

• Can we learn what emotions animals are experiencing? - Tom Smulders, evolutionary neuroscientist, Newcastle University, England

• Are we alone in the universe? - Robert Hazen, staff scientist, Carnegie Institution for Science

Food Is Important Than Moronic AI & Dreams Of Utopia

The bigger fear is what scientists call “multiple breadbasket failures” – that is, several of the world’s great growing regions failing at once. The journalist George Monbiot tells me that globalisation has allowed us to make up for a bad harvest in one region with imports from another. This year, military activity has at times reduced Russia and Ukraine’s Black Sea grain export capacity by 97 per cent, and the Iran war has throttled Hormuz – the conduit for a third of the world’s urea, a fertiliser. El Niño is bearing down on India’s rice, Australia’s wheat and southern Africa’s maize.

India, at least, has a buffer. The monsoon season was drier than expected, but Delhi is sitting on a record strategic reserve of 59.6 million tonnes of rice, and has so far resisted repeating the 2023 export ban that pushed world rice prices up by more than a fifth. Britain? “We used to have strategic food reserves in this country,” Monbiot says. “ But we left it all to the private sector who have now moved to this just-in-time production and delivery model.” The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs estimates that the UK imports roughly 40 per cent of its food.

And what does come from our own fields is coming under increasing pressure. This summer’s drought reduced expected wheat yields by a seventh. The Met Office says El Niño is likely to lead to a wet and stormy autumn, and a colder than usual winter. During the last El Niño winter, in 2023, fields were so sodden that the following year’s wheat harvest fell by a fifth.

Monbiot’s deeper worry is that the food system now looks like the banks before the financial crash: concentrated, efficient and without flexibility. In 2008, governments rescued the banks by issuing future money. “If the food system starts to go down,” he says, “you can’t bail it out by issuing future food.” Food security and self-sufficiency, at a governmental and household level, is one of the central issues of our uncertain times.

But there are two things I can say for certain: next year is going to be hotter. And your big shop, dearer.

- More Here

Meta Values - 54

Living through something is not the same as learning from it, and learning from it is not the same as consciously extracting and communicating the wisdom it contains.

Many don't learn even from painful experiences.

Learning without experiencing firsthand and by using wisdom from past humans is absolutely free and will save one’s life. 

This is "magic" behind the long survival of organic life on this planet.

 

How Did the English Build Such Beautiful Villages?

The materials tell another part of the story, because before railways and modern transportation made standardized construction products available across the country, builders relied heavily upon whatever stone, clay, timber, flint, straw, and other materials could be obtained locally.

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This created harmony almost automatically, because two cottages could be built a century apart by different craftsmen, with different windows and different proportions, while the shared material immediately connected them to one another and to the surrounding countryside.

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Stone cottages, rendered façades, timber-framed buildings, walls, gates, gardens, and small shops all sit close to the road, creating a street whose shape is defined by architecture rather than by the engineering requirements of traffic.

The buildings turn corners naturally, doors face the pavement, rooflines overlap, windows remain close enough to be noticed by someone walking past, and walls continue the line of the street wherever the houses pull away from it.

Walking through Lacock therefore feels very different from moving through a settlement where buildings sit behind large setbacks and roads occupy most of the space, because here the lane remains intimate enough for architecture to stay within the pedestrian’s field of vision.

The street becomes an outdoor room formed from cottages, walls, trees, hedges, and gardens.

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The English also became exceptionally good at using vegetation as architecture, with hedges forming walls, trees creating canopies, climbing plants softening cottages, and garden gates turning the transition between public lane and private home into a small architectural event.

A stone wall might continue from the side of a cottage before gradually disappearing beneath ivy, then become a hedge, then open through a wooden gate into a garden, allowing constructed and natural forms to flow into one another without a sharp boundary.

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The village never needs a dramatic ending because architecture simply gives way to landscape.

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William Morris, who knew and loved these places, put the deeper principle simply:

“Simplicity of life, even the barest, is not a misery, but the very foundation of refinement: a sanded floor and whitewashed walls, and the green trees, and flowery meads, and living waters outside; or a grimy palace amid the smoke with a regiment of housemaids always working to smear the dirt together so that it may be unnoticed; which, think you, is the most refined, the most fit for a gentleman of those two dwellings? … Now if the public knew anything of art, that is excellence in things made by man, they would not abide the shams of it; and if the real thing were not to be had, they would learn to do without… Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”

And this may be the simplest answer to how the English built such beautiful villages, because they built churches where people worshipped, pubs where people gathered, cottages from the materials beneath their feet, walls around gardens, bridges across streams, and lanes along routes people already traveled, then allowed generation after generation to add another layer without completely erasing the one that came before.

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Beauty Of Probabilia - A Good sceptic Has More Than Doubt & Less Than Certainty

How tightly should you hold your beliefs? You face the question several times a week without noticing. Hold them too loosely and you don’t stand for anything, hold them too tightly and you become the sort of person no argument can reach. Most of us swing between the two and have no vocabulary for the ground in between. A Roman lawyer worked one out, under pressure far worse than anything we are likely to face, and it is still the best answer available.

The time is early 45 BCE, the place a villa near Lucrine Lake, northwest of Naples, in southern Italy. One of the most fascinating and controversial figures in the entirety of Western history, Marcus Tullius Cicero, is finishing writing a book that will be known as the Academica, where he explains the nature of sceptical philosophy and why it is so crucial not just to the advancement of human knowledge, but to living a good life.

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Which is why he is worth your time now. What follows is partly the story of a man, but mostly a usable method: a way of holding beliefs that is neither the performed humility of the professional doubter nor the armoured certainty of the person who has ‘done their own research’. Cicero had a name for it – probabilia – and I think you will find it very useful any time you have to assess the validity of a notion and make a decision about it.

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The difference shows in practice: a genuine sceptic, confronted with compelling new evidence, updates – whereas the contrarian does not: they shift goalposts, raise new objections, or ignore what they cannot explain, all while citing studies selectively and appealing to the handful of dissenting experts cherrypicking the evidence. Their doubt is not the productive Socratic doubt that opens enquiry but a rhetorical shield that forecloses it. These self-styled sceptics are in fact dogmatists, having reached their conclusions in advance and thereafter simply engaging in rationalisations.

On the other side, a certain strand of scientism has overcorrected by demanding certainty as the price of admission for any belief worth holding, deploying ‘follow the science’ as a conversation-stopper rather than an invitation to enquiry. That is not how real science works either.

Both pathologies make the same mistake: they treat doubt and certainty as the only two options. Neither leaves room for what we actually need: calibrated confidence, the ability to say This is the best available account, I will act on it, and I remain open to being wrong. What is missing, then, is a philosophy of provisional but committed belief, a philosophy Cicero already worked out, in Latin, 2,000 years ago.

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Cicero’s own formulation is plain. In the Academica, he separates his school from the dogmatists in a single sentence: others declare that certain things are settled and fixed, whereas ‘we hold many things to be probabilia, which we can easily follow but can scarcely affirm.’ Follow easily, affirm rarely. The entire method is encapsulated by that asymmetry.

The term probabilia does not mean ‘probable’ in the modern, quantitative statistical sense, but something closer to ‘worthy of approval’: a claim that has withstood scrutiny, coheres with the available evidence, and a reasonable person would assent to while remaining open to revision. It is enough to act on.

Nor is ‘probabilia’ a single, undifferentiated category, and this is the important part usually left out. Carneades graded impressions (ie, preliminary judgments) by how much scrutiny they had survived. At the first level, an impression simply strikes you as a bit more likely to be true than not. At the second level, it rises to being persuasive. At the third, it is ‘undiverted’, meaning that nothing else you believe conflicts with it. At the fourth and highest level, it is also thoroughly examined, essentially the result of scientific investigation. Trivial matters need only the first or second grade; a medical decision or a criminal verdict demands the third or fourth. What Cicero inherited and deployed, then, was not a generic mood of open-mindedness but a graded, checkable procedure.

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Cicero is explicit in the Academica: the wise person acts on the best available view, not because they are certain it is true, but because suspending all judgment would make life impossible. We are not the kind of people who think nothing is true, say the Academics; we are the people who say that some falsehoods are mixed in with truths, so similar to them that we have no sure criterion for judging, so we can assess only provisionally.

Strip away the Latin and the toga, and the Academic method comes down to a handful of habits, all of which can be practised, starting today:

• Say how confident you are, not just what you think. ‘I believe X’ is nearly useless. ‘I believe X, at about 7 out of 10, and here is what is holding back the other 3’ gives your interlocutor something to work with and gives you somewhere to move in the light of new evidence or better arguments.
• Grade your beliefs by how hard they have been tested. Most of what any of us believes sits at Carneades’ second level: it merely struck us as persuasive. Reserve confident action for what has been through the third and fourth levels.
• Separate your values from your empirical beliefs. That children should not go hungry is a value and may be held firmly. That a particular school-meals programme reduces hunger is an empirical claim, to be held only as firmly as the evidence warrants. Conflating the two is what makes people defend failing policies as though their integrity depended on it.
• State in advance what would change your mind. If nothing would, you do not have a belief, you have an identity.
• Argue the other side properly. The Academy’s signature exercise was arguing in utramque partem, on both sides of a question. Carneades notoriously did it in Rome in 155 BCE, defending justice one day and demolishing it the next. The point was not cynicism but that you do not truly know what you believe until you have built the strongest case against it yourself.
• Act anyway. The sceptic who treats uncertainty as a reason to postpone action has missed the point entirely. Uncertainty is the permanent condition of humanity, deciding effectively within that is a skill we can all benefit from.
• Treat being wrong as data rather than disgrace. If you follow these sceptical rules of thumb, you will change your mind from time to time – or at least ought to. The question is whether you experience that as humiliation or as the method working.

None of this was merely theoretical for Cicero. It informed every major decision of his life, including the most contested one.

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The letters he exchanged with his friend Atticus in the months before his death are the most instructive documents Cicero left. Knowing that Mark Antony wanted him dead, he debated whether to flee, whether to return to Rome, whether to trust the young Octavian (the future emperor Augustus): reasoning under uncertainty, weighing probabilities, deciding anyway. When he returned and resumed attacking Antony in the discourses known as the Philippics, he knew he might be signing his death warrant, but the probable good outweighed the probable cost. He was murdered on 7 December 43 BCE. His last words, to the legionnaire sent to kill him, were: ‘I am stopping here. Come over, soldier. There is nothing right about what you are doing, but at least make sure you cut off my head properly.’

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Second, democracy requires the willingness to be persuaded. Deliberation is possible only if citizens hold their political views as probabilia rather than as dogma, and the current political crisis is partly an epistemological one.

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The well-examined life is one of continuous calibration and revision: strong-enough commitments to act with integrity, loose enough to update when the evidence changes.

This is countercultural in an age that prizes authenticity in the sense of having a fixed self, and urges us to own our identity. Cicero would have found that to be self-congratulatory. He changed his mind about friends, alliances and tactical judgments, and worried about it, as his letters make plain. But developing a crystallised self that never updates is not integrity: it is rigidity dressed up as character. The Ciceronian person is recognisable by a willingness to be embarrassed by earlier certainties, and by treating that embarrassment not as failure but as evidence that enquiry is working.

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The genuine sceptic is not the person who doubts everything, nor the person who demands proof before believing anything. It is the person who has learned to hold their best views with exactly the right strength of grip: firmly enough to act on them, loosely enough to let go when the evidence turns. That is what probabilia means. It is harder than dogmatism and harder than nihilistic doubt, but Cicero thought it the only honest stance available to a finite human being. He was probably right.

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Meta Values - 53

Early in life, visit all of these places (maybe schools should take kids as part of mandatory yearly trip):

• Slaughter House
• Hospital ICU 
• Hospice 
• Prison
• Cemetery and Cremation Center
• Poor neighborhoods
• Farms
• Water Processing Centers
• Aftermath of a natural disaster

Most of the above would cost zero dollars but will instill priceless wisdom and gratitude for life. 

The second and multiple order effects would be even more priceless - elimination of pain and suffering of animals, humans, food/water waste, and nature sans Anthropocene. 

 

The Mythology Of Conscious AI - Anil Seth

The importance of taking an informed ethical position despite all these uncertainties spotlights another human habit: our unfortunate track record of withholding moral status from those that deserve it, including from many non-human animals, and sometimes other humans. It is reasonable to wonder whether withholding attributions of consciousness to AI may leave us once again on the wrong side of history. The recent calls for attention to “AI welfare” are based largely on this worry.

But there are good reasons why the situation with AI is likely to be different. Our psychological biases are more likely to lead to false positives than false negatives. Compared to non-human animals, the apparent wonders of AI may be more similar to us in ways that do not matter for consciousness, like linguistic ability, and less similar in ways that do, like being alive.

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Long before Descartes, the Greek concept of psychē linked the idea of a soul to breath, while on the other side of the world, the Hindu expression of soul, or Ātman, associated our innermost essence with the ground-state of all experience, unaffected by rational thought or by any other specific conscious content, a pure witnessing awareness.

The cartoon dreams of a silicon rapture, with its tropes of mind uploading, of disembodied eternal existence and of cloud-based reunions with other chosen ones, is a regression to the Cartesian soul. Computers, or more precisely computations, are, after all, immortal, and the sacrament of the algorithm promises a purist rationality, untainted by the body (despite plentiful evidence linking reason to emotion). But these are likely to be empty dreams, delivering not posthuman paradise but silicon oblivion.

What really matters is not this kind of soul. Not any disembodied human-exceptionalist undying essence of you or of me. Perhaps what makes us us harks even further back, to Ancient Greece and to the plains of India, where our innermost essence arises as an inchoate feeling of just being alive — more breath than thought and more meat than machine. The sociologist Sherry Turkle once said that technology can make us forget what we know about life. It’s about time we started to remember.

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Wise Man Amongst Moronic Neighbors In NJ!

A Mercer County homeowner’s decision to rewild their yard is sparking debate among residents who say the vegetation creates visibility concerns for pedestrians and cyclists.

The property, located in West Windsor, features a native plant garden that extends to the edge of a corner lot. A sign posted at the front of the yard states it is a certified wildlife habitat by the National Wildlife Federation.

Residents raised concerns during a Sept. 15 township council meeting, arguing that the landscaping obstructs sight lines at the intersection and could negatively affect nearby property values.

Others questioned how native gardens should be maintained and whether current township regulations are sufficient to address them.

The homeowner, Bradley King, defended the property at the council meeting, saying it provides a habitat for wildlife and pollinators.

“I am a haven for many animals on my property that we all care about deeply,” King told the council, adding that he has young children and is “equally concerned about ticks and lyme disease as anyone else,” referring to residents’ concerns about pests.

King said he is willing to discuss neighbors’ concerns and that he supports efforts to find a compromise.

“I encourage and embrace my neighbors being at liberty to do as they wish with their private property and I just wish the same consideration from my township,” King said.

Native landscaping is gaining popularity

More New Jersey residents are trading in their hard-to-maintain grass lawns for an alternative that invites migrating birds, insects and pollinators to thrive in the space.

Michele Bakacs, an associate professor and county agent with Rutgers Cooperative Extension, said the native planting movement has inspired more homeowners to support birds, pollinators and other wildlife by creating meadows of flowers and grasses on their properties.

Bakacs works with New Jersey residents interested in establishing native landscapes.

Homeowners who create nature-based landscapes should consider factors such as sight lines and visibility when planning their yards, she said.

For homeowners with corner lots, one practice involves setting the meadow back from roads and sidewalks, Bakacs said.

Jean Epiphan, an assistant professor at Rutgers University and an agriculture and natural resources agent, said communities are continuing to revisit landscaping regulations as interest in native plants grows.

“And so there’s a lot of movement, maybe a little slow in this direction, but there is movement,” Epiphan said. “And town by town, people are making changes.”

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Councilwoman Andrea Mandel said she had seen the property prior to the council meeting and had observed vegetation extending into areas that may already be in violation of township regulations.

The council has not taken formal action, but officials indicated they would continue reviewing whether existing rules adequately address native landscaping while balancing safety concerns raised by residents.

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Meta Values - 52

Never-ever confuse knowledge & technological progress with progress in human morality. It never happened nor will happen in the future. 

Thank you John Gray for teaching me this during my wonder days with Max. Thank you, sir. 

First step improve my morality and make marginal progress in morality in future is to understand John Gray's wise words. 

There is no such thing as progress, that is, of things getting better: science and technology may improve, but the human animal will not; purpose does not exist independent of human construction, history and civilizations have no grand plan, no superior march towards glorious progress, nor can that purpose be a moral redemption of mankind.

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If there is anything unique about the human animal it is that it has the ability to grow knowledge at an accelerating rate while being chronically incapable of learning from experience. Science and technology are cumulative, whereas ethics and politics deal with recurring dilemmas. Whatever they are called, torture and slavery are universal evils; but these evils cannot be consigned to the past like redundant theories in science. They return under different names: torture as enhanced interrogation techniques, slavery as human trafficking. Any reduction in universal evils is an advance in civilization. But, unlike scientific knowledge, the restraints of civilized life cannot be stored on a computer disc. They are habits of behaviour, which once broken are hard to mend. Civilization is natural for humans, but so is barbarism.

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Science enables humans to satisfy their needs. It does nothing to change them. They are no different today from what they have always been. There is progress in knowledge, but not in ethics. This is the verdict both of science and history, and the view of every one of the world's religions.

- John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

The Upper Limits Of Biology

In June 1973, chestnut colt Secretariat ran the Belmont Stakes so fast that no horse has matched him since. In less than two and a half minutes, Secretariat flew along the track, finally pulling away to win by 31 lengths, nearly three quarters of a football field. The other horses were so far behind they weren’t even in the television frame. Fifty years later, billions of dollars have been poured into breeding and training, yet Secretariat’s record still stands.

This is the paradox of the thoroughbred: breeders have spent centuries trying to create a faster horse, but in doing so, they may have bred away the very genetic diversity that would allow the horse to keep improving, or even to remain robust.

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As genetics has played such a large role in breeding horses, it is small wonder that horse breeders are moving with the frontiers of science. The world’s first cloned horse, called Prometea, was born in 2003. Horse cloning is now big business, despite an American Jockey Club ban, as other equine sports, including show jumping and polo, allow clones.

In 2024, the Argentinian company Kheiron announced the production of the first CRISPR-edited horses: Polo Pureza, an award-winning mare, was the foundation for five gene-edited clones with increased explosive speed. According to reports, the company modified the MSTN gene, so that the animals would develop more muscle fibers and potentially run faster as a result. Even so, the prospects for exceeding current records through gene editing are slim. Today’s racehorses are already tightly optimized for speed, balancing strength against the cost of carrying additional muscle mass. Adding more muscle is relatively low-hanging fruit, and if this were the key to unlocking greater speed, selective breeding would likely already have brought it about.

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At the Belmont Stakes in 1973, Secretariat ran in a category of his own. His extraordinary performance seems to have been the result of many unlikely factors aligning. After he died, Secretariat’s heart was reportedly measured at almost 10 kilograms – twice as much as normal. This appears to have been a physiological fluke, however, as it isn’t a trait reliably passed down to offspring. Combined with his unusual stamina, exceptionally powerful legs that allowed him to cover 25 feet per stride, favorable race conditions, and a skilled jockey, this produced a race time that has still never been matched half a century later, despite advances in breeding, training, nutrition, and veterinary care.

Secretariat offers a glimpse of the upper limits of biology. But as racehorses have pushed against that limit to become faster and more powerful, their population has become more fragile as the gene pool has narrowed. Our 4,000-year pursuit of the ultimate horse may not have much further to run.

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