In the mind of a microbial paper 25 Aug 2009 Over at Small Things Considered is a point by point explanation and explication of a recent paper. For us nonscientists it’s a useful guide to how papers come to be written, how techniques and subjects are chosen, and so forth. Peer into the heads of some scientists and read it. Biology
Biology Reduction and emergence 8 Aug 20118 Aug 2011 I have been having a metaphysical debate on Twitter, which is more surreal than reading the Tractatus. My interlocutors said a few things which leads me to want to clarify my views a little more than Twitter allows. Hence… My thesis is this: Emergent properties are no different, ontologically speaking,… Read More
Biology Does life exist? 11 Jan 2014 Life, I believe, is what physics does on one particular planet on a Wednesday. More exactly, it is a series of chemical and physical dynamics that occurs between 3.85 billion years ago and now on this planet. Ferris Jabr, an editor at the Scientific American site, has a piece entitled “Why… Read More
Biology Darwin Day: Enough already 18 Feb 2011 I love studying about Darwin and his life and times. I have read enormous amounts, and taught Darwinian history. I’m teaching it again this semester. But enough already. Can we talk about modern biology now? I get a strong impression ( and that’s all this is, as I can’t find… Read More
And once you’ve figured out where the proteins are, you’ll have to figure out when they are. The standard of what counts as an explanation keeps getting raised. I recall when a eukaryotic cell (though nobody called ’em that at the time) was just a an irregular circular shape with a smaller circle inside that represented the nucleus. As somebody once remarked to me, Watson and Crick discovered the meaning of life back in ’53 but it was only the meaning of life until the advance of biology upped the ante.