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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 12th, 2023

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  • Yes. But if you have many complaints from MANY MANY users, it may not mean anything serious, it could still mean a very small fraction have problems. Absolute number means very little without context. That’s the purpose of the previous comment. Please note how it doesn’t say anything about qualities of Windows.


  • I’m afraid that you don’t quite see all the complexity involved. I’m not saying I see all of it, but I can see there is more to it than you think.

    What about bacteria? Not only don’t they don’t often use sexual reproduction, so they don’t need a pair of parents to produce offsprings, but they exchange plasmids and therefore DNA with little regard for species.

    Plants are a complete mess of genome duplication, aneuploidy and whatnot. In these aspects, they are sort of scary to me.

    Also, what about formation of a new species? Do you think there is a clean-cut time when they stop producing offspring? Also, what exactly do you mean by fertile? Where do you get a partner to test if the offspring is fertile?

    These are just a few problems that came to my mind right away. I’m sure there’s loads more. I’m afraid that the notion of well organised, easy to categorise world just doesn’t match the real world. Species are more or less a continuum. Incidentally, so is life. We have no good definition fornlife either. Just use whatever definition is useful at the moment and don’t forget to specify it when necessary.


  • Hasn’t Beal’s list been taken down quite a while ago? I remember making a copy of it before they removed it. It was a great source, but sometimes it needed some context. I think all of Frontiers in ended up on the list for reasons, but their review process was mostly alright, for example. It was this kind of lack of clearly definedrules and explanations that let them to taking the list down. Is it back up?


  • For the record, this is almost certainly a genetic defect of the father, some kind of dominant mutation. Nutrition and other environmental factors most likely didn’t play any role in a height difference this big.

    There are two copies of each gene. Here, one of the copies got mutated in such a way that it caused the stunted growth of the father. Each sperm contains one randomly selected copy of each gene. Therefore half of the father’s sperms contained the mutated gene and the other half the normal version. There was 50% chance the son would be normal height and 50% chance he would be small like his father.

    I actually know a family like this. Nothing fishy going on there, the mutation is well described and now new kids with the mutation get growth hormones during their growth to reach normal size.