I drive a Prius and can confirm. Large trucks act threatened by my existence on a regular basis.

And it’s SUCH a good game. I got through it with the DLC and cried at the end.

Please stop spreading misinformation. You’re on the internet. Kindly fact check yourself in the future. It’s better for everyone, including you!

I grew up believing the same until somewhere in high school, when I started taking science seriously.

… a jumble of local maximums and chance.

I really like how you phrased this. I’m totally stealing it.

Oh no, rate of mutation is definitely a thing and is controlled by several factors. A big one is generation time, which is what it sounds like, the time between each generation. The copying of DNA is a source of mutations. This is why many controlled experiments on evolution are done with bacteria, who have super low generation times. For example, depending on temperature, the generation of many salmonella species is around 20-30 minutes. That lets you crank out massive numbers of potential mutations, then introduce a selective pressure, like an antibiotic the species normally isn’t resistant to or an energy source it normally can’t utilize, and see what happens.

To answer your question, yes, a higher mutation rate would confer an advantage. To a point. Most mutations are deleterious and usually lead to death, a few are benign and do nothing (at that point), and a very rare few are immediately advantageous. As long as the rate of mutation isn’t so high that the deleterious mutations combined with whatever other pressures are wiping out the population, more mutation means more chances to have the right trait to deal with a novel pressure or, very rarely, do something better.

To preface, I’m a microbiologist, so I have skin in the science game. I hate how these articles often have science illiterate authors or authors who are imprecise with their wording. They repeat misinformation on basic topics that science educators have been striving to correct for decades, perpetuating the cycle.

…the study shows once again how evolution throws up multiple solutions to basic problems…

In this case, it’s the “mysterious force of evolution that whips up solutions to problems”. Evolution doesn’t create solutions. There is no guiding force behind evolution.

Evolution through natural selection selects for existing solutions that were generated randomly through mutation, increasing the frequency of that trait because those without either die or are outcompeted. What happens if a trait is required for survival but no organisms have it? They all die. That’s why over 99% of all multicellular species that have ever lived on Earth are extinct. If you include microbes, make that 99.99999%.

I like that you’re thinking of alternatives, though! Don’t ever lose that, it’s less common than you might think.

Check out OP’s post history. They whine a lot about women, especially feminists and the pay gap, and Muslims in that cringy way boomer men more often do. Pretty sure they’re a boomer.

I’d imagine an increasingly hostile world economy coupled with a then-looming but now beginning climate crisis might have a huge impact there.

It’d be bad. Real bad. An algae bloom of massive proportions. It has one huge issue.

Enough algae to make the rivers run green will use up enough oxygen at night to kill off fish and oxygen hungry invertebrates, starting a chain reaction of death.

Now you have a river full of dead organisms, so they start decomposing thanks to microbes. You know what many types of bacteria love? Oxygen. So they start using up oxygen, multiplying all the while. Night hits and the algae need to use oxygen, but a bunch die because there’s not enough. Now the river is full of literally hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of decomposing matter. The river largely goes anoxic (meaning there’s no oxygen) so things start dying left and right. A bunch of those bacteria can live with and without oxygen, so they use up what they can and keep on chugging without.

Now we’ve moved from aerobic respiration to anaerobic. You know what the primary byproducts of anaerobic respiration are? Organic acids and alcohols, which smell. The river begins to smell like an infected wound. It’s no longer green but deep, murky brown from the suspension of decomposing organisms. This continues until the river flushes everything out, but it kills what’s downstream as it continues until it hits the ocean, where it likely continues to kill everything in the vicinity until it becomes dilute enough.

I’m a microbiologist and worked with algae and cyanobacteria as an undergrad. Never underestimate the impact of uncountable billions of trillions of living organisms.

That’s one hell of a slippery slope argument.

Do you think they’ll try to garner votes from murderers and rapists? Maybe they’ll attempt to make pigeons American citizens so they can vote too.

“These commie Timtoks will drag the kids to hell where they’ll burn with the D&D dungeon masters and the people who hand out free hallucinogens to children!”

-Republican Suburban Hellscape

Am I reading this right? Are you conflating pedophilia with transgender support and feminism? Is this a joke or sarcasm of some kind I’m missing?

Edit: wait, is this super meta unpopular opinion?

Elden Ring had a soundtrack?! Now I need to play it again. I think I had the music volume off.

I think a lot of the Internet is going to end up shitted up with this kind of nonsense. While leaving Reddit certainly tackles one issue, having a way to filter out the rest of this shit would be useful.

Sorry to play armchair doctor, but has she tried budesonide? I ask because a friend of mine has/had very similar symptoms. He was diagnosed with microscopic colitis but it was actually mast cell related. Doctors are still trying to figure out what mast cell disorder it is, but the leading theory is the other medication was causing his mast cells to degranulate, whereas budesonide inhibits degranulation.

As someone who also has a mystery mast cell issue (go MCAS!), my mast cells going pop makes me really loopy, sometimes to the point of incoherence.

China Mieville novels are great but be prepared for some weird, weird content.

Apparently he has crippling anxiety. I get it and, out of everyone I’ve listed, I’m very okay with him and Sanderson. I’m just wary of getting invested in unfinished series. Lynch only has the Gentleman Bastards series, which I fell in love with. Sanderson has so many literary irons in the fire that he’s going to have gobs of unfinished business if something happens to him or he pulls a GRRM and just fucks off one day.

It’s about the frequency of Stormlight Archives releases. Last I checked, he stated he had over a dozen Cosmere novels to release before the next one drops. If he gets hit by a truck, that’s the end of it.

I had the same reaction. George R.R. Martin, Patrick Rothfuss, Scott Lynch, and Brandon Sanderson have me spooked.