Science news roundup: RNA, Darwin vs Spencer, more

Very insightful longform piece by Philip Ball, talking about the latest of what we know about "noncoding RNA" being another mechanism of gene control, along with epigenetic tags, and more. This includes microRNA and long-noncodingRNA, among other things, in what is looking more and more like an "RNA revolution."

There's still a LOT to learn, and still lots of pushback against envelope-pushers, but it's all interesting.

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Have we been viewing Darwin too much through the filter of Herbert Spencer? This piece, worth a read just for its posited talking point — how the world of humans will, or will not fully, survive a pending climate catastrophe, says yes:

Darwin told us in 1859 that what we had been doing for the last 10,000 or so years was not going to work. But people didn’t want to hear that message. So along came a sociologist who said, “It’s OK; I can fix Darwinism.” This guy’s name was Herbert Spencer, and he said, “I can fix Darwinism. We’ll just call it natural selection, but instead of survival of what’s-good-enough-to-survive-in-the-future, we’re going to call it survival of the fittest, and it’s whatever is best now.” Herbert Spencer was instrumental in convincing most biologists to change their perspective from “evolution is long-term survival” to “evolution is short-term adaptation.” And that was consistent with the notion of maximizing short term profits economically, maximizing your chances of being reelected, maximizing the collection plate every Sunday in the churches, and people were quite happy with this.

Food for thought. As is the next paragraph, which explains why philosopher of science Dan Brooks says we need to get rid of that filter:

Well, fast-forward and how’s that working out? Not very well. And it turns out that Spencer’s ideas were not, in fact, consistent with Darwin’s ideas. They represented a major change in perspective. What Sal and I suggest is that if we go back to Darwin’s original message, we not only find an explanation for why we’re in this problem, but, interestingly enough, it also gives us some insights into the kinds of behavioral changes we might want to undertake if we want to survive.

More food for thought. Brooks uses the term "bottleneck," saying Homo sapiens will survive, but in a way similar indeed to the "bottleneck" that early modern Homo sapiens hit before "out of Africa" became permanent.

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Did humans kill off Neanderthals in part with herpes viruses and other viruses? Versions of herpes virus, adenovirus (colds) and papilloma virus were recently found and sequenced in a Neanderthal bone set dated at 50,000 years ago. The "viral death" theory had already been around; this ramps it up.

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I knew Lord Kelvin for the Kelvin temperature scale and absolute zero, as well as for his classical physics mis-guess on the age of the Earth. (That said, as radioactivity became known, he adjusted his dating and paid off a bet to Lord Rayleigh, but remained a theistic evolutionist with emphasis on the theistic.) Per this piece, I did not know he was involved with the laying of the transatlantic cable and inventor of a mechanical tide calculator and a number of other maritime instruments and tools.