Science roundup: We are not machines, night owl superiority, dreams and consciousness, LUCA, more

An Aeon piece is the headliner. It talks about the ongoing discoveries in genetics, which go beyond the fact that much of our genome is not "coding" but rather produces regulatory proteins that control coding genome, to the fact that much of the coding genome codes for RNA, and more beyond that. 

That's where the "not a machine" comes in. Having just an "on-off switch" genomically, like a bacterium, would be disastrous for a creature like Homo sapiens.

In addition, per the piece, older biologists still have diehard, last-ditch resistance to anything that attacks the "central dogma" of genetics.

That's only the tip of the iceberg of a great read. And, it's by Philip Ball.

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Yes, I'll gloat on this second one.

The Guardian reports that night owls have superior cognitive functioning. (That said, Ben Franklin was only "early to bed' if there was a lady there waiting for him.)

And it is NOT "small survey size":

Research on 26,000 people found those who stay up late scored better on intelligence, reasoning and memory tests.

Sounds like something real.

That said, this means getting up later.

The study also notes that the best night owl performers still got a recommended 7 hours or more of shut-eye.

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Is life sort of like a super-lucid dream? Noema has the right framing with a pull-quote graf below the header:

Recent research on lucid dreams suggests that consciousness exists along a spectrum between sleep and waking, between hallucination and revelation, between dreamworlds and reality.

Yes, indeed. 

Spectrum. That's part of what the David Chalmers-es of the philosophical world miss with their "hard problem" of consciousness.

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Retired geology prof and online friend Paul Braterman says "historical science is the best kind of science."

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Related? Interesting new research claims on the purported Last Universal Common Ancestor, mainly that it developed and existed earlier, and was more complex, than once thought. That said, the early origin claim, especially, is not uncontroversial, namely, the claim that it was before the early heavy bombardment of Earth by meteorites and such. OTOH, not all paleo-astronomers think the early heavy bombardment was that severe.