I was taught that it was all Britain’s fault, and that we repelled the evil British and therefore we won.
My Canadian cousins were taught that basically it was all our fault and that they won the war, which is why they were still Canada and not part of the U.S.
I was still in high school at the time and until then, I had thought that what was written down in history books was absolute. That was what happened, and that was that. There were no arguments. Then to find out that their history books and our history books varied rather dramatically (i.e. we both said we won, which was kinda cute), it was at that point I realized that history wasn’t absolute and is very much open to interpretation.
As for who was right, I’d have to say now that we were both taught very much oversimplified versions of what happened and very much politically skewed versions of what happened.
There seems to be a paradigm shift undergoing in the understanding of how the genome functions.
The old model was: Proteins carry out the structural, metabolic, and regulatory functions of the cell. Functional DNA is DNA that codes for proteins (along with some nearby on/off binding sites). The 98% of DNA that is non-coding is junk: relics from the past that evolution did not bother to excise out.
When the human genome project showed revealed an astonishingly small number of proteins coded within the genome I think it forced a lot of people to realize that there is no way in heck that proteins alone can regulate all the functions in a human, or any multicellular, body. Think about all the different kinds of cells you have, all the functions they carry out, all the complex structures they build (like the brain!), all the steps involved in development. Can you write a computer program that does all that in 40,000 lines?
One discovery is that some DNA is transcribed to RNA that is not protein-coding; it carries out regulatory functions directly. I predict that there will be discoveries of more and more modes of regulation until, eventually, the vast majority of “junk” DNA will be shown to be functional in one way or another. The emerging picture will be of the genome, as a whole, to be a vastly complex state-machine that interacts with the cellular environment and with itself in a many, sometimes subtle, ways.
If there’s just as much food for giraffes at ground level, why do they bother feeding in treetops?
There has been a ton of ecology work on resource segmentation between similar organisms. Predators specialize on particular types of prey, herbivores specialize on particular types of plants. When you have a vast array of similar ruminants, as in Africa, ruminants that can browse from treetops has an advantage over those that cannot.
And of course the ancestors of giraffes didn’t grow longer necks because they knew someday they’d be able to reach the treetops. The ancestors of giraffes resembled the okapi–a pretty conventional browser body plan. But note that the conservative okapi has pretty long legs. So the ancestors of giraffes were already able to exploit higher browse than most other ruminants, even before they evolved their exaggerated necks. When you’re competing against other browsers, being able to reach a little bit higher than your competition can be a huge advantage.
And this is what leads to resource segmentation.
As an aside, take a look at the gerenuk. Here’s an antelope with a much longer than usual neck. This long neck lets it browse at higher levels than other antelopes. This is clearly a feeding adaptation. You can see how this sort of thing becomes a self-reinforcing adaptation.
And I don’t buy the explanation that giraffes have long necks to avoid predators. If a bite on the neck is so damaging, you want less neck, not more neck. A long neck is just a bigger target.
He had good reason to think he had permission: He got clearance from the censors of the Holy Office, and his book carried the imprimatur (let it be printed) without which it could not have published in Italy. Oh, and the Pope had personally reviewed the application, which does not mean he necessarily read and approved every word, but he did require Galileo to insert some material – namely, the Pope’s clever theory of how to split the difference between the Church’s insistence on geocentrism and the new-fangled ideas of heliocentrism.
The Inquisition later decided it didn’t like the way that order was followed, but the publication was perfectly well authorized, with the authority of the Pope.
As for the idea that Simplicio was a caricature of the Pope, again you’re quite right. In the book that Galileo wrote in the first place and submitted for permission to publish, the Pope’s specific idea didn’t appear at all. It was tacked on by the Pope’s own order, see above. You can read the book he submitted by simply taking the full text and omitting the last couple of pages where the Pope’s material is. There is nothing whatever in the rest of the text to suggest an association with the Pope. BTW, do you know what Galileo’s mouthpiece says in response to Simplicio’s recounting of the Pope’s idea? “A most admirable and angelic doctrine.” I just don’t what I’d do if somebody insulted an idea of mine that way.
Umm, got any evidence for that? I mean, there is the bit about Simplicio being an insult to the Pope, which I’ve noted in another posting as being without any basis. And he did get in a nasty fight with Scheiner, which has the amusing sidelight that the big argument was about the discovery of sunspots, for which, as it turns out, neither of them gets the prime credit now.
He also met old Clavius, the great astronomer of the prvious age, on a basis of mutual respect;. And his relations with Cardinal Bellarmine were entirely cordial; for evidence of that, you can read the letter Bellarmine sent him in 1616 after delivering the Pope’s orders about heliocentrism. (I have a personal crackpot notion that Bellarmine actually felt bad about that little business of burning Giordano Bruno in 1600 and wanted to avoid anything like a repetition.)
It’s not easy to find real cases in which Galileo went beyond being a very strong controversialist in arguing with his professional peers in the philosophy business. There are in fact a couple of cases in which he had the opportunity to pick a fight with someone who had said something dumb, and ignored his friends’ eagerness to see the guy blasted, saying he had no need to pick a fight in the matter. In one of these, the other guy came around to a more reasonable position on his own, and later passed on to Galileo a novel observation on sunspots, which he used in the Dialogue to good effect.
If anyone is thinking of the famous statement that Galileo alienated all his friends, it would be good to think about Benedetto Castelli, a Benedictine abbot and student of Galileo, who was the first to defend Galileo against an informal charge of heresy, and visited him 25 years later, when Galileo was sick and under house arrest, and it took some months to get the Inquisition’s permission to visit. That’s the kind of alienated former friend for me! Not to mention the people who took up a collection to make a monument for Galileo immediately after his death, and the people who held that money for 100 years till the Pope allowed them to use it.
That reminds me. I was listening to a talk by Louann Brizendine the other day, and she mentioned that up until fairly recently (when she was in med school) medical studies didn’t include women because their hormones might change the results. This leads me to believe that I was probably taught a lot of stuff about the difference between men and women that’s wrong.
Oops, typo. That should say “the wheel is just a special case of a lever”. In any sense in which a wheel can be considered a machine (that is, something with mechanical advantage), you actually have multiple wheels connected on the same axle and in contact with different things. Draw a line from one contact surface, through the axle, and to the other contact surface, and that line is basically a lever (plus a whole bunch of other material that isn’t doing anything at the moment, until they rotate into position).
Also, someone asked earlier why giraffes have both long legs and a long neck, instead of just long legs: They need to be able to get their head to ground level to drink. Humans are the only animals with long legs but a short neck, which Benjamin Franklin took as proof that we were meant to drink beer, not water.
And I’m not a historian; most of what I know about Galileo is his scientific work, not his interpersonal relations, so I’ll drop that.
I remember being taught that we would never be able to detect planets around other stars. Planets are too small and distances too great for their effect on the motion of their star to be detectable, and forget about ever imaging them directly, they’re too faint and too close to their star for that to ever be possible.
IIRC we’ve discovered 400+ extrasolar planets to date, along with directly imaging about a dozen of them.
the galileo posts are great! when i read about him, it sounds like he made improvements to the telescope on his own, but got famous by acting as a ‘lightening rod’ for the heretical views of his comtemporaries. does anyone know if any other developments can be directly attributed to galileo?
They didn’t need to know anything. If the taller ones have access to a larger (or just different) pool of food resources than the shorter ones, then the taller ones may statistically be in better breeding condition than the shorter ones.
Or, in the extreme cases of food scarcity, the PMGs knew to mate with the taller ones, because those happened to be the not-so-dead ones.
Surely you know Lake Gatun was built to provide water for the locks? It wan’t there when the French were digging. The fact remains that there would be no major oceanic flooding catastrophe if a sea-level canal were to be dug there, and the reason for the locks was to get over the landscape instead of digging all the way through it. Outflow both directions from Gatun probably does prevent Carribean and Pacific wildlife from mixing, which would have unknown results.
again, that wasn’t a serious question. it was to address the basic premise that giraffes have longer necks to satisfy a need. your conclusions are absolutely right.
It may be a gross over-simplification but when my friends father, a chemistry professor told me this in the 80’s it immediately started me to thinking about one of the things I dream about doing but never will. I want to leave an intricate glass sculpture on the moon, someplace where there is at least a chance it will go unharmed by meteorites and other things for hundreds of thousands of years along with a picture of the sculpture. I like the thought of someone (probably not a human someone) finding it a million years from now and comparing what was with what will then exist.
I don’t disagree with your assessment, but many great advances in science have been brought about because the person responsible was an idiot and discovered them accidentally while trying to prove an idiotic theory. He still gets credit for making Europe and the rest of the ‘civilized’ world realized there was an entire continent they didn’t know about.
If anyone else made astronomical observations with the telescope before him, I’ve never heard of it. With his scope, he observed sunspots and lunar mountains (of which he also measured the height), both of which went against the assumption that heavenly bodies are perfect, and also observed phases of Venus and the hitherto-unknown moons of Jupiter. both of which make the heliocentric model more plausible. He also paved the way for Newton’s laws of motion, though the really serious work on that relied on calculus.
As far as I know, Galileo was the first to try to measure the speed of light. He was a great advocate for mathematics as the language of nature (physics).
Of the related myths that I recall being taught and haven’t been mentioned: that the the Medieval philosophers put the Earth at the center of the universe as a place of privilege (in actuality, that put the corruptible and tainted Earth as far from perfect unchanging Heaven as possible); that the Italian Renaissance was a big step forward for science and philosophy (in actuality, the only advancement I know for sure, was that autopsies eventually revealed limitations to the knowledge of the ancients); that Columbus was considered an honorable man in his own time (In actuality it was only those who cast him in the most favorable light who considered him nothing more than a lying, deluded sneak.)
I was also taught that the Crusades were all about European religious imperialism. No mention that the first Crusade was initiated at the plea of the Byzantine Emperor, which was crumbling under Turkish invasion, and that the Pope agreed to help out to try and heal the Great Schism.
True, but I need some place with gravity near the earth and with (near) vacuum to avoid atmospheric degeneration of the glass, not to mention, if someone or something ever discovers the evidence of human beings on the moon, I’d really like there to be something higher on the list of interesting things than a sign on Apollo 11 with Richard M. Nixon’s signature on it.
