Patrick Shaw Stewart

My allegorical fable⬇️seems to be confusing some people There are actually three main points 1. sex is a great way to spread innovation to lineages that never evolved them That's understood. But what many evolutionary biologists don't get is: 2. Mutation speeds up when a population is under strong selective pressure 3. Sexual selection - focusing on particular traits such as peacocks' tails, birdsong in songbirds, migration, or (in humans) beautiful faces, athleticism and cleverness - can restore accurate replication Those traits need to be complex - ie the product of many genes - and everyone needs to agree on what is important, so that recent mutations can be picked up _____________________ At the end of the last ice age, sea levels rose by 120 meters. As the water rose, about 1,000 humans were marooned on the Fantasian Islands, about 40 miles off the coast of West Africa (at least, I feel that’s where they ought to be). Within decades, people had wiped out all the large mammals on the islands, and they lived on gourds, fruit, and the eggs of blue-footed boobies. However, there was a kind of bean on the islands that could be eaten in small quantities – in larger quantities, it was toxic. There was one family on the island that was particularly stupid and ugly, avoided by the other islanders. This was because both parents had high mutation rates – they had DNA polymerases that couldn’t replicate DNA quite as accurately as others could - their polymerases made slightly more mistakes. Instead of about 100 new mutations per child (mutations the parents didn’t have, that is), their children had about 800. By the third generation, there were a lot of illnesses in the family, but there was one boy who could eat the beans without any ill effects (scientists now believe he had three new mutations that allowed him to tolerate both tannins and lectins). All his siblings died at young ages, but he and his children were strong - although stupid - and his sons mated with the most beautiful girls on the island. These girls had DNA polymerases with very low error rates, so fidelity was restored. After 300 years, everyone on the island was descended from this particular individual, and they were all perfectly healthy and intelligent, with beans forming 60% of their diet. By the way, it was crucial that the young men sought out the most beautiful girls - as we still do today. That’s because they were subconsciously looking for accurate polymerases. The story is allegorical, but I think this kind of thing happens all the time with animals, plants, fungi, and microbes – whenever a species is subjected to strong natural selection. For example, when they invade new terrain, an ice age begins, or they infect a new host. That’s why sexual reproduction is so universal – scientists don’t have a good explanation right now for why it’s so popular (check out the Wikipedia article). I think sexual reproduction a general adaptation to unstable environments and a mechanism to restore replicative fidelity – which is often lost. Prokaryotes have similar mechanisms, but sex is the most complex and effective Preprint: vixra.org/pdf/2303.0056v… (I've since changed the name back to The Everest Hypothesis btw)

Correct. Which it’s why it’s so crazy to damage its reputation by defending idiotic and dangerous gain of function research that had huge risks and minor benefits.

@ejwwest @PeterDClack @ChrisGloninger Would any well-known journal publish it?

@PeterDClack @ChrisGloninger We eagerly await your reappraisal of 200 years of climate science in a paper published in a peer reviewed journal. When do you expect to publish it? But you’ll need to explain what you think you know that every climate scientists & every national science academy have missed.

The geologic record doesn't say "warming is fine." It says rapid climate shifts cause mass extinctions. Current warming: 10-100x faster than the PETM, which still killed off massive numbers of species over 10,000 years. We're speedrunning that in 200 years with 8 billion people and infrastructure built for a stable Holocene. "It was warmer in the Cretaceous" isn't the flex you think it is. The dinosaurs didn't have coastal megacities.

@ChrisGloninger Chris the world warmed much faster at several points during and at the end of the last ice age. Didn't it?

@7Kiwi @mattwridley Could you please expand on that? Is there a real loss of interest in carbon credits in companies, or is this more a technical problem with the Emissions Trading System? Or both?

@PatrickSSte @mattwridley Yes. Both Germany and Italy have called for reform of the EU ETS system which has caused prices to plummet

If renewables are competitive, why do they need continuing massive subsidies? If fossil fuels are uncompetitive why have we banned new drilling and are we taxing what remains into oblivion?

I've just thought of a perfect analogy.  Let's say you're interviewing candidates for an office manager job.  You want to know if they are honest, hardworking, intelligent etc, but you also want to know if they are meticulous, which is usually not obvious at first. So you set them a test after the interview to copy information into a document where mistakes will immediately show up. That's why the peacock has a large, complex tail: it shows the peahen that the peacock can copy its genes accurately. Can anyone think of a good way to test this idea !?

@increasingmess @gadboit @Rebecca21951651 @Ayjchan @loofymectin @ban_epp_gofroc @angoffinet Exactly Where does that text come from?

@gadboit @Rebecca21951651 @PatrickSSte @Ayjchan @loofymectin @ban_epp_gofroc @angoffinet Is this the Pac-Man Scenario

Andersen & cronies claim SARS1 circulated for months or years in an intermediate host, during which time it moved 1,000 km from Yunnan to Guangdong. They now claim SARS2 circulated for much less time in an intermediate host and also moved 1,000 km from Yunnan to Wuhan. How? 🧵

@gadboit @Rebecca21951651 @Ayjchan @loofymectin @ban_epp_gofroc @angoffinet My point is that first 9 months is pretty flat⬇️

This isn't mainly about a furin site, important though that may have been for it to get going It's very tricky for a virus to jump to a new host and be transmitted onwards - that's why it's rare If it just causes a fever in one person it probably won't go anywhere If it is highly pathogenic it probably won't spread Thousands of people die of Lasa fever every year, but it never spreads human-to-human A respiratory virus in particular needs us to be walking around - walking flu - and spreading it, because a respiratory virus is unstable in the air. It needs to find a new host quickly. This balance is tricky. Therefore I would expect a new virus to mutate very quickly in the first few months, with new variants with beneficial mutations constantly arising, then sweeping over the world, competing against each other, in a complicated way. We didn't see that in the first 9 months. Why not? We saw it later

(joining this thread here because I landed here) @gadboit and others, it's pretty obvious that SC2 was well-adapted to humans when we first became aware of it because no new major strains arose for the first 9 months. It had obviously been in humans for months if not years before November 2019. It might have been smoldering in Wuhan for months (years), or it might have been in humans elsewhere. But given that it emerged in Wuhan, it seems likely that it was given a helping hand by a lab that liked putting furin sites into potentially-dangerous-to-humans viruses. (Jay is one of my heroes by the way

@gadboit @loofymectin @ban_epp_gofroc @angoffinet @Rebecca21951651 I don't buy into the idea that nothing can be done, the problem is too hard, so please ask someone else.

@GreenBin69 @DanielJHannan I have to ask - what's your point? My point is the abolitionist movement was motivated by people who wanted to do good in the world - and do God's will

@PatrickSSte @DanielJHannan Slavery was also endorsed by Christians who could justify it (which shows how diverse and perverse christianity is). Clerics speaking out against it were persecuted by other Christians. This book illustrates this

Britain was early in banning slavery. But, unlike other countries, it did not stop there. It poured blood and treasure into a campaign to stamp out the foul business globally. It signed treaties with African kings, who were determined to keep the institution alive, and enforced those treaties. Even while engaged in a life-and-death struggle with Bonaparte, it diverted gunboats to hunt down the slavers. It closed down the traffic in human beings from East Africa to Arabia. Abolitionism became a popular cause, with working-class families donating to missions. Between 1808 and 1867, Britain spent 1.8 per cent of its GDP on anti-slavery operations, the most expensive moral foreign policy in human history. What recompense does it get today? What recognition? Its reward is to be targeted by every shakedown artist, Third Worldist, grifter and halfwit. It is now seriously proposed that the country that stamped out the slave trade should pay reparations to the African states that took the slaves. Truly no good deed goes unpunished. telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/03/1…

@GreenBin69 @DanielJHannan It was also motivated by Christianity

@DanielJHannan I don't believe reparations are necessary, but lets not pretend part of the motivation for the anti-slavery actions wasn't to prevent other rivals retaining an economic advantage over Britain. Nor forget that for many slavery was replaced by Indenturing, which was similiar

@mattwridley @gadboit At least I *think* @gadboit is saying that

I largely agree with @gadboit. It may well have come from a village eg in Laos, because it looked like a human virus and was remarkably stable when it began to spread worldwide Peter Daszak said his team was looking for human coronaviruses in South China But I also agree with @gadboit that it may well have been adjusted in the lab Eg a furin site added?

Ah, yes, that well known annual pilgrimage of Laotian monks to Wuhan and nowhere else in China each November. They fast and meditate along the way, avoiding all human contact. And they return to Laos without touching anybody or anything. Riiight...

@sciencegirl If the full moon is going down that is obviously a RISING sun

Mount Fuji glows deep crimson in the setting sun, crowned by a pearl moon

@grok @jasonc_nc @VGrubsky So you invest 1 unit of energy and get roughly 2.5 units back - albeit at the cost of using land

According to USDA lifecycle analyses (2002-2015 updates, RFA 2022), nitrogen fertilizer for corn (produced via natural gas Haber-Bosch) uses ~8,500 BTU/gal ethanol—mostly NG. Ethanol yields ~76,000 BTU/gal, displacing equivalent gasoline energy. Total petroleum inputs across farming/processing/distribution are only ~17% of all energy used (~5,000-10,000 BTU/gal liquid fuels). Net: ~6x more liquid fuel (oil) displaced per BTU of NG for fertilizer alone. Overall energy ratio 2.1-2.8: positive, trading domestic NG/coal for imported oil reduction. (Refs: USDA AER-813, 2015EnergyBalanceCornEthanol.pdf)

Effectively all growth in corn production over the last 20 years is for ethanol. ~20 million acres of conservation land, grassland, and soybean rotation was turned into corn monoculture that effectively strip mines the topsoil. Meanwhile it’s the most fertilizer dependent crop with only a 40% uptake rate. So ~1.7 million tons of nitrogen runoff flows into the Mississippi basin annually while also polluting their own water supplies. This runoff ends up expanding the Gulf deadzone, which is also where 40% of domestic seafood comes from. It’s hard to find a worse way to create fuel, with a wicked level of waste and downstream consequences.

@VGrubsky @helin_drsaga Well, I think one problem is that a lot of very good articles are published that are only ever read from start to finish by about 10 people (trying to be fair)

@helin_drsaga @PatrickSSte I never understood why you have to pay to give away the rights to your work to a journal. Shouldn’t journals pay the authors to publish?

Peer review was supposed to be science’s quality filter, but somewhere along the way it started acting more like a bouncer who only lets in the regulars. It’s slow, it tends to favor established labs and familiar names, and it gets uncomfortable around anything too unconventional. Papers loaded with mountains of data tend to cruise through, while bold ideas that actually challenge the consensus get stuck in limbo or turned away at the door. The irony is that where a paper gets published almost never determines its real worth. What actually matters is what the scientific community does with it afterward, whether people cite it, argue with it, build on it, or use it to blow up a long-held assumption. That’s where the value lives, not in the journal’s logo. A major survey a few years back found that roughly 70% of researchers think the current system is fundamentally broken, and it’s not hard to see why. Publicly funded research hides behind paywalls, editors chase whatever topic is hot that month, and the whole incentive structure pushes toward safe bets over genuinely risky and potentially important work. Science has always been complicated and deeply human and full of ego and inertia, but the conversation is shifting.

@DouglasCarswell Don't we have two aircraft carriers that we can't afford? Isn't that the trouble?

5th largest defense budget in the world, but no ships. Why? Britain squandered its defense money on quasi-corrupt procurement projects.