With the Neanderthal genome at 1.5x coverage, the Mammoth sequence in draft last year, and the Tasmanian tiger this january, I'm wondering how many extinct species have we sequenced yet?
Does anyone know?
What are the limits for extracting ancient DNA? Yeah, I know it depends on how well preserved the DNA is, but does anyone have rough numbers?
I wish I knew more about ancient DNA...
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50-71=-21
How can you say that evolution is “true”? Isn’t that just your opinion, of no more value than anybody else’s? Isn’t every view entitled to equal “respect”? Maybe so where the issue is one of, say, musical taste or political judgement. But when it is a matter of scientific fact? Unfortunately, scientists do receive such relativistic protests when they dare to claim that something is factually true in the real world.
...
Scientific “truth” is only one kind (“Western” truth, the anthropologist may call it, or even “patriarchal”). Like tribal truths, yours merely hang together with the world view that you happen to hold, which you call scientific. An extreme version of this viewpoint (I have actually encountered this) goes so far as to say that logic and evidence themselves are nothing more than instruments of masculine oppression over the “intuitive mind”.
Grr... Does not compute!
Scientific “truth” is only one kind (“Western” truth, the anthropologist may call it, or even “patriarchal”). Like tribal truths, yours merely hang together with the world view that you happen to hold, which you call scientific. An extreme version of this viewpoint (I have actually encountered this) goes so far as to say that logic and evidence themselves are nothing more than instruments of masculine oppression over the “intuitive mind”.
Oh well, no more on this for now. This afternoon I'm attending two seminars: one on intelligent design and one on Darwin (both at BiRC, but with speakers from Dept. of Science Studies).
I might have more to say after that.
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50-70=-20