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A Story About Gullibility, Skepticism, and Three Associate Professors
Once, after the end of a working day at a university, two associate professors visited an associate professor of biology.
Two Misanthropic Columns
Is our song sung?
Two "psychological" columns and something else about comparing incompatible viewpoints
On the comparison of worldviews. Simplifying, one can say that our behavior is regulated by a feedback loop: model of reality – behavior – reaction to the response of reality – adjustment of the original model. If the original model …
August session: retirement age
Sixty years ago, the August session of VASKHIL took place, during which the Lyseynkovites—“Mitchurinites”—with party support triumphed over the classical geneticists. Should we recall this event? A boy born in those days is already retiring... Yes, we should! The consequences …
Lies, Damned Lies and…
…Statistics. Today its use is an almost mandatory condition for scientific work in many fields, including zoology. It will be no great news if I say that statistics are used incorrectly more often than correctly. The reasons for this vary, …
Shabanov (2006) Humans, hybrids, frogs
[An already quite old article in Computerre, which, in my opinion, may still be of some interest due to its discussion of possible scenarios in interspecific hybridization and the evolutionary role of partial recombinants. Among other things, it is available …
Tiktalik and evolution
The description of *Tiktaalik* — one of the earliest tetrapod species — provides an excellent opportunity to discuss the evolution of quadrupeds and the principles of phylogenetic reconstruction
Monkeys, dogmas and “Jenkin’s nightmare”
Monkey processes. Human as a monkey. “Evolutionism” is not a synonym of “Darwinism”. The essence of “Jenkin’s nightmare” and a quotation from his article. Holdeyn’s paradox (inefficiency of selection on many alleles). Shishkin’s epigenetic theory as a solution to the …
Sleep—and dream?
A rather old column in which an attempt was made to explain the phenomenon of sleep. Since its publication, the situation seems to me to have fundamentally not changed. It would be worthwhile to learn the opinions of specialist somnologists …
"Frankenstein's Food" and the Right to Truth
So does a person have the right to know what they eat? Of course they do. But they also have the right to a proper understanding of that knowledge. What does the average person know about modified organisms? That they …
Open Letter to A. V. Yablokov Regarding a Book on Genetically Modified Products (Written circa 2002)
Around 2002 I read a book that amazed me: "Kings and Cabbage. What They Will Never Tell You About Genetic Engineering" (Moscow: SOES Publishing House, 2000). This book was published with funds from a foundation led by the renowned Russian …
Two articles on global warming
The warm road to Kyoto. If the threat of climate change forces humanity as a whole and each individual to reconsider the motives of their activity, it may play a beneficial role in our history. Global warming as a phenomenon …
Four Old News Items: Altruists, the RNA World, the Goliath Cyborg, and Obesity
Altruists die, but their cause lives on.
Four “Nobel” News Items from Different Years
Nobel loves threes.
Four Earlier News Items: A Unique Case of Symbiogenesis, Cloning, Fighting Warming, and Artificial Organs
The caring thief. Admit it: even if you tried to invent something like this, would you have enough imagination?