So we all agree that all this "AI is going to kill us all, we must slow the pace!" stuff coming from Altman/Musk/Amodei is just their way of lobbying for the ban open source LLMs, right?
Bird account
@dialecticbio.bsky.social
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The "The Dialectical Biologist" account. Structural biology & anti-racism. Loves: birds, proteins, Linux, Lewontin Hates: race science, racists, transphobes
![Fig. 1. Genome assemblies, annotations, and transcriptomes.
(A) Species representing the four sugar-consuming groups. [Bird photos (top to bottom): Steven L. Hunter (ML426078561), David J. Southall (ML431374521), Gerald R. Allen (ML633429605), and Charles Davies (ML205719751); photos accessioned into the Cornell Lab of Ornithology | Macaulay Library] (B) Cladogram and diet of the birds included in the study. On the basis of the percentage of dietary nectar and fruit intake, we delineated four groups of core sugar-consuming birds (red font) and core non-sugar controls (blue). Core non-sugar control sets were defined as groups phylogenetically close to sugar-consuming clades and comprising a similar number of species but not taking any nectar in the diet. These were used as direct controls in the downstream analyses. (C) Comparison of genome assembly contiguity. The contig N50 value indicates that 50% of the assembly consists of contigs of at least that size. The nine newly sequenced birds are indicated with a blue circle. (D) Status of 15,133 ancestral bird genes, classified by TOGA as those with an intact reading frame (blue), with gene-inactivating mutations (premature stop codons, frameshifts, splice site disruptions, or deletions of exons or entire genes; orange), or with missing or incomplete coding sequences owing to assembly gaps or fragmentation (gray). (E) Status of 8338 near-universally conserved Aves genes (BUSCO, odb10) in annotations generated in this study (green circles) or NCBI RefSeq annotations. (F) Tissue-specific transcriptomes generated for pairs of sugar-consuming and non-sugar control species. Black arrows specify the direction of DESeq2 analysis (for details, see methods and table S11).](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ltfn4ycf2afx23cmmlfynfwn/bafkreibzhx7fuidph2njhmsrja2vzgnobkwzt3shlnmezccfskyiaiqnpy)
!["Alan [Dershowitz] had us give Dteven Pinker $10,000 for a letter"](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ltfn4ycf2afx23cmmlfynfwn/bafkreih3t7dmugjvn5jsvpwb7zniybehpinedwxt56q6qyomlwxgwyqmmy)
![One formative influence was Watson’s making his one and only important scientific discovery when he was only 25. His next act flopped. Although “Watson’s [Harvard] lab was clearly the most exciting place in the world in molecular biology,” geneticist Richard Burgess, one of Watson’s graduate students, told the oral history, he discovered nothing afterward, even as colleagues were cracking the genetic code or deciphering how DNA is translated into the molecules that make cells (and life) work.
‘I really don’t know what happened to Jim’: Friends ask where James Watson’s odious attitudes about race came from
“He fell flat on his nose on all these problems,” Harvard’s Ernst Mayr (1904-2005), the eminent evolutionary biologist, told the oral history. “So except for this luck he had with the double helix, he was a total failure!” (Mayr acknowledged the exaggeration.) By the 1990s, even Watson’s accomplishments at Harvard and CSHL were ancient history.
Watson nevertheless viewed himself “as the greatest scientist since Newton or Darwin,” a longtime colleague at CSHL told STAT in 2018.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:ltfn4ycf2afx23cmmlfynfwn/bafkreigcwyxfsyzsmjgh2hvl2ke44gi77bsmwwqrqdfo3uiarchkbet6s4)
