Hi, I'm Scott Alexander and I will now explain why every disease is in fact just poor genetics by using play-doh statistics to sorta refute a super specific point about schizophrenia heritability.

https://awful.systems/post/904078

Hi, I'm Scott Alexander and I will now explain why every disease is in fact just poor genetics by using play-doh statistics to sorta refute a super specific point about schizophrenia heritability. - awful.systems

Notable mostly because I don’t think it’s very often that eugenics grievances breach the surface in such an obvious way in a public siskind post: > People really hate the finding that most diseases are substantially (often primarily) genetic. There’s a whole toolbox that people in denial about this use to sow doubt. Usually it involves misunderstanding polygenicity/omnigenicity, or confusing GWAS’ current inability to detect a gene with the gene not existing. I hope most people are already wise to these tactics.

I wonder if Scott is the person who stood up during Michael Levin’s talk on (non genetic) bio-electric circuits storing morphological memory across time and said, “those animals can’t exist!”

Just like neuroscientists try to read out and decode the memories inside a living brain, we can now read and write (a little bit…) the anatomical goals and memories of the collective intelligence of morphogenesis. The first time I presented this at a conference – genetically wild-type worms with a drastically different, rewritten, permanent, target morphology – someone stood up and said that this was impossible and “those animals can’t exist”. Here’s a video taken by Junji Morokuma, of them hanging out.

Forms of life, forms of mind | Dr. Michael Levin | Trophic memory, deer, and a truly unique scientific object

Trophic memory in deer antlers: a remarkable phenomenon showing how the morphogenetic collective intelligence learns from experience. In this post I talk about George Bubenik, who discovered this p…

Forms of life, forms of mind

This is fascinating.

I was hoping someone more knowledgeable on the subject might have chimed in to provide some context by now, like are bioelectric circuits legit or is this sheldrake all over again, and why can’t I find anything on the very interesting phenomenon of deer antlers maintaining acquired deformities between fall off and growth cycles, and apparently trophic memory is an hapax legomenon to your linked article according to google.

Feel free to ask Michael in the comments of his blog, he frequently replies, helpfully, with references. I mean all science is tentative, so skepticism is healthy.