If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
Scientists say most dogs have some wolf DNA – even chihuahuas (AFP, November 24, 2025)
And it is not genetic leftovers from when dogs originally evolved from wolves around 20,000 years ago, but instead suggests that domesticated dogs and wild wolves have interbred within the last few thousand years.
Mathematical model indicates Neanderthal disappearance can be explained by genetic dilution (Krystal Kasal, 11/11/25 Phys.org)
In a new study, published in Scientific Reports, researchers use a mathematical model to determine if Neanderthal disappearance could be explained only by genetic dilution from mating with humans through periods of recurrent small-scale immigrations.
When Christians Follow Nietzsche: Enthusiasm for Nietzsche’s ideal of human excellence and vitality has given rise to calls for manly Christian warriors to flex their superiority. (John Ehrett, November 7, 2025, Plough)
Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity is implicitly grounded in the argument that there is a human goodness that is not the Goodness that is God. Just how is this other-than-divine goodness exemplified?
Nietzsche offers one answer: within the ideal human body, the material manifestation of human perfection. The creative instincts of his Übermensch require a fit vessel, a genetically superior specimen. There is a reason Rand’s heroes were always so aestheticized. While Nietzsche himself resisted racialized interpretations of his thought, his intellectual heirs have not been so restrained. In recent years, few have pushed Nietzsche’s logic to its terminus as boldly as the Yale-trained political philosopher Costin Alamariu, better known as the pseudonymous online provocateur Bronze Age Pervert. For Alamariu, genetic-supremacist politics is not merely an extension of Nietzsche’s thought; it is the dark core of Western philosophy itself. As Alamariu would have it, philosophy begins not in wonder but in eugenics.
This reality, Alamariu argues, was violently suppressed by generations of Greek philosophers, from Plato on, who feared the consequences of revealing the fact of biological political determinism to the masses. This means that the entire tradition of Western thought, the whole “Platonic-Socratic tradition,” was based on a lie, “born in an act of rhetorical obfuscation and conservative cowardice.”
Is this true to Nietzsche’s vision? It’s hard to see why not. Alamariu consciously identifies himself as Nietzsche’s successor, stressing that he is “trying to explain some of the implications of the work of Nietzsche for a world in which he is still the only prophet, and will remain so for some centuries.” And indeed, in Alamariu’s work, the logic of vitalism comes to full flower. For all its veneration of superior human specimens, vitalism ultimately subverts any sense of human exceptionalism, leaving – quite properly – only nature. Where Nietzsche left off, Alamariu simply finishes the job: Ecce simio. Behold the ape.
To address just one aspect of this excellent essay, it seems awfully queer that these guys who believe so fiercely in Darwinism are also such enthusiasts for cosmetic surgery and performance enhancing drugs.
‘Grue Jay’ Spotted in a Texas Backyard Is First-of-Its-Kind Hybrid (Russell McLendon, 10/07/25, Science Alert)
An odd bird found in a Texas backyard is the offspring of two distantly related species, separated by 7 million years of evolution, whose ranges only recently began to overlap due to climate change, researchers report in a new study.
Is Life a Form of Computation?: Alan Turing and John von Neumann saw it early: the logic of life and the logic of code may be one and the same. (Blaise Agüera y Arcas, MIT Reader)
Although this is seldom fully appreciated, von Neumann was one of the first to establish a deep link between life and computation. Reproduction, like computation, he showed, could be carried out by machines following coded instructions. In his model, based on Alan Turing’s Universal Machine, self-replicating systems read and execute instructions much like DNA does: “if the next instruction is the codon CGA, then add an arginine to the protein under construction.” It’s not a metaphor to call DNA a “program” — that is literally the case.Of course, there are meaningful differences between biological computing and the kind of digital computing done by a personal computer or your smartphone. DNA is subtle and multilayered, including phenomena like epigenetics and gene proximity effects. Cellular DNA is nowhere near the whole story, either. Our bodies contain (and continually swap) countless bacteria and viruses, each running their own code.
It’s not a metaphor to call DNA a “program” — that is literally the case.
Biological computing is “massively parallel,” decentralized, and noisy. Your cells have somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 quintillion ribosomes, all working at the same time. Each of these exquisitely complex floating protein factories is, in effect, a tiny computer — albeit a stochastic one, meaning not entirely predictable. The movements of hinged components, the capture and release of smaller molecules, and the manipulation of chemical bonds are all individually random, reversible, and inexact, driven this way and that by constant thermal buffeting. Only a statistical asymmetry favors one direction over another, with clever origami moves tending to “lock in” certain steps such that a next step becomes likely to happen.
This differs greatly from the operation of “logic gates” in a computer, basic components that process binary inputs into outputs using fixed rules. They are irreversible and engineered to be 99.99 percent reliable and reproducible.
Biological computing is computing, nonetheless. And its use of randomness is a feature, not a bug. In fact, many classic algorithms in computer science also require randomness (albeit for different reasons), which may explain why Turing insisted that the Ferranti Mark I, an early computer he helped to design in 1951, include a random number instruction. Randomness is thus a small but important conceptual extension to the original Turing Machine, though any computer can simulate it by calculating deterministic but random-looking or “pseudorandom” numbers.
Parallelism, too, is increasingly fundamental to computing today. Modern AI, for instance, depends on both massive parallelism and randomness — as in the parallelized “stochastic gradient descent” (SGD) algorithm, used for training most of today’s neural nets, the “temperature” setting used in chatbots to introduce a degree of randomness into their output, and the parallelism of Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), which power most AI in data centers.
Traditional digital computing, which relies on the centralized, sequential execution of instructions, was a product of technological constraints. The first computers needed to carry out long calculations using as few parts as possible. Originally, those parts were flaky, expensive vacuum tubes, which had a tendency to burn out and needed frequent replacement by hand. The natural design, then, was a minimal “Central Processing Unit” (CPU) operating on sequences of bits ferried back and forth from an external memory. This has come to be known as the “von Neumann architecture.”
Turing and von Neumann were both aware that computing could be done by other means, though. Turing, near the end of his life, explored how biological patterns like leopard spots could arise from simple chemical rules, in a field he called morphogenesis. Turing’s model of morphogenesis was a biologically inspired form of massively parallel, distributed computation. So was his earlier concept of an “unorganized machine,” a randomly connected neural net modeled after an infant’s brain.
These were visions of what computing without a central processor could look like — and what it does look like, in living systems.
Claims of pure bloodlines? Ancestral homelands? DNA science says no. (Alvin Powell, September 18, 2025, The Harvard Gazette)
Human history is rife with contentions about the purity (and superiority) of the bloodlines of one group over another and claims over ancestral homelands.More than a decade of work on ancient human DNA has upended it all.
Instead, Harvard geneticist David Reich said on Monday, increasingly sophisticated analysis of genetic material made possible by technological advances shows that virtually everyone came from somewhere else, and everyone’s genetic background shows a mix from different waves of migration that washed over the globe.
A blue jay and a green jay mated, researchers say. Their offspring is a scientific marvel (CNN, September 29, 2025)
The bigger question scientists are puzzling over, though, is why does the mystery bird exist?
“We think it’s the first observed vertebrate that’s hybridized as a result of two species both expanding their ranges due, at least in part, to climate change,” said Brian Stokes, a doctoral student of biology at the University of Texas at Austin and first author of the study published September 10 in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
Interbreeding Hybrid Giant Salamanders Are Creating A Very Sticky Situation For Conservationists: Escapees of the restaurant trade are making things tricky for the conservation of giant salamanders. (Tom Hale, 10/02/25, IFL Science)
Scientists have noted how these two species managed to “hit it off” and started hybridizing in Japan’s streams. In a 2024 study, researchers collected 68 samples from giant salamanders in the Kamogawa River of Kyoto, as well as several samples from private collections, aquariums, and zoos throughout Japan.They found that some of these individuals were hybrids of Japanese giant salamander and Chinese giant salamander, created by the two species interbreeding. In some cases, it appears that hybrid offspring also mated with each other or others from the “genetically pure” populations, creating an even deeper mix of hybridity and gene mixing.
Princeton Study Maps 200,000 Years of Human–Neanderthal Interbreeding (Princeton University Science Daily, 7/14/25)
Now, a group of researchers made up of geneticists and artificial intelligence specialists is uncovering new layers of that shared history. Led by Joshua Akey, a professor at Princeton’s Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, the team has found strong evidence of genetic exchange between early human groups, pointing to a much deeper and more complex relationship than previously understood.
“This is the first time that geneticists have identified multiple waves of modern human-Neanderthal admixture,” said Liming Li, a professor in the Department of Medical Genetics and Developmental Biology at Southeast University in Nanjing, China, who performed this work as an associate research scholar in Akey’s lab.
If it looks like a dire wolf, is it a dire wolf? How to define a species is a scientific and philosophical question (Elay Shech, 5/30/25, The Conversation)
This gap between appearance and biological identity raises a deeper question: What exactly is a species, and how do you decide whether something belongs to one species rather than another?Biologists call the answer a species concept – a theory about what a species is and how researchers sort organisms into different groups.
There’s no such thing as species.