Yes, but it only mentions it as a case study in what NOT to believe, and points out where it is wrong.

Which seems reasonable.

All of science knew it - not just me! The acorn worm research is from 2003.

You're snarky response is misunderstanding what is new in this research - its not that our front/back brain correspond to the ancient front/back split nervous system, but much more specifically that they stay separate during early embryonic development - this is what is new information.

yw

You're confusing Ernst Haeckel's original theory of "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" as a "law" (false), with the reality that embryonic development nonetheless does expose some of our evolutionary past.

e.g.

When chickens evolved from dinosaurs they lost their teeth, but they didn't lose the dinosaur DNA that creates teeth - what changed was gene expression controlling embryonic tooth development and sequencing. You might have expected that evolution would have just disabled development of teeth altogether, even if the genes for them were still there, but evidentially that is not what happened, and that is not an isolated case.

> Perhaps... but I don't think any part of the brain stem is creating poetry.

That's not what it is saying - the two nervous systems are 1) the front part, originally just concerned with sensing, that has now evolved into our mid+forebrain, including our neo-cortex which is the bit creating poetry, and 2) back part, our brain stem (+spinal cord) controlling motor and autonomous (breathing, heartrate, etc) functions.

? "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is not an evolutionary advantage. It is a biological hypothesis

I wouldn't even call it a hypothesis, and I'm not aware of anyone ever saying it was an "advantage" (advantageous for what?!).

Still, it is an interesting reality that some of our evolutionary past is preserved in our DNA and can be seen in this embryonic sequencing.

It's a reflection of the way DNA, gene expression, and embryonic sequencing, work, and the way evolution acts upon that.

The front/back split this research is about has nothing to do with reptilian vs human brain - it is about brainstem (back) vs rest (front), and reptiles have both parts combined just like us.

You have to go way back in evolution, to the pre-chordates, to find this mostly separated front vs back dual nervous system. In all the vertebrates, including fish and reptiles, the two systems are already combined (at least in the post-developmental stage).

You can still also see it in a few modern descendants of the pre-chordates such as jellyfsh and the acorn worm.

It's been known for a while that the nervous system of animals started out as separate front/sensory and rear/motor+autonomic-functions, and in humans we see the same gene expression markers in front/back (fore/midbrain vs hindbrain aka brainstem) as we see in primitive animals such as the acorn worm where these remain far more separate.

What this new research shows isn't that our brain originated as two organs/systems, but rather that it still goes through that stage during embryonic development rather than having been more fundamentally fused into one earlier in our evolutionary history as had been believed to be the case.

It's yet another case (cf human embryo having a tail, chicken embryo having teeth) of "Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" whereby embryonic development does through the same steps as evolution did.

So make it make sense...

The AI companies are themselves calling for an AI slowdown, but Trump says this is a hoax. Are the AI companies hoaxing themselves? Trump says republicans want more datacenters in their back yard. Trump's going to appoint an "AI Tsar" (he loves Russians, doesn't he!) to educate the AI CEOS on AI ...

Please make any of it make sense is a world outside of Trump's head.

To be fair, if you do want a datacenter in your back yard, or are hoping to be laid off due to AI, then Trump maybe is your guy. He has already massively accelerated AI, although only in China so far.

That's presumably his idea of a "high IQ individual" - someone who can tell that a line drawing of a giraffe is not an elephant, just like he can.

You forgot his Voter Force.

Interesting spin though - that the AI companies calling for a slowdown are perpetrating a hoax on themselves, although it's not clear who Trump thinks the victim of this HOAX is ... himself? The data-center loving republicans what are hoping to have one built in their back yard?

So Trump will be appointing a "high IQ individual" to put the AI CEOs right on AI. Who will it be? One of his idiot sons, or some random idiot like JFK Jr? Kid Rock perhaps?

Yes, it's a fuzzy line, but I'm sure Putin realizes that the consequences of something like that and what would happen in response to an overt military attack are very different.

You'd think they'd be concerned about security even if just to protect themselves from corporate espionage, yet they can't even secure their own systems.

Presumably (but who knows - they seem incompetent) they've tried using their own models to hack/secure themselves, and the fact that they've failed rather taints their whole "look what a powerful hacking tool we've built" story.

Russia attacking NATO in some limited way (beyond just hacking & sabotage) is possible, but I don't see Putin opting for "suicide by cop" - he seems to very much want to stay alive.

AFAIK with AWS it depends on the type of service.

For managed services with E3 your data should be ok as long as at least one of the availability zones in a region is ok. Provisioned services like EBS live in a specific availability zone, and it's up to you to configure periodic snapshots to another zone or region if you want to.

Apparently in the Bahrain region all three availability zones got hit within the space of a month, hence the data loss for any customers who had not chosen to make backups/snapshots outside of the region.