Biologists are almost unique among scientists in being happy to say how little they still know about their subject. Up until last year nobody had thought to see whether anything eats viruses! Turns out some do.
Citation needed.
> Up until last year nobody had thought to see whether anything eats viruses! Turns out some do.
Nah, lots of things eat viruses. It's nothing unusual at all. You eat viruses, I eat viruses. They are everywhere, after all.
The novel finding was a critter that lives / can live solely on viruses.
> Nah, lots of things eat viruses. It's nothing unusual at all. You
> eat viruses, I eat viruses. They are everywhere, after all.
>Moreover, our foraging trials demonstrated robust growth in the Halteria population with only chloroviruses as food (rint = 0.66 ± 0.26 [SD], black lines, Fig. 1A), with minimal to no growth in the controls (with chloroviruses filtered out; rint = 0.22 ± 0.12 [SD], blue lines, Fig. 1C). The abundance of the larger Paramecium did not increase in treatment or control trials (Fig. 1D), indicating that not all ciliates can grow on chloroviruses in these conditions, even when they consume them.
>> Up until last year nobody had thought to see whether anything eats viruses! Turns out some do.
> Nah, lots of things eat viruses. It's nothing unusual at all. You eat viruses, I eat viruses. They are everywhere, after all.
> The novel finding was a critter that lives / can live solely on viruses.
Eg creatures that eat plastic are still news, even if plastic is not their sole diet.
How could you possible find a citation for that? It’s not even pretending to be a scientific or totally objective claim. Asking for a citation for this type of statement is no way to have a discussion. Do you not see why?
Most any scientist will happily babble all about the stuff they don't know yet in their discipline, because that's exactly where the excitement lies for them.
Much of Wikipedia is "curated" by retired professors carefully scrubbing mention of anything new that makes their thesis look wrong.
What makes you think so? What evidence do you have?
The point should be to learn and appreciate the method or process of scientific investigation of uncertain and mysterious or hard to understand phenomena.
Instead we get dogma as a proxy of measuring intelligence with little regard for what the fundamental tools are of being a scientist.
I’ve gone all the way through to Grad School and came out astounded at just how little commitment to or a sense of the essence of scientific investigation and what’s expected of the investigator there is in the system. They don’t prepare you for it because they themselves weren’t prepared. You can try to leverage some meta understanding of the “process” in conversation or debate, but so often the conversation falls flat because few are prepared or accustomed to it. Research is often done, IMO, in philosophical poverty by people eking out a living in the gutters of novelty and paradigmatic safety, averting their gazes from the sky (flourishes aside, you get my point).
Putting aside the health of actual research. If the general public is to benefit from education and pass that benefit into their society (that’s the point right), it needs to be more than soon to be forgotten and often useless fallacies.
> If the general public is to benefit from education and pass that benefit into their society (that’s the point right), it needs to be more than soon to be forgotten and often useless fallacies.
I realize this is hyperbole, but still I think it's obvious that there is more than soon to be forgotten and often useless fallacies.
I do generally agree though that current models/paradigms are usually presented more as "the final word" vs "a useful mental model".
Esp. when paradigms are challenged by, or conflict with untestable traditional explanations, ppl tend to get irritated and overstate the confidence of their own understanding
Nonetheless, while I agree with your pushback, I do wonder how much utility there is in the “dogma” approach. There’s a lot of “facts” being thrown around in education, from what I’ve seen, that are often forgotten or become vague memories. How much better would it be to focus on skills and practice and concepts? Especially in the digital age where a fact is easily discoverable, provided one has the appropriate research skills.
Beware; deep rabbit hole. [1]https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qm-manyworlds/#:~:text=Th....
Astrophysicists, as a rule, hate to be obliged to consider phenomena that involve plasma fluid dynamics, even what can be shoehorned into MHD. Such phenomena are thus orphaned. The exception, of course, is solar physics, where nothing can be done at all without fully general plasma fluid dynamics. Solar physicists have the largest gonads in science, on par with rocket propellant chemists.
Are there other phenomena they see but don't like to talk about? Maybe?
"Effects which are essentially kinetic and not captured by fluid models include double layers, Landau damping, a wide range of instabilities, chemical separation in space plasmas and electron runaway."
That electrons are 1836 times less massive than the lightest positive charge carrier is neglected. Accelerated, they strike positive and neutral particles and knock loose more electrons.