The UD News Desk’s latest post has me thinking. The multiverse is not only unscientific, it is positively anti-scientific. If there are an incomprehensibly vast (I believe some say even infinite, though that is hard to conceptualize) number of universes, then any being or phenomenon can be explained by “we just happen to live in the universe in which, by sheer dumb luck, that being or phenomenon was instantiated.” This boils down to: “Anything and everything can be explained as the result of sheer dumb luck.” I take it that science is the search for causes upon which predictions can be based. For example, in the movie Apollo 13, NASA scientists calculated the exact number of seconds the astronauts needed Read More ›

This week’s “we thought it was junk but it turned out to be crucial” study comes with the added bonus that the so-called “junk” is also species-specific / taxonomically restricted. The general topic is tandemly repeated satellite DNA in the much studied fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. These satellite DNA regions comprise 15-20% of D. melanogaster’s genome, and one of the regions, AAGAG(n), is transcribed across many of D. melanogaster’s cell types. … read more