Serge was a bit Europe obsessed. Nevertheless, an Interesting read —
From above link (if you read nothing else today, that one would be a good one to stop on):
His theses were that “this war is profoundly different from that of 1914–1918… That the economic structure of the world has changed… That the defeats of European socialism cannot be imputed solely to the failures of the leaders… but are rather explained by the decadence of the working class and of socialism as a result of modern technology.” His heresies grew more serious as he said that “socialism must renounce the ideas of dictatorship and worker hegemony and become the representative of the large numbers of people in whom a socialist-leaning consciousness is germinating, one obscure and without a doctrinal terminology.” And to crown it all, “That in the immediate coming period the essential thing would be obtaining the reestablishment of traditional democratic freedoms,” which alone can create the conditions for the rebirth of socialist and working-class movements.
SNIP
More damningly, he said that during the discussion, he “felt exactly as if he was in a cell of the Russian Communist Party in 1927.” His fellow leftists were “idealists hemmed in by the sclerosis of doctrines and circumstances, and dominated by their convictions and their emotional attachments. In short, by fanaticism.”
Wow! What a great read! Why does the fish have clear blood instead of red blood? From link above:
Becoming the modern icefish required millions of years of natural gene hacking. Parts of their genomes that, in adults, were dedicated to making antifreeze for blood were greatly expanded. More genome space became dedicated to making ice-preventing proteins in the shell-like casings that surround icefish embryos.
Frigid water holds more gasses, including oxygen, than warmer water does. But in water so cold, red blood becomes gunky, hard to pump and more likely to freeze. So the fish basically “evolved a therapy for anemia,” said John Postlethwait, a developmental biologist at the University of Oregon who also worked on the paper. It developed supersize gills and lost its scales, which enabled it to absorb the water’s plentiful oxygen through its skin. It also expanded its circulatory system with extra vasculature and a heart four times the size of closely related, red-blooded species.
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From link in above tweet —
Judging by the oldest stone tools found there, the cave’s first residents moved in around 300,000 years ago and were, presumably, Denisovans or Neanderthals. Denisovans occupied the cave from at least 200,000 years ago to about 55,000 years ago — when the sediments in which Denisova 3 was found were laid down, Jacobs and Roberts reported in January5. The team also dated Neanderthal remains and sediment to between about 100,000 and 190,000 years ago.
This could imply that the two groups overlapped for long stretches, but Jacobs cautions that the team cannot yet pinpoint such periods, in part, because of the scarcity of hominin remains. Pääbo’s team is scouring the hundreds of sediment samples from Jacobs and Roberts’ study for hominin DNA, which could help to nail down when Denisovans and Neanderthals occupied the cave and whether they overlapped.
snip
The Russian archaeologists who led the cave’s excavation have proposed that the tools and jewellery were made by Denisovans and suggest that the group had the capacity for symbolic thinking. But archaeologists in the West tend to favour the idea that the artefacts were made by early modern humans, whose remains have been found at another Siberian site, Ust’-Ishim7, and date to the Initial Upper Palaeolithic.
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