Minnie Mouse With Rosy Cheeks -- Notes From All Over, Part 2 -- October 28, 2019

Note: there is nothing here about the Bakken. This is not meant for anyone to read. I got off on a tangent. So, please skip this page and move on. 

Apple earnings: should report on Halloween, October 31, 2019, 12:00 a.m. EST.

• history, earnings: 
• one year ago: $2.78
• consensus, this year: $.284
• history, share price:
• one year ago: $222
• January 3, 2019: $142 
• today: around $246
• headline over at MarketWatch: "Apple earnings: iPhone optimism hasn't changed Apple's downward trajectory. Despite a recent stock rally, estimates suggest Apple's full-year profit and sales will decline for only the second time since 2001."
• already iconic: I don't know if folks have noticed but the following image is getting more exposure than the Apple logo -- I see it everywhere -- Mickey Mouse with rosy cheeks, or is it, Minnie Mouse with rosy cheeks?

Science: for the third time I'm reading And Then There Was Life: The Plausibility Of Life: Resolving Darwin's Dilemma, Marc W. Kirschner and John C. Gerhart, c. 2005. The title was quite misleading and I was disappointed with the book the first time I slogged through it ... I don't think I ever finished it the first time -- about a year ago. I picked it up a few weeks ago and read it more seriously. I still think the title is misleading but the book is much, much better than I first realized. But, wow, it's hard to read. The subject matter is not difficult; it just seems the Harvard professor and the Yale professor who wrote it are not very good at writing. It turns out there is a whole wiki page devoted to this book; that wiki page has been incredibly helpful.

No words to describe it. In the history of life, there are two huge jumps. The second jump is from the first cell to where we are now. There are no words to describe how far "we" have come in three billion years.

• four, maybe five billion years ago: God created Earth
• three billion years ago: the universal ancestor arose; split into two lineages -- eubacteria (the "true" bacteria) and the archaebacteria (ancient, extremophiles)
• two billion years ago: archaebacteria split into two lineages -- the eukaryote (us) and the modern archaebacteria (extant, ancient, extremophiles)
• so one and a half to two billion years ago, a huge evolutionary shift when ancient archaebacteria split into modern extremophiles and eukaryotes
• as incredible as that second jump was -- and I can find no words to describe it -- the first jump was exponentially many times greater: from inanimate rock to life itself
• I find the jump from rock to DNA-RNA-protein-phenotype so incredible, I often panic thinking about the odds
• there are two things that can lead me to "panic" once I really start thinking about them: how life began in the first place -- as just mentioned -- and the fact that it appears that the Earth is the only place in the universe where life as we know it exists -- which I have talked about before

The third unknown:why we are here. Richard Dawkins says we are what we are simply due to the "selfish gene." If that's all there is -- if that's it -- a "selfish gene" -- the whole "life" thing seems pretty inconsequential. Which seems to explain why human beings seem pre-wired to "believe" in a Higher Being."

Wow, how did I get here? Waiting for daylight and for the market to open.

Oh, that's right ... I was going to mention William Bateson and then got side-tracked. In the Plausibility of Life book, the authors give a few pages to William Bateson who they consider one of the greatest, if not the greatest, biologists ever. I was curious about his bio. It turns out, of all things, that he was born in Whitby, Yorkshire, England.

....(born August 8, 1861, Whitby, Yorkshire, England—died February 8, 1926, London), British biologist who founded and named the science of genetics and whose experiments provided evidence basic to the modern understanding of heredity. A dedicated evolutionist, he cited embryo studies to support his contention in 1885 that chordates evolved from primitive echinoderms, a view later widely accepted. In 1894 he published his conclusion that evolution could not occur through a continuous variation of species, since distinct features often appeared or disappeared suddenly in plants and animals.

Realizing that discontinuous variation could be understood only after something was known about the inheritance of traits, Bateson began work on the experimental breeding of plants and animals. In 1900 he discovered an article written by Gregor Mendel, an Austrian monk, 34 years earlier. The paper, found in the same year by botanists Hugo de Vries, Carl Correns, and Erich Tschermak von Seysenegg, dealt with the appearance of certain features in successive generations of garden peas.

Bateson noted that his breeding results were explained perfectly by Mendel’s paper and that the monk had succinctly described the transmission of elements governing heritable traits in his plants.

All of that for one point: he was born in Whitby.  Whitby, of course, is known for its connection with Bram Stoker and Dracula. I once walked the coastline from Robin Hood Bay to Whitby. It took about six hours to walk that distance; the return trip, walking inland on the asphalt road, took about an hour to get back to the car.

Bateson:

• born 1861: about the time of the US Civil War
• published his theories around 1900
• Einstein's theories, 1904
• WWI: 1916 or thereabouts
• 1926: Bateson dies 

Quick: who coined the word, "genetics"? Yup, William Bateson -- in 1891. Watson and Crick were publishing about 1951.  Genetics: "study of heredity."