Divergent Thinking of Popular Science

popular science should also be delivered once a month.

My brain is not spinning. What should I write?

animals? Plants? Microbes? Or genetically modified?

I feel that there is nothing to write about, or even if it is forced out, the quality of the article is hard to guarantee.

I would rather not contribute than ignore the quality. Otherwise, it's my job. I don't do it well, okay? What do we think? What do the authors think?

What do people who have always liked Fulgent WeChat official account think? How can I get along in the biosphere in the future?

so ... I think I'm thinking a little too much.

From the perspective of social psychology, I must have met a "bottleneck".

So again ...

My brow wrinkled, haha, I got it, so let's play along!

if you sort out some of the short articles you wrote before, it will make up a "bottleneck effect"!

"bottleneck effect" in genetic evolution

On a hot summer day, I was reading the literature about silkworm domestication, and finally I understood something.

On a whim, I pulled the valve and made a plop noise, and my thoughts flew back to my hometown of Sangtian.

I have an impulse to write a poem, but I don't know how to write it. In the end, I have to write a poem with Bing Xin. Although the poem is not very good, it also expounds the principle of group domestication:

"Silkworms in the treetops,

When you move to a farmer's house, the number of SNPs decreases …"

After writing the poem, it is necessary to explain.

"Silkworm in the treetops" and "Silkworm after housewarming" represent "wild silkworm" and "Silkworm" respectively. The hero of the story is Silkworm, and the story is "housewarming". After reading the first two sentences, readers can't help thinking, what will happen when wild silkworms become farm silkworms? The latter sentence gives the answer: the number of SNPs has decreased ... < P > SNP is single nucleotide polymorphism, what is single nucleotide polymorphism? I don't want to explain these in too professional terms, and it is estimated that no one wants to see those endocrine-disrupting words in popular science, so I'd better keep my style and say them in the most popular language. Everyone in our life has a unique face, even twins are slightly different, so it is convenient for us to identify everyone. When you see this face, you will know that he is Zhang San, and when you see that face, you will know that it is Li Si. The fundamental reason for the difference between faces is that everyone's own genetic material is different. This reaction is SNP in DNA. If DNA is equivalent to face, SNP is the most detailed difference in DNA. These differences are called variation or polymorphism. Of course, SNP is only one kind of DNA variation or polymorphism.

Let's talk about "silkworm" again. Because of its own heredity and the surrounding environment, the growth rate, cocoon size, disease resistance and other traits of wild silkworm are different among individuals, showing a polymorphic scene of "a hundred schools of thought contend". When people start to raise silkworms, they will choose some silkworms with characteristics that are beneficial to them, such as screening some silkworms with fast growth, large cocoons and strong disease resistance for breeding and reproduction. After a long period of screening and breeding, some traits that are unfavorable to human beings are eliminated in the domestication process, while traits that are beneficial to human beings, such as large silk production, strong disease resistance and fast growth rate, are preserved, and wild silkworms are domesticated into silkworms. Let's compare wild silkworm with silkworm again. Because the wild silkworm has not been artificially screened, some of its wild characters have been preserved and can evolve relatively freely; Silkworm evolved according to the requirements of human beings, and the traits that are not conducive to human beings are gradually lost, which is reflected in DNA, that is, the polymorphism is reduced and SNP is reduced ... < P > In fact, this is not only the experience of silkworm, but also these things happen in rice fields. The pace of thoughts has moved from mulberry fields to rice fields.

wild rice has the characteristic of natural threshing, that is, the seeds are separated from the plants after ripening, and the contact surface of spikelet axis of wild rice is smooth after threshing, which makes its seeds unfavorable for harvesting. Therefore, cultivated rice domesticated by human beings has lost this characteristic and needs to be threshed manually, leaving a "scar" on the contact surface of spikelet axis. There is evidence! In the rice spikelet shaft unearthed from the Huxi site in Yongkang City, central Zhejiang Province, both the base plate is smooth and the base plate is scarred. However, almost all the rice we planted today do not have the property of natural threshing. In this domestication process, the related genes were also screened at the same time, and domestication made polymorphism develop towards convergence. Domestication is a "bottleneck", and only traits and genes beneficial to human beings can be preserved through the bottleneck, which is the "bottleneck effect" in genetics.

Although I am honest and dutiful, my thoughts are wild, and I am not satisfied with strolling through mulberry bushes and stumbling in rice fields.

So, the mud leg in my mind was pulled out from the mud in the rice field, and I planned to make a crossing. One day 65 million years ago, an asteroid broke into the earth's atmosphere, and a lot of dust rose into the atmosphere. Severe earthquakes occurred one after another, and forest fires broke out, and smoke covered the sky. In a short time, most large species represented by dinosaurs became extinct, while some mammals survived. Disastrous scenes should not be described too much. What I want to say is that the history of biological evolution is like this. Those who adapted survived and those who did not adapt withdrew from the historical stage. Every catastrophe on the earth can also be regarded as a "bottleneck". Through the bottleneck, it adapts to the environment, mutates to produce new species, and develops and grows in the new environment, and then there is a new generation of species explosion. So it is with silkworm and rice. In the process of human domestication, they did lose some properties, but after adapting to human screening, they will still produce some new properties because of the existence of variation. But these lost species, lost attributes, may never be found again.

after understanding this problem, I put down my documents and looked at the distant peaks, which were lush and green. I couldn't help but sigh that it was with life that the world was full of vitality. Therefore, regardless of the ideal state of salary, brother, I am really proud of being a student.

bottleneck of education

In the morning, the dreamer woke up and recalled his dream. He dreamed that when he was in primary school, he couldn't recite the Three Character Classics, and was scolded by the teacher. At that time, I thought that he had almost got it. The teacher who was already tearing his hair out from behind took out a shovel and patted me on the head. Fortunately, I reacted quickly, but it was also a dream. My dream must be my own decision. But fortunately, when I think back to my primary school days, my San Zi Jing is not so miserable.

About when I was in the second grade of primary school, the homework that the primary school teacher left us was to recite the San Zi Jing. At that time, eight or nine-year-old children may not listen to their parents, but they are absolutely loyal to their teachers. In the words of parents at that time, "Teachers even fart", especially in our rural areas in the 199s, when children ask their parents for tuition, the usage rate is the highest. So at that time, I knew the Three Character Classics by heart. However, although the San Zi Jing was not tragic in those days, I can only think of the first sentence, "beginning of life, human nature is good. Sex is similar and learning is far away. "

when I was in high school, I read a book whose title I can't remember. In the book, I learned that at the end of the Warring States period, there was a Xunzi who advocated the theory of evil nature, which was completely opposite to the first sentence of the San Zi Jing, and almost meant "beginning of life, inherent vice". It seems that there are several examples in the book to illustrate that when beginning of life was a child, his destructive power was extremely strong. Nowadays, there is also a famous saying on the Internet, "Xiong Haizi, don't be taunted!" . Even the Durex manufacturer saw this business opportunity, and made a short film, with messy rooms, sad parents, and Xiong Haizi who "didn't fight for three days, went to the house to uncover the tiles" ... The intention of the merchant need not be emphasized too much here. Friends who have naughty children at home may feel the same way.

When I was a second-year graduate student, I accidentally saw a message when I was browsing the web. When a German anthropological research institute was studying the baby's response to the environment, it was unexpectedly found that all babies were "good children" who helped others. Psychological researchers do simple actions in front of a group of babies who can just crawl every day, such as hanging towels with clips and stacking books. After a period of time, researchers will deliberately bungle these simplest tasks. For example, dropping a clip or knocking over a pile of books. At this time, 24 babies in the laboratory all showed the intention of helping in a few seconds.

beginning of life, is human nature good or evil? This is a topic that people have been arguing for thousands of years and have not reached a conclusion. We can analyze this problem. For babies, there is no difference between good and evil, because they simply don't know which behaviors are right and which behaviors are wrong. Ignorance doesn't matter between good and evil. Didn't the ancients also say, "I don't blame those who don't know." In beginning of life, there was no distinction between good and evil.

In real life, we seldom meet villains. Mao Zedong once said that "more than 95% people in China are good people", so it is statistically significant. This should be attributed to education. At the beginning, people can be compared to a blank sheet of paper. There are many ways to draw something on this blank sheet of paper, such as the bleak and happy smile in Mona Lisa, or the darkness, such as the lonely and desperate Scream. If children leave it alone at the beginning, they will be influenced by the surrounding environment and choose a path without knowing what light is and what darkness is. Let's tell another story to illustrate the problem!

In 192, in a small town named Midnapol in the northeast of Kolkata, India, people often saw a "mysterious creature" haunting the nearby forest. Often at night, two "humanoid monsters" walking on all fours followed three big wolves. Later, people killed the wolf, and finally found these two "monsters" in the wolf's den, which turned out to be two naked girls. The oldest is about seven or eight years old and the youngest is about two years old. Their living habits are the same as wolves; Walk on all fours; Sleep during the day and come out at night, afraid of fire, light and water; I only know that when I am hungry, I look for food and sleep when I am full. Eat meat instead of vegetarian food; Eat meat without hands, put it on the ground and tear it with your teeth; I can't speak, but I have learned the language of wolves, and I howl like a wolf after midnight. Later, the two little girls were sent to the orphanage in Midnapol to be raised, and they were given names. The older one was kamala, and the younger one was Amara. In the second year, Amara died, and after seven years of education, kamala mastered 4 5 words, barely learned a few words, and began to move towards people's living habits. She was estimated to be about 16 years old when she died, but her intelligence was only equivalent to that of a child of 3 or 4 years old. This is the once sensational "Wolf Child" incident.

Wolf children, who are human beings, have the habit of wolves, which is the result of wolf education. Imagine if they grew up in human society and received a normal education, just like us ordinary people. This is the function of human education. In the whole process of education, there is also a "bottleneck". At first, people had plasticity in many directions, which is called "wildness" for the time being. "Wild" can have what we think is good and bad. Therefore, a baby can be shaped to have the habit of a wolf when growing up in the environment of a wolf, and can also be shaped to have the habit of a certain beast when growing up in the environment of other beasts. However, as people grow up day by day, they are exposed to things in human society, such as language, body movements, manners, etc., and gradually get rid of their own "wildness" and form some codes of conduct of their own. For example, we know that we can't go shopping naked unless we want to play performance art; You can't urinate in the street like a dog, unless you really can't hold back after drinking too much, or you have mental problems; You can't just point your finger at others unless you want to provoke them and so on. Finally, after coming out of the "bottle mouth" of education, some of my "evil" thoughts or behaviors have been eliminated, and I have become a person who can adapt to society and live in harmony with the people around me. Of course, education can't process us into identical products like a processing factory, because everyone is different. Educated people still leave some of their own personalities or develop some new characteristics to a greater or lesser extent. As we saw in some news today, students who graduated from famous universities, some became CEOs, some went into exile, and some chose to sell pork. Applying the knowledge and ability we have gained from education, we can draw inferences from others. After the bottleneck, there is an open field in front of us, but it has changed from absolute freedom to relative freedom.

"beginning of life, human nature is good", I have a new understanding of this sentence. Perhaps it doesn't mean that people are born good, but the real meaning is that people have a good heart, and they have the desire and power to be good, and the trend of human nature is always good. This is all due to education. The original purpose of education is to eliminate "evil" but not to obliterate individuality.

Thinking bottleneck

On summer nights, there are too many mosquitoes living on the second floor.

swarms of mosquitoes are rampant, hiding in mosquito nets and listening to the hum of mosquitoes, but I can't get in. It's so refreshing in my heart.

I have just finished reading a story in Those Things in the Ming Dynasty, so grab a notebook and continue to write.

in 1399 ad, Zhu di rose up and rebelled, trying to take his place, and the battle of Jing Nan broke out. Zhu Di's reactionary armed forces successively won, captured Youyan, defeated Geng Bingwen and defeated Li Jinglong, and arrived at the gates of Jinan. Zhu Di is in trouble. At this time, the capital is empty. If we attack the capital at this time, we will win. The biggest obstacle is Jinan City, Shandong Province. The folk customs here are tough, the soldiers are brave, and there are also famous soldiers Tie Xuan and Sheng Yong guarding it. It is difficult to fight in the past anyway. In Zhu Di's view, this is a very difficult obstacle to overcome! So Zhu Di was very depressed. If he wanted to take Jianwen Emperor, he had to take the capital first, and if he wanted to take the capital, he had to take Shandong. However, Shandong could not be shaken. Zhu Di found that he was already dead. Just when Zhu Di got stuck in his mind, a monk named Yao Guangxiao told him that our goal is just the capital, and all roads lead to the capital. Why don't we go around Shandong? Chu Difang woke up from a dream and suddenly realized that he led troops to Nanjing, seized the country and made great achievements in the imperial industry.

People often fall into some dead ends when thinking about problems. Here, Zhu Di is caught in a dead end, thinking that if he wants to win Nanjing, he must win Jinan first, without considering the "detour" and falling into an infinite loop. This is a habit of thinking. It seems that everyone has the habit of one thing or another. Good habits can make people behave more steadily. However, in some cases, habits will become a stumbling block for you, just like Zhu Di's. Without the guidance of the monk, I think Zhu Di's next strategy is to pull out his sword and commit suicide by committing suicide.

just writing here, I found my idea terrible.