#yeah one theory is that’s where dna or rna came from

[tielt]

->

[a-dinosaur-a-day]

Is there language in cladistics to describe organisms that technically belong to one group but have split to develop such a distinctive evolutionary path that it is no longer useful to describe them as belonging in the group? Like how all tetrapods are technically fish but calling them that isn't useful when trying to distinguish between groups of animals.

Like snakes are technically lizards, but unless you're specifically talking lineages, most people wouldn't include snakes in a conversation about, idk, native lizards in you're area. Even wikipedia says gila monsters are the "only venomous lizards in the US", which is true by all metrics except cladistics.

(BTW I'm NOT trying to make a "birds aren't dinosaurs argument. IMO I don't think birds have even evolved that distinctly from dinosaurs to even argue they should be called something else. I mean look at them, they look like freakin dinosaurs.)

I mean, to be fair to snakes, here, there are a LOT of legless lizards that don't fall into snakes, so they don't actually seem that different either!

but yeah no, there is no term for that, because that's not how evolution works. Tetrapods have a huge evolutionary path, but it's still a part of the path that Sarcopterygians took, because that's where we came from.

Evolution is a constant series of changes, sometimes fast, sometimes slow, but there's no way for us to pick one or some changes and know that those are important enough to cause a distinct evolutionary journey. I don't think anyone alive in the Cretaceous could have guessed that the tiny flying dinosaurs would be the only ones around in 66 million years, but here we are!

We have to keep it as monophyletic groups because that's the closest we get to describing objective reality, objective evolutionary groups. Also, we are all impacted heavily by our ancestry.

This traces back to a cross-disciplinarian philosophy called Foundation Theory. Where you start, or come from, or found yourself on, affects everything that comes later. You cannot fix a building with a rotten foundation, for example, because that whole building depends on that foundation

the fact that tetrapods are lobe-finned fish traces back to that. So many aspects of tetrapod anatomy only make sense when you remember we're fish

the foundation of tetrapods is a fun friend crawling up to shore. We can't erase that, or ignore it, because then we're missing key aspects of the puzzle - the foundation of it, really.

And if you want to go deeper, the foundation of ALL life, we can see how much of our quirks trace just to being carbon based, or bound in membranes, or use DNA instead of RNA, or -

the list goes on

So, alas, nay. You never leave a group you're a part of. You can never remove yourself from your foundation.

[thinkgloriathink]

Why I stopped doing Pre-med (my lengthy and candid explanation)

If you know me personally, you might be surprised to hear that I’m not doing pre-med anymore. In fact, this massive pivot happened so quickly and dramatically that I, too, am trying to figure out how my seemingly robust pledge to pursuing a career in medicine toppled like a tower of toothpicks the literal instant I entered college. Surely enough, I dove head first into some intensely angsty rumination sessions to wrangle apart this ugly mystery, and I scraped together a semi-coherent analysis of how this happened to me. Here’s the best explanation I can come up with:

Any good scientist knows that to properly appraise the strength of a scientific theory, you shouldn’t just be scouring for examples to confirm it, but rather scouring for cases to disconfirm it. Looking back into my past, I’ve discovered that I did a whole lot of confirming, and very little disconfirming. All my life, since showing an early propensity for biology, the life sciences, then medicine, I’ve gotten puff after puff of ego boosting encouragements. At a dinner party, people are always asking you what you want to be when you grow up. I’d say medicine, people would nod their heads with recognition, no further questions asked. As a result, I’ve lived my whole life full of self-assurance without self-examination, enjoying the cushiness of people’s approval. Once I established that I was going to be a doctor, everything I saw and all the ways I behaved seemed to fall into place, conveniently fitting the narrative. I’m not squeamish around blood? Pure doctor material! I’m skilled at memorizing anatomy terms? You’re on the right track, Dr. Feng! Soon, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy, where I’d purposely act in ways that would be in character, because future-doctor-Gloria was my identity. When I started having my first doubts about pre-med during the first few months of college, I surprised myself by how flimsy I became when I was confronted by the question: Why do you want to be a doctor? Up until then, I've been going at it with 110% confidence because I liked it, and my liking it made sense to other people. Chemistry class sucked, but I was able to make it through the semester because I told myself that it’s all part of the process. “I want to be a doctor” became a mantra that I’d remind myself time and time again through times of intense stress, but the more I said it, the more unfounded it felt. I reached a point in the year where I would tell myself repeatedly that I was in it for the long haul, but feeling less confident every time I said it. God forbid, if someone asked me “Why?” during those anxious times, I would’ve imploded under the weight of all my existential angst because I literally felt as though I had no good answer. “I want to help people.” Nothing felt more fabricated to me than that weak ass reason, which alone is hardly a justification unique to a career in medicine.

Here are the few pivotal moments and thought trains that poked holes in my confidence for being a doctor. Note: these are explanations, not justifications. If you’re reading this and are still on the track to doctorhood, I will root for you like the aggressive soccer mom you never had. All I ask is that you check in with yourself every once in a while, honestly, so that you know for sure your life is heading in the direction you -- and only you-- truly want.

I tried and failed to get accepted into any of the combined medical programs I’ve applied to last year. Of course, considering the incredibly low acceptance rates to these prestigious programs, the odds were not in my favor, and it’d be foolish to expect acceptances to roll in easily. But this did plant the first seed of doubt in the back of my head that all these admissions officers who turned me down were seeing something in me that I might not have been aware of at the time. I felt as though I’ve poured my heart and soul into the “Why Medicine?” essays, writing with as much candor as I thought was possible. When you’ve laid out all your cards like that and you still get the thumbs down, it’s hard not to think that, just maybe, I’m not as equipped or compatible to be a doctor as I had thought. Maybe this was some kind of sign. This was a fleeting thought that didn’t initially shake my resolve at the time, but it reemerged with a different effect on me once my doubt train started to pick up speed this past year.

All my friends were getting their asses kicked by their computer science classes, but the challenge seemed to make them like it even more. Meanwhile, I was getting my ass beat by my pre-med classes, but my motivation seemed to be way more fragile. I was performing, for the first time, average in my class. While this sounds pretty unremarkable and expected at an elite institution where you’re no longer the big fish in your tiny little pond, it was a major source of frustration and disappointment for me. The fact that this rank-consciousness mattered so much to me, and the fact that so much enjoyment in the subject seemed to evaporate once I realized that I wasn’t the highest performer anymore indicated that I might’ve only enjoyed my pre-med classes in high school because I was good at them. I sat down in my virology class one day after having one of these revelations, looking at the powerpoint slides with almost a different pair of eyes. I have to memorize all the types of RNA and DNA polymerases and the different ways they could stack together DNA crumbs to build a new strand? Why and how is this knowledge important to me? Oh yeah, I need to shove this down my brain so I can regurgitate it onto a sheet of paper next week for a grade. I don’t actually find any of this interesting. What am I even doing here? Something I found even more curious is the fact that I've survived my statistics class second semester, which I thought beat me to a pulp at least as bad as chemistry did, but I liked it even more because of it. In fact, that class even managed to restore in me a modicum of confidence in math, an area I was sure I was going to avoid like the plague in college. In fact, I'm really glad that I took it, as I actually feel like I've learned something valuable and enriching if not directly applicable to my life. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case for Neuro and Chem.

I was totally getting high off of the youthful optimism and individualistic spirit of Carpe Diem of the college students around me. After being immersed in all these big-picture-thinking communities at school, or reading 21st century lifestyle design books like the 4-hour workweek or Nassim Taleb’s books, all I could think about was seizing the day and making the most out of the present. I lost some faith in the idea of super-delayed gratification— the idea of enduring a dreary and soul-sucking life now so that you can live a happier and more comfortable future down the line. When I was down in my depths of existential gloom, all I felt I had going for me was the good faith that the future me— Doctor me— would enjoy my life, even though the current me did not. But what a waste of your livelihood would it be, I'd think, to spend the most important decades of your life jumping through hoops while stressed and broke, when you can technically engineer your life such that you can work hard, ride its ups and downs, AND enjoy its fruits now. After all, your life is really just a massive sum of today’s. If you keep living for brighter tomorrows, you’d go through life squandering all the today’s, which are actually all we’ve got, and all we’ll ever get.

I remember just hanging up from a video call with my sister while I was sitting on a couch in the lobby of the Sciences Library, when I entertained this train of thought. I had just won a Hackathon at MIT by randomly deciding to take a leap of faith and flex my creative muscle, and had one of the most novel and eye-opening experiences of my life. I came into touch with (cw: intense self-flattery) the fact that I was an adaptable person with many talents, a person with a creative eye, a knack for playful intellectual thought, a slightly unconventional character, with visions and ambitions that seem a little larger than life sometimes. All of these parts of myself, which I didn’t think fit the qualities of the prototypical pre-med student, felt more to me like diversions and hindrances than assets… which made me sad. Somehow, I thought the competitive straitjacket of pre-medicine and the highly standardized structure of pre-professional training was forcing me into a mold that missed so much of what I liked about myself. Sure, I knew I had characteristics that would make me a good doctor--that hasn't changed about me. But at the time, when I felt like college was just starting to set me off on my personal renaissance, sticking doggedly to the competitive-as-hell premed plan that I no longer felt super passionate about felt pretty damn stifling.

I've begun to realize recently that I actually might also enjoy doing other things besides medicine (whaaaat?). Before college, I'd always choose classes or study the things that aligned with the pre-med path. When selecting my courses for Columbia SHP, for example, I'd only choose to enroll in physiology or biology classes. I had the choice to take other things at the time, but my a priori assumptions were that I simply won’t like what isn’t pre-med related, so I didn’t try them. Before second semester I shrugged and said “what the heck” and enrolled in an economics class, and I also said “what the heck” for applying to work at Kinvolved; my expectations for both were initially quite low, as I was secretly hoping that these would dispel my what-if questions from first semester, as an obvious distaste for them would reassure me that medicine was the way to go. Lo and behold, I was taken off guard by how much I actually enjoyed these experiences. All my life, I’ve never had to make any hard choices between medicine and other appealing alternatives, because I've never given myself one. In essence, closing doors on the other things was a lot easier back when I didn’t have a clue about what was behind those doors. Pre-med has been all I knew, and everything I thought I liked, until college showed me otherwise.

Lastly, the difficulty of my pre-med classes did (and still does) intimidate me. This reason does fall secondary to the first five I’ve just stated, as, I think, if I were really 100% set on being a doctor, I’d be resourceful enough to find ways to tolerate the workload. But having to shoulder a very taxing course load throughout my first semester, while feeling isolated and unsure the entire time, even in the presence of the hundreds of other pre-med students, was not a great feeling. I guess I blame this unsavory experience (and I forgive myself, of course) on the rocky adjustment period of first semester freshman year, and my underestimation of the importance of forming supportive study groups. Can this problem be remedied easily in the future with a little initiative? Of course. But did this nevertheless paint my first semester experience with an extra shiny layer of demotivation and disillusionment, and propel my I-don’t-wanna-do-medical-school-anymore spiral? You betcha.

[insert-witty-comment]

Moving into Part 2, Moon takes over the writing. As usual, he immediately sticks in a disclaimer.“The purpose of the previous section was not only to inform but to put to rest once and for all some of the major doubt and nagging uncertainties that people have on the subject of UFOs and aliens. Any person with an open and logical mind should now have a heightened awareness and better grasp of these subjects. Those who still remain cynical at least have to admit that Preston has an orderly and exotic imagination that will not quit. Of course, Preston has not insisted that his adventures are definitive truth. He is open to the idea that some of his visitations or other paranormal experiences might be influenced by his subconscious or be the product of his inner imagination.”No, I don’t think this is the type of guy who can be reasoned with.Chapter 24 talks a little bit about the theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung, and somehow uses the ideas of these guys to claim that UFOs exist.Chapters 25-28 describes Moon’s bizarre childhood. His family was the only one in the entire neighborhood that wasn’t Catholic. Instead of asking his parents the reason for this like a normal kid, he instead asked his psychic friend who told him that it was because his father was molested by a priest as an altar boy. Well okay then. He also learned from his mother that she believed in guardian angels.“Upon asking her why, she told me that I had been saved by a guardian angel when I was a small baby. It occurred on a hot day in Newhall, California when she had put me in a stroller and let it rest under the shade of a large tree. She sat on the porch not too far away. According to her story, a large branch of the tree began to give way. It was not a gradual break and was obviously going to crush me in just a matter of seconds. My mother was too far away to reach me in time and for a split second felt the horror of possibly losing her baby. There was no way I could survive the fall of that branch. As the branch began to fall, a very strong gust of wind appeared and blew my stroller out of harm’s way. The day had been very hot with no sign of wind before or after that occurrence. That it was strong enough to push the stroller was most remarkable to her. Despite growing up Catholic, she had abandoned her faith and was not really a religious woman at all, but this experience led her to believe in guardian angels. I would later learn that a Greek goddess named Alcyone was one of the seven Pleiades and that she controlled the fate of storms and winds.”So either it was a guardian angel or an ancient Greek goddess. Logic.“As I have no personal recollection of the incident in the stroller, I cannot say if the aboveoccurrence was celestial intervention by a higher power or just dumb luck. It would seem that some force in the universe wanted to me to stay around for a while.”If I had to venture a guess, I suppose God is a Stranger Things fan as well and needed Moon to live in order to inspire the Duffer brothers with his batshit lunacy. That’s the only reason I can think of that isn’t completely ludicrous, and really what reason could be more worthy of divine intervention?When Moon was twelve, he played in a baseball game. He had a horrible headache and every time he would swing or run the pain got worse. Upon getting home, he immediately vomited and went to bed. While asleep he felt an even more intense pain as it felt like a computer was rifling through his mind. After that he couldn’t keep down his food and was constantly vomiting. The doctor had no idea what to do, and by the tenth day Moon could barely walk from weakness. However, after his best friend’s father took him back to his old neighborhood, he got better. Three years after that he moved to another town where he became interested in the work of Robert S. de Ropp and his ideas of achieving enlightenment.“Two important truths I learned during this time period have served me incredibly well. First, all proper path work or initiation work begins from the heart. In other words, you should not engage in any activities that you don’t really believe in. For me, this eliminated just about any possible career.”Of course it did.“Another point taught by de Ropp is that each one needs to generate his own magnetic center in order to find like minds and compatible groups through which one can learn. Although I lived in a hippie laden community at this point, most of these people were too drug oriented to seriously consider real consciousness exploration”.Fair enough. Moon then wrote to de Ropp asking for advice, and was told to finish school and join “The League”, which was a mystical group tied to UFOs. Naturally, Moon took this advice to heart and joined Scientology. No, that is not a joke. I absolutely refuse to even repeat his shilling for those people, so I’m just going to post a link to Operation Clambake here instead.In Chapter 29, Moon moved to New York with his wife in 1983 and soon discovered a book slamming both Hubbard and Crowley. However, this somehow inspired him to start looking for “Excalibur”, a mystical lost text penned by Hubbard, and he eventually claimed to the conclusion that Hubbard was a powerful psychic and the reincarnation of King Arthur. This somehow connected it to pyramids, ancient gods and geometric magic.Chapter 30 starts off with Moon revealing that he owns… an isolation tank;“Not only had I found a tank on Long Island, but its owner was the manufacturer of the most modern and desirable flotation tank available. There was also an interesting and tragic tale he had to tell but first I will talk about floating. The tank was very user friendly and had a contour like a whale. There was plenty of room inside with two waterproof switches for lights and music. The water is hygienically filtered and loaded with Epsom salt so that your body is completely suspended in water and completely relaxed. It is impossible to physically relax all your muscles to the extent you can while floating. Subluxations even disappeared through total relaxation. As the tank is totally dark, your mind begins to process information until it finally relaxes and penetrates the deeper layers of consciousness. I not only found it to be extremely fun but it also opened up psychic channels of the mind. At the very least, it relaxes one’s body. I soon realized that if people floated every day, there would be a lot less strife in the world and a great deal more productivity. This is where the tragic tale comes into play.”Yeah, fun and no more strife in the world, sure…So apparently the government see’s these things as a threat and ended up using a controlled lightning bolt (seriously) to set the Babylon factory making these things on fire. Yes, these things were literally being churned out of a factory for anyone to buy. Not to worry, you too can still buy your own isolation tank from Peter Shepherd if you really want to (as of 1995). Just make sure you don’t use after getting abducted by aliens. Apparently these tanks are such a threat that the government uses specially outfitted black helicopters to monitor these things and waste my tax dollars. Also;“I have also found it rather remarkable that if you try to get someone to float, it is like pulling teeth. The most prevalent excuse is claustrophobia. The tanks Peter has are not claustrophobic at all and can be opened by the floater in a moment. Inner space is certainly more boundless than the wide open spaces of Earth. Consciousness is still very much a taboo in our current society.”Why do I have the feeling that Moon will end up calling Eleven a pussy when/if he ever gets around to watching Stranger Things.“Actually, there is one possibly valid excuse for not floating which is that it could open you up to psychotronic attack. I have experienced such, but there are also means of protecting yourself. Besides, if you never throw a punch, you will never win the fight.”….And then he’ll start calling her a spineless wimp for not punching out the Demogorgon.One month after using the tank, he saw a UFO on Halloween and was told by a psychic that the aliens wanted him to see them. One week later in early November, he met Nichols and Cameron. After that, he was astrally abducted by aliens in his sleep and was taken to a UFO. There, he met up with Nichols and was taken to a room where an “oriental woman” broadcast the information to understand Japanese into his mind. After that, he woke up in his bed. Nichols later denied involvement and Moon came to the conclusion that he was being tested, and if he allowed the aliens to continue messing with his mind, he could have become a great psychic but at the cost of his humanity or some crap. So he essentially told the aliens to piss off. A bit later he had another dream in which two angels changed his DNA and RNA around. This somehow inspired him to start writing about the Montauk Project.Chapters 31-32 describes his hunt for the Illuminati. It kicks off with a retread with the whole Babalon Working ritual, the Cameron/Wilson connections, Crowley, Parson (who is an Illuminati leader now, I guess), and of course lots and lots of sex magick. It also claims that women tend to have a greater potential for magick due to being the “providers of life” and he claims that it’s no coincidence that most UFOs look like an overlapping three-dimensional vagina.Chapter 33 explains something called “Project KOALA”, which exists in 8885 A. D. and was (will be?) established by the “Inner Light Network”, a group of people “who are working for divine order in government and other arenas, many of whom receive direct guidance from ultraterrestrials.” KOALA (not the most intimidating name in the world) was designed maintain human health and ecology, and to contain the Montauk Project by finding a way to manipulate time. This information was helpfully provided by Tahuti via a psychic.Chapters 34-37 describe the impact the Pleiadians had on our world. It explains the ancient Greek creation myth and the legend of the Pleiade Sisters. It also explains that Troy was a Pleiadian outpost, and that the infamous Trojan Horse somehow used time manipulation aided by divine intervention. The Pleiadian descendants went on to found Rome after Troy fell, and the Roman gods kicked the Greek gods’ asses. It then explains how Romulus and Remus founded Rome.“Perhaps more importantly, the most important aspect of this myth is the death of Remus. Romulus went on to rule for a long time even though he had done wrong and knew he was guilty. Their quarrel was all over property boundaries which is a patriarchal way of looking at things. Remus saw the futility of boundaries and was thus representing the feminine side. Romulus slaying his brother was an act of vanquishing the feminine. That he ruled for a long time has its own implications. The writings about Remus surviving were buried as was his personage and namesake. It finally emerged in America with the legends of Uncle Remus, a kindly old Negro who was completely nonthreatening. He and his namesake were only suitable for bedtime stories. Of course, this was a contemptuous positioning of the black race with the feminine energy. The ruling powers didn’t respect either one which gave rise to a satirical stereotype which subtly expressed their contempt.”You know, I didn’t really think that this guy could top Song of the South but it looks like he almost did. Almost.Chapter 38 explains how this connected to Montauk; basically it has something do with bulls and gods and names and I don’t fucking know, I just want to wrap this up.Chapter 39 can be summed up by saying that seven is the most important number in the universe, as it somehow connects all life together.Chapter 40, last one, states that the Pleiadians have all of Earth’s “blueprints” but not even they know who drew them up.Finally we arrive at the Epilogue.“All of the books I have written with Preston Nichols are criticized by some for being disjointed, and this one will be no exception. Although I make everyeffort possible to communicate clearly, there is a reason why the pieces of the puzzle are never in perfect focus. We are writing about phenomena thattranscends the third dimension. The phenomena is not part of this realm and the information does not come as easy as finding the maintenance manual for a motorcycle. Obviously, critics and everyone else (including myself) would like everything handed to them on a silver platter as far as transcending the third dimension.”Shit, did one of his psychic friends preemptively rat me out? Eh, who cares?“My interest in saying all this is not to silence critics but to bring home a very important point. Spiritual evolution is hard work. It is not arrived at merely by reading books. Although books can be a boost, one has to put ideas in to practice in order to change conditions. Each person’s path is a separate and individual journey. For those who are seeking their own path, clues have been included in this book as to how you might go about it. All you really have to do is consult your own intuition and follow the horizon of your own consciousness. If those words don’t ring a bell then it isn’t meant to be rung. In keeping with the above, I would like to end this work with the last words the Buddha was said to have spoken.“Decay is inherent in all component things. Work out your salvation with diligence.”And on that mildly depressing note we are done. So, what does all of this have to do with Stranger Things? Well… we learned that you can buy your own isolation tank for only a couple thousand dollars. Other than that, not much.Join me next week on Hawkins Book Club and we’ll take a look at The Black Sun: Montauk’s Nazi-Tibetan Connection.……God, it hurts already.Thanks for reading, and Stay Strange.The Montauk Project: Experiments in Time OverviewMontauk Revisited: Adventures in Synchronicity OverviewPyramids of Montauk: Explorations in Consciousness Overview via /r/StrangerThings