It's not that we don't like jokes - it's that this joke is an easy and boring joke to make. More importantly, it's downright hostile to many people in our community.
I disagree with this argument. If I go around telling people I am the reincarnation of Napoleon, and insist to be called “Your Excellency”, sooner or later I will be committed to a mental institution. The subjective experience of an individual cannot serve as a basis for reality.
EDIT: of course, there is no answer to this, only downvotes. Trying to discuss this subject is more and more like trying to discuss a religious doctrine.
There are so many places to go online for social validation of low effort one-liners. I appreciate humor and even some snark in comments, but come on.
I come here for signal, it's one of the few places I know that still has a high signal/noise ratio. It's decreasing to be sure, but it'd be nice to keep it as high as possible for as long as possible.
We're swift to ban accounts that post like this on Hacker News. It's so easy to dismiss all the flags and downvotes as, "people don't like jokes here", but the reality is that people don't like dumb, inflammatory, vacuous comments of the kind you find swarming around the rest of the internet like flies around your dinner.
People are here to discuss intellectually interesting things. Please let us eat our dinner.
This isn't a story about fungus, it is a story about conflating fungal reproduction with human sexual reproduction in the mind of the layperson to legitimize 'gender theory'. Over sexualized titillating language and bad analogies are required for it to be effective..
This is about the model species Schizophyllum commune. I found the OP article left me wanting to know more. The wikipedia page for S. commune links to a fascinating, in-depth page by an enthusiast:
Q: There are lots of techniques to preserve genetic diversity in EA/GA, like e.g. niching. Does anyone know if this specific thing has ever been tried?
That segment about how the fungi slime reorganized the Tokyo Subway System into a more efficient system was fascinating. Curious whether you could use this in someway to design everything from Circuit Boards to Software. One of my favorites so far.
My understanding is that the main reason for different sexes in Fungi is to figure out whose mitochondria go on to populate the child after the nuclear DNA is combined. Having mixed populations of mitochondria inside a cell would provide an incentive for competition among them, which would be a Bad Thing. Otherwise they fungi could just do away with sexes entirely for a further, much smaller, increase in the number of potential partners.
See Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane.
Serious question; I hope it makes sense: What makes these "sexes" and not just "individuals"?
To elaborate a bit: when I read the description, it sounds like a person could make the same claim about humanity: "there are billions of sexes: John, Jane, Tim, Judy, Juan, Maria, etc etc"
How is this different? Or equivalently, what makes a "sex" a "sex" if it's just variability within the sex chromosome, but every individual is able to create progeny with 25% (?) of other individuals.
> what makes a "sex" a "sex" if it's just variability within the sex chromosome, but every individual is able to create progeny with 25% of other individuals?
I haven't read the article yet (looks like it's been DOSed by traffic from Hacker News?), but your criterion would be met in a population of 201 entities (numbered from 0 to 200) where each entity X can procreate with entities in the range [X-25 ... x+25] (mod 201, of course). That would arguably yield 201 distinct sexes, where each individual is sexually compatible with 25% of the population.
If a mapping between compatible sexes existed such as in your example, it would be more useful to think of sex as continuous spectrum rather than a discrete collection.
Perhaps. But only because the mapping I've defined has so much symmetry.
Instead of the range [X-25 ... X+25], assign to each sex a random one of the 200-choose-50 (4.6 * 10^47) possible groups of partners sexes with size 50.
It would be impossible to completely describe the set of sexual compatibilities without simply enumerating them, and therefore necessary to treat the sexes as a set of discrete entities.
I think that if each individual was randomly compatible with some subset of the population, we don't have 200 sexes, we have one sex and a 25% fertility rate.
A DNA sex is a set that can merge successfully with another set that produces an offspring. This is not always possible in all life because some sections of the DNA are incompatible when swapped.
Conversely, what we think of sex (the genitalia and dimorphism identification) may not even be defined specifically by genes sets, but by epigenetic/environmental responses.
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[ 2.6 ms ] story [ 111 ms ] threadSuch as? Attack helicopters?
How?
EDIT: of course, there is no answer to this, only downvotes. Trying to discuss this subject is more and more like trying to discuss a religious doctrine.
Do you have an example?
"Perfect execution, great, great job." "That is brilliant!" "Interesting -- great idea! I'll have to think about the right way to implement that."
I come here for signal, it's one of the few places I know that still has a high signal/noise ratio. It's decreasing to be sure, but it'd be nice to keep it as high as possible for as long as possible.
People are here to discuss intellectually interesting things. Please let us eat our dinner.
http://botit.botany.wisc.edu/toms_fungi/feb2000.html
Also, there's this database with more pretty pictures and some distilled information:
http://www.mykoweb.com/CAF/species/Schizophyllum_commune.htm...
I hadn't realize how unique some of the fungal genetic systems were!
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPqWstVnRjQ
See Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life by Nick Lane.
To elaborate a bit: when I read the description, it sounds like a person could make the same claim about humanity: "there are billions of sexes: John, Jane, Tim, Judy, Juan, Maria, etc etc"
How is this different? Or equivalently, what makes a "sex" a "sex" if it's just variability within the sex chromosome, but every individual is able to create progeny with 25% (?) of other individuals.
To me, that sounds like 4 sexes.
I haven't read the article yet (looks like it's been DOSed by traffic from Hacker News?), but your criterion would be met in a population of 201 entities (numbered from 0 to 200) where each entity X can procreate with entities in the range [X-25 ... x+25] (mod 201, of course). That would arguably yield 201 distinct sexes, where each individual is sexually compatible with 25% of the population.
Instead of the range [X-25 ... X+25], assign to each sex a random one of the 200-choose-50 (4.6 * 10^47) possible groups of partners sexes with size 50.
It would be impossible to completely describe the set of sexual compatibilities without simply enumerating them, and therefore necessary to treat the sexes as a set of discrete entities.
I think that if each individual was randomly compatible with some subset of the population, we don't have 200 sexes, we have one sex and a 25% fertility rate.
Here is the sparrow with four sexes: https://www.nature.com/news/the-sparrow-with-four-sexes-1.21...
Conversely, what we think of sex (the genitalia and dimorphism identification) may not even be defined specifically by genes sets, but by epigenetic/environmental responses.
Even though alligators have DNA sets that are swapped, they are largely physically sexed by temperature: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature-dependent_sex_dete...
It even has an advantage, as females without mates can sometimes spontaneously reproduce and have offspring that are both male and female: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parthenogenesis_in_squamata