>Do you believe rehabilitation is impossible or do you want revenge?

I don't believe that someone who commits mass murder can be rehabilitated, no. It isn't about revenge; it's about public safety.

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

This is precisely why I lost all interest in Oculus the instant I heard that it had been acquired by Facebook.

This. And and unfortunately, the otherside is that administrations want to keep the 'dirty' bits of science away from where students study or alumni pay over-priced sums of money for sporting tickets. Point in case is when some animal facilities were told they had to move in Salt Lake City because they were going to be too close to the Olympic venues. They, too, got shoved in various basements.

There's quite a few drugs that have very low lethal doses with multiple delivery routes. Fentnyl or carfentnyl can easily be delivered in a lethal dose in the microgram quantity. And there are more derivatives that we haven't explored much because they're too active that likely would suffice..

We can, and do, try this. It's called 'ancestral state reconstruction' and its what I make my students do each year. There's a ton of assumptions that go into it, though, and few few are likely to be correct over long timescales. We can do that with closely related taxa (I can make some educated statements about the last common ancestor of, say, black-tailed and white-tailed deer DNA-wise), but the further back in time you go, the more homoplasy (convergent/parallel evolution), atavism, and just plain weird crap (macro-mutations) happens. Heck, for some species, we have two+ chromosome counts running around at the same time. Dinosaurs are probably beyond our reconstructive ken.

OTOH, people are clever. I'm open to someone coming up with an interesting statistical approach that proves me wrong for these deep coalescenceses.

Scientist here (you can tell by my hat, and the fact that something like 90% of my comments on /. start with "I'm a biologist"). First, the DNA we get is from better preserved remains, which kicks the half life back further (It's in TFA, but not mentioned in the summary). There's still a 'deadline' around 7 MYA, where (allegedly) all the bonds would have pretty much been broken at that point - Frozen remains supposedly have a halflife around 158 kya. It's that dang phosphate backbone that's too willing to run off and go have reactions with any trallop of a molecule that wanders on by.

This means even in the relatively recent past, the amount of DNA we're looking at is pretty dang tiny. Part of the reason ancient DNA is so dang tricky is because the much of what you sequence is not actually what you're interested in - doubly so when you're sequencing something closely related to humans. For example, did some spot sequencing of ancient/historic polar bear remains, and had to toss out a chunk of the data we got back, as it was soil bacteria(/fungi/pollen) contamination. How do we know which is which? We had good scaffolds to align our bear sequences back up again, though not everyone is as fortunate as us.

In addition to being rare, what is left is fairly short. You can imagine if you start putting breaks in at random, your average length is going to start declining rapidly, and then level out at some small value that takes quite a while to get smaller. It'll get there, and given geologic time scales, a lot of what we want is that far back, but it'll take a while.

Finally, what isn't mentioned in this summary is that there was massive variance in the estimates of half-life. Supposedly only 40% of the variance in halflife was explained by age. Preservation, inter-lab differences, and good old fashioned luck probably contribute considerably to variance in half-life.

There are other factors too, but they're boring, and I should probably get work done instead of dragging out this reply.

(And to answer your latter question, Neanderthals have been sequenced whole genome, not just mtDNA).

Here's the link for the article. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0278691512005637

I'm fairly underwhelmed with it. First is the issue you mention of "how many negative results did he not publish?" that is rather insidious. Then there's all the issues that come from his small data set size, and the fact that he did not use large portions of his actual data. And can't be bothered to report it. Or provide it. But it just wasn't useful data, for reasons not explained. I wouldn't accuse the authors of misconduct (no doubt the authors believe their ms is true), but the practices described is definitely a great way to get a false positive. Briefly skimming the interwebs show other people have some statistical issues with this too. http://www.science20.com/science_20/blog/gm_maize_causes_tumors_rats_here_how_experts_responded-94259

Sadly, only "GM crops evil!" will get reported, because it plays into a social narrative. Not "shitty stats continues to be shitty!"

Dose makes the poison. Any chemist or biochemist would tell you that. Selenium is either a mineral requirement or a toxic substance, depending purely on the dose. As is the case for sodium, potassium, and good old fashioned water. On the other hand, there's likely some amount of elemental mercury in your drinking water right this instant. But it's so trace that it's hard to detect without clever setups, and it undoubtedly has no health effects because it's so rare.

If you asked a homeopath, though, the ultra-rare nature of the pollutant is what makes it especially deadly. Heaven help us if the mercury in the water become any more dilute, we'll all die from its toxicity.

And in any event, any analytically chemist would tell you that in many regulations out there, we set unrealistically low requirements for some contaminants. Sometimes its because water naturally has a lot of junk in it, and getting it out on a utility scale is tricky, but more often than not, the 'safe levels' are picked as arbitrarily low numbers by middle manager types without any understanding that the analytical methods for detecting the analyte of interest at that low of a level aren't feasible.

A person of integrity would not presume he's guilty until he shows that he's innocent.

There's an adage about wrestling pigs from Shaw that's relevant to this.

Your comment smacks heavily of "If he has nothing to hide, why is he fighting to hide things?" Here's an alternate explanation for why he's fighting too hard: The professor was personally offended by what he probably saw as a mob of science-denying jackals that were to sure to pick at his emails, find some quote, take it horribly out of context and trumpet it in the news as loudly as could be, front page headlines blaring. And then when a correction is published showing he did no wrong, that correction will be published on the 5th page of the middle section of the newspaper where none will ever see it.

It's hard not to be personally insulted in such a case. Hell. I'm starting to feel more than a touch offended on his behalf. I know in such a case, even if there was nothing I had ever written that could be misconstrued, I would fight bitterly and with all my reserves to thwart such an attack on purely personal grounds. As someone on slashdot, I'm surprised you don't realize that sometimes people fight even losing battles purely on principle.

As a biologist, I'd say you've hit the nail on the head. There's probably no such thing as a species as a discrete entity, and the reason we have about 57 different species concepts is that they're all differing models for categorically explaining a continuous phenomenon that otherwise defies enumeration. But like other models, they're fantastically useful in some respects, and we keep them around for those purposes. When species concepts start to break down, we start talking about things like gene trees, or population dynamics, depending on the level of precision required. Even those things are models, but models that are useful for the level of question we're asking.

At its root, the only things that really 'exist' are probably genes, which struggle for existence in communities of other genes, trying to replicate themselves as much as possible because the ones who don't aren't around anymore. But working purely with genes, and nothing else, needlessly complicates a great many things.