13 Comments
Aug 22, 2022Liked by Stuart Ritchie

The competition assays were in test tubes, not Petri dishes. (See section "En masse competitions in YPD" in the Methods.)

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Aug 22, 2022Liked by Stuart Ritchie

*megabases, not megabytes!

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I have to wonder, how much of an impact this paper would have made in pre-Twitter science?

Your opening premise in Science Fictions - that science is a 'Social Construct' - initially felt overstated, if not alarmist when I first read it.

Scientific discoveries should be self-evident, no? Wouldn’t all extraordinary claims naturally undergo rigorous scrutiny so that their truthiness* would be apparent? Doesn’t the process of science, as Carl Sagan noted “…with the most rigorous, skeptical scrutiny of all ideas, sifts the wheat from the chaff”? Why would scientific claims need marketing and sales departments?

Turns out, you were right.

*Fascinating that substack didn't spellcheck me for truthiness. Well done, Colbert.

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How do 3 independent reviewers on a Nature manuscript all miss that the control group is the only one not CRISPR-ed? Normally I like reviewer anonymity, but this is dereliction.

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I think you've got a typo in the following sentence. "...showed that synonymous mutations are far less likely to be linked to a huge range of human traits and diseases (nearly 5,000 of them) than mutations that actually alter the genetic sequence." I think you meant to say "... than mutations that actually alter the AMINO ACID sequence" (ie, that the amino acid is actually altered in the protein). All of the mutations of course are actually altering the genetic sequence.

One way that I have heard of synonymous mutations actually leading to deleterious/advantageous effects rather than to neutral ones is if some synonymous transfer RNA is much rarer than another (for example, if UUC transfer RNA was much rarer than UUU transfer RNA). If that was true, switching from a DNA sequence of UUU to a sequence of UUC would result in protein assembly being slowed down dramatically; and, of course, vice versa, switching from UUC to UUU, would lead to assembly of that protein proceeding much more rapidly.

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And you haven't even touched on the ludicrous "simulations" performed in the last figure... So amateur

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(From a non-scientist, just a fan of learning about science.) I see a poetic parallel between 1) mutations and 2) theories that contradict established science and promise to revolutionize our understanding. Similar to how the vast majority of mutations in this study are “significantly deleterious” and a small percentage are “significantly beneficial,” I would not doubt that the vast majority of flashy “paradigm-shifting” theories are significantly wrong and only a handful are of any benefit.

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Thanks for the piece. FYI UK copyright law permits the quotation of a work for the purposes of criticism and review. https://www.copyrightuser.org/understand/exceptions/quotation/ is a good guide to this.

So far as I'm aware this even applies to material published in nature!

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