This piece depressingly misunderstands what science is. What they did is a cool marketing trick and a decent (g)engineering application, but it doesn't seem to much advance science's actual goal of amassing useful, explanatory knowledge. This reminds me of those braindead takes "Large Language Models make linguistics useless". No, LLMs are themselves useless for what theoretical linguistics does, they're an NLP tool. Or, to take a natural science example, it's people more impressed with physics tricks known for decades or even centuries than with the blink-and-you'll-miss-it discoveries of late.
“science’s actual goal of amassing useful, explanatory knowledge”
-sequencing ancient genomes with unprecedented coverage and depth
-developing a method to sequence genomes from a blood draw in living animals
-developing multiplex gene editing
-hypothesising what genes create what phenotypes and then proving this by creating edits in those genes and making a dire wolf
-raising re-engineered dire wolves and observing their behaviours, offering insight into how an extinct species might have behaved
This is all novel discovery and application. How can you argue they aren’t amassing useful explanatory knowledge?
Tell me, is the recent news of the first in vivo personalised CRISPR base-editing to cure a baby with CPS1 deficiency also just a “cool marketing trick and a decent (g)engineering application”?
What, in your eyes, is a prime example of “what science is”, seeing as you’re telling me I don’t understand this?
There is very little "insight into how an extinct species might have behaved". The scientific part ended somewhere between step 3 and step 4 of what you describe.
This piece depressingly misunderstands what science is. What they did is a cool marketing trick and a decent (g)engineering application, but it doesn't seem to much advance science's actual goal of amassing useful, explanatory knowledge. This reminds me of those braindead takes "Large Language Models make linguistics useless". No, LLMs are themselves useless for what theoretical linguistics does, they're an NLP tool. Or, to take a natural science example, it's people more impressed with physics tricks known for decades or even centuries than with the blink-and-you'll-miss-it discoveries of late.
“science’s actual goal of amassing useful, explanatory knowledge”
-sequencing ancient genomes with unprecedented coverage and depth
-developing a method to sequence genomes from a blood draw in living animals
-developing multiplex gene editing
-hypothesising what genes create what phenotypes and then proving this by creating edits in those genes and making a dire wolf
-raising re-engineered dire wolves and observing their behaviours, offering insight into how an extinct species might have behaved
This is all novel discovery and application. How can you argue they aren’t amassing useful explanatory knowledge?
Tell me, is the recent news of the first in vivo personalised CRISPR base-editing to cure a baby with CPS1 deficiency also just a “cool marketing trick and a decent (g)engineering application”?
What, in your eyes, is a prime example of “what science is”, seeing as you’re telling me I don’t understand this?
There is very little "insight into how an extinct species might have behaved". The scientific part ended somewhere between step 3 and step 4 of what you describe.