I was having lunch today at a nearby Chinese restaurant. I was seated next to some young folks who were loudly having a biology discussion. I tuned in because I’m a geek, but I kept my mouth shut after I heard one bad science moment after another.
Unfortunately, the discussion quite quickly changed from being a biology discussion to a metaphysical discussion about whether mitochondria see us as the parasite or vice versa. Whilst I am not a biologist, I do receive “Nature” and therefore have the right to blog mindlessly on this topic and any other science related topic.
From what limited understanding I scraped from the Wikipedia article, mitochondria and us are at best symbiotes, but the reality is that without mitochondria we would be nothing and without us, our specific types of mitochondria would not exist. Therefore, I doubt the mitochondria fear me any more than I fear the trillions of them running around my body right now.
In the next few minutes, the discussion on the next table did not get any closer to making any sense. In the end, I realized that they were design students (I am lunching near Madison Ave). Nothing wrong with design and fashion per se beyond its obvious superficiality and banality, but it’s obvious that science is not a part of their education.
I wonder about this country’s long term future. The USA needs folks who at the very least understand science and do not fear it.
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