If people had wings and could fly it would be considered exercise and nobody would do it.
Americans wouldn't do it, the rest of the world would
I was about to be offended and then I remembered how I got out of breath walking up the stairs this morning. (To be fair, I'm anemic af and almost certainly have a touch of long covid, but still.)
There's just something about stairs that gets me. I can run a sub hour 10k, hike 15+ miles a day, and my resting heart rate is in the 50s, but stairs always get me winded.
My french teacher in high school said that everyone gets winded going up stairs, cause people who are fitter walk up the steps faster
This just solved it for me. That is exactly it. I've been angry at stairs my whole life and now I realize it's because I go up them as fast as I walk- which is considerably faster than most people I know.
Stairs are different muscles. I used to work at a dam where I would have to climb 20 flights of stairs/ladders multiple times a day with 80 pounds worth of tools on me. Before then stairs were difficult for me, now I can run up that with that much weight no problem. I haven’t worked there for a year but I also can do sub hour 10k (barely) but those muscles stay with you as long as you stay on your feet regularly during the day.
If it’s an issue for you I suggest weight training up and down the stairs you have available to you (in your house maybe?) 5 minutes a day with a couple 20 pound weights up and down those bitches and you’ll make walking stairs your bitch for the rest of your life. If you can do a sub 10k you have the willpower to do it if you want to.
Why would I fly for twenty minutes when I can drive for an hour 🙄
Yes. Burgerlanders are very averse to any level of self improvement that might be difficult. I blame the car culture propaganda more than I blame the people though.
I’m tall and fairly light. Skipping steps helps a lot with efficiency.
If you look at birds like the kakapo, they would've had flight in the evolutionary past, but evolved out of it due to lack of predatory threat.
This can be part of Island syndrome, where the dodo also suffered from, till sailors came around and found out they were tasty.
We'd end up making flying cars so we wouldn't have to fly ourselves...
Behold, a feathered biped
Plato is gonna be fuckin pissed
Between this, my stripes, and my tail.. all things I have genes for, but no activation...
I'm kinda pissed, being human could be far less cringe
Humans do have stripes but we ourselves can’t see them.
Look up Blaschko lines
Unless you have the right skin condition I don't think they're visible in any wavelength
I’m good on the feathers I read the goosebumps book about learning to fly and it gave me a preview of my trypophobia when R.L. Stine described the feathers growing out of the main characters skin
ETA: it was “chicken chicken” not “how I learned to fly”
MF walking one way into getting a pile of teratomas
My guess is they mean we have the genes to encode the proteins, since we have similar keratinized tissues like hair and nails. But probably not the hox genes to encode the structure
Well then put the box genes in me so I can have a damn plume
Stunning creatures, sea lions.
Wonderful plumage.
Fierce Creatures (1997)
There's certainly something stunning and wonderful in that picture all right
I also have a thing for short guys in glasses!
This sounds like a fun PhD project
No funding. Less fun
TIL evolution is bad at deleting legacy code
We just comment it out in case we ever need it again.
I want the damn feathers for the social aspect! If we were allowed to preen each other, the world would be a better place!
While we're on the topic, we all have very slightly webbed digits, multiple involuntary reflexes for when we get wet, and a nasal/respiratory system that is (partially) adapted to swimming. I wonder how far our DNA could be pushed to pad out what was started here?
Our throat region seems poorly thought out. As somebody said recently, tube food goes in or you die is right next to tube food must never block or you die.
The fact that billions of us still get that right hundreds of times a day is honestly pretty fucking insane, with how delicate that whole setup is
Sometimes when I'm chewing a mouthful of food in the car it occurs to me that if I suddenly get in a wreck I will have no control over my gasp reflex.
Quick someone get CRSIPR therapy
What does that even mean, you have like “four letters” and dna strands of millions long. Like how selective do you have to be. I’m sure you can basically write anything that way.
Are there entire chunks that are inactive that would give feathers, that at some point gave feathers to our ancestors?
All things DNA is full of code that doesn't get activated and is just passed on anyways
Gene expression is what they mean by "activated"
Basically think of it like having a library of instruction books and only grabbing a few of them to do the project that needs done.
DNA contains coding and control regions. Changes to the coding regions are rare, most of the evolutionary stuff is happening within those control regions instead. Mutations there are more likely to result in interesting effects by affecting the way genes activate and interact, while the coding regions do the heavy lifting.
Losing some feature could be as simple as a mutation that permanently switches off the control region of a gene, even if the gene itself and the interactions formerly coded around it still work. Over time, those accumulate mutations and degrade, since they are not useful and therefore evolution doesn't preserve them, but they are still there. For example, we have an inactivated gene that used to make an enzyme that would break down uric acid. So we get gout, but our ancestors didn't.
I'll settle for hair regrowth.
OTOH it would be kind of cool to look like the hawk man on the old Buck Rogers tv show.
Is this true ? It doesn't feel true with my current knowledge.
A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
