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Philip Ball Profile picture
@philipcball
Jan 24, 2020 • 3 tweets • 1 min read • Read on X
This sounds interesting and important, and also infuriating in what it exposes. The only way to ensure "truly free markets, ones which are not sabotaged by their most powerful participants", is by "robust regulation."
theguardian.com/books/2020/jan…
Put another way: those who clamor for "deregulated markets" basically want the freedom to undermine the very basis on which free markets supposedly achieve their efficiency - because that would damage the profit margins of financial institutions.
So what we're left with is economists mathematizing a fantasy (nothing new there), while chancers like Javid reap financial and political profit.

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More from @philipcball

Philip Ball Profile picture
Sep 20, 2024
Nice article by David Krakauer and Chris Kempes about the computational view of living things. I have some initial thoughts...
aeon.co/essays/is-life…
Most of all, it feels crucial to maintain a distinction between what evolution does and what living things do. I have no problem with considering organisms as problem-solving - as goal-directed entities, they *must* be. /2
I'm less sure whether it's right to see the evolutionary process as problem-solving, e.g. "Insect wings solve the ‘problem’ of flight". I don't think that's the right framing, not least because it has a strong whiff of teleology. /3
Read 4 tweets
Philip Ball Profile picture
Sep 10, 2024
"Dr Simoné said a lot of people are drinking plenty of water however that water is not the same structure as what we have at an intracellular level."
Oh hello again my old friend.
dailymail.co.uk/femail/health/…
"'If we can use lemon lime cinnamon clove and Celtic unprocessed sea salt you can actually change the structure of the water so it hydrates,' she said."
God give me strength (and commas).
Like so much quackery, this is vitalized by a tiny shard of truth: water is restructured in the hydration shells of biomolecules, and this matters. "Lemon like cinnamon clove" has nothing to do with that. It just happens.
pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/cr…
Read 6 tweets
Philip Ball Profile picture
Aug 10, 2024
Reading a new biography of Jim Lovelock (of which more at a later date) has sent me back to an exchange I had with Jim in 1993 in the ecological magazine Resurgence. My God, the biography casts that in an interesting light.
A 🧵 /1
resurgence.org/magazine/issue…
My piece was called Myth and Meaning in Gaia, and it set out to explain the version of Gaia theory then current. A little priggishly, I argued that the idea raised some interesting ideas but that the “strong Gaia” view – that the Earth is literally alive – was untestable. /2
As I recall, I was somewhat influenced by Jim Kirchner’s critiques of Gaia, like this one. Kirchner first put forward his challenge at a 1987 Chapman conference of the AGU, instigated by Steve Schneider. That was a big deal,& a big challenge for Jim L. /3
agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.102…
Read 27 tweets
Philip Ball Profile picture
Jul 11, 2024
Had a fun argument last night about the machine metaphor in biology. My position is that, while it's fine to use a machine metaphor to describe some parts, like a heart or a flagellar motor, it doesn't work well for a living organism as a whole. The counterargument was...
...that if a machine is an entity in which component parts work together to achieve a goal, we're machines. But my objection is that this is then no longer a metaphor but a redefinition of machines to include us (as well as all kinds of things, like books, that...
... don't seem obviously machine-like). The whole point of a metaphor (here) is that it refers to something familiar to describe the less familiar. If "machine" doesn't refer to a typical image of a machine, the metaphor evaporates - or worse, misleads. Views?
Read 7 tweets
Philip Ball Profile picture
Jun 23, 2024
Here goes another thread on why a new paper illustrates an aspect of what I’m loosely calling “the new biology”: an emerging picture of the operational principles of our highly complex molecular and cellular basis. /1
Here’s the paper: /2
(I gather it's best now not to put the links in the first tweet of a thread, because Elon.)
nature.com/articles/s4158…
The paper begins with a very nice and apt statement: “The discovery of pervasive transcription and the revelation of the large number of non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) raised the question of their functionality.” /3
Read 37 tweets
Philip Ball Profile picture
Jun 18, 2024
Here’s another thread dissecting an amazing but complex piece of molecular/cell biology. Again, I believe it illustrates some important general principles. (And it’s condensate-free!) Here’s the paper. /1
cell.com/cell-systems/a…
It comes from the lab of Aryeh Warmflash at Rice University, who is at the forefront of decoding the molecular processes that govern the behaviour of pluripotent stem cells. The 1st author is Elena Camacho Aguilar of the Andalusian Center for Developmental Biology in Seville. /2
The question they address is how pluripotent cells in the very early embryo acquire their initial fates, differentiating into more specialized tissues. One of the first stages of differentiation takes pluripotent stem cells (PSCs) to the three tissue types that…. /3
Read 29 tweets

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