This weekend I am participating in an interdisciplinary think tank on Sea Island. The idea is that the organizers get a bunch of people together from different fields, invite them hang out together for three intensive days at a fancy resort, get each participant to give a talk about their own work, and then have everyone discuss it all over drinks and meals.<\/p>\n
I shared a shuttle bus ride from the airport with Jack Horner. He is a noted paleontologist who, among other things, is studying how dinosaurs might be brought back to life.<\/p>\n
The most promising approach, as I understand it, is to start with birds, which share a lot of DNA with dinosaurs. After all, birds evolved from dinosaurs. Then you use cutting edge science to transform those birds into dinosaurs (lots of technical details omitted).<\/p>\n
Jack was telling me that there are many more possible ways to use the same technology. “For example,” he said, “you could create a duck with the head of an alligator or crocodile.”<\/p>\n
“Wait,” I told him, “that sounds like a bad joke.”<\/p>\n
“How so?” he asked.<\/p>\n
“Imagine,” I said, “that it’s some time in the future, when all of this technology has been perfected. A man walks into a restaurant.<\/p>\n
“Waiter,” the guy says, “I’ll have that new thing — the duck with the head of a crocodile.”<\/p>\n
“Ok,” the waiter replies, “If that’s what you really want. But just wait until you see the bill.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This weekend I am participating in an interdisciplinary think tank on Sea Island. The idea is that the organizers get a bunch of people together from different fields, invite them hang out together for three intensive days at a fancy resort, get each participant to give a talk about their own work, and then have … Continue reading “Crocoduck”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18419"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18419"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18419\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18424,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18419\/revisions\/18424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18419"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18419"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.kenperlin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18419"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}