Bonus panel:
No no you see it’s…it’s all made of vibrating… energy, no not like that, in a science way! There’s particles, but actually they’re waves, but of probability but its all energy. What is energy? Uh… work, over time. What’s work? Uh… the thing I really better get back to, bye!
its all energy. What is energy? Uh…
This. This so much. What the hell is energy and what enables it to exist?
People always confuse multiple things.
There is gravity, the actual effect we see every day all around us. Gravity is a real thing, it exists. Then there’s the law of gravity, this is a math formula you can use to predict the effect gravity has on things. There’s multiple variations of this one, think Newton and Einstein. For almost everything the Newton version works just fine. Then there’s the theory of gravity, this is our attempt to explain why gravity exists and why it does the things it does. This is the tricky one we don’t really have a grip on.
By mixing these things it is often portrayed that “scientists” don’t know anything, they don’t even understand something as simple as gravity.
In addition, the word “theory” has a well known definition in the world of science. It also has a layman’s definition. Those two things are completely separate.
Yes very good point!
“That’s just a theory, a game theory!” won’t fly on your PhD defense.
I made a comment the other day saying pretty much the same thing about “respect” and “tolerance”. All three have multiple definitions that certain types of people, knowingly or unknowingly, use to their advantage to push an agenda. Generally the types of people I’m talking about are either evil (doing it purposefully) or very stupid (parroting others because they have no argument on their own) and in all cases they’re being shitty and think it means they win.
Then there’s the theory of gravity, this is our attempt to explain why gravity exists and why it does the things it does.
Not just the why, but also the what. We didn’t observe gravitational waves until 2015. People have proposed the existence of dark matter and dark energy because observed gravity doesn’t behave as our models would predict at certain cosmological scales.
I like to think of it in this way: What we call dark matter isn’t the cause/source, but the discrepancies we’ve seen in our observations/data. So anybody who says dark matter doesn’t exist is plain wrong, the discrepancies are there plain as day. And it isn’t a single thing, it’s many discrepancies in a lot of data. Now the name is probably not as good, as it isn’t clear it’s actually matter and it isn’t dark but simply doesn’t interact with EM radiation. So we can’t “see” it directly, only indirectly. The name is so poor, it leads to a lot of miscommunications. But the fact is, the data doesn’t match up. So there has to be something there. And that’s data going back almost 100 years.
Just like I said about gravity. There’s dark matter, the real thing that exists and we can “see”. And then there’s the theory of dark matter, the how and why, the thing we haven’t figured out yet.
So anybody who says dark matter doesn’t exist is plain wrong, the discrepancies are there plain as day.
There’s dark matter, the real thing that exists and we can “see”.
No, we have observations that are consistent with the existence of matter that does interact gravitationally with regular matter, but does not appear to interact with light or electromagnetic forces. It’s not like any matter we know about, other than the fact that it seems to have gravity.
General relativity works really well to explain matter in the solar system. Bigger than that, you have to use something else. The general consensus is that dark matter exists, but it’s not strictly proven, as there are alternative theories.
Then, even bigger than that, dark matter alone isn’t enough, you need dark energy to explain some observations, if you assume that cosmological constants are constant. If it turns out that they’re not truly universally constant, we might need to modify some theories (including the proposed existence of dark matter and dark energy).
We still don’t know how it happens. Only why.
And Newton’s formula doesn’t work for the solar system. And later ones not for galaxies (hence Dark Matter Unicorn).
I assume the “almost everything” is relative to the things people need to calculate gravity for. Astrophysics is cool, but rather the minority compared to, say, calculating the forces a bridge has to withstand or the arc of a ballistic projectile or any other calculations concerning primarily things on our planet.
In a way. I mean we know it exists, no one would reasonable deny it, but the exact mechanism are still debated. How much is beneficial adaptation, how much is genetic drift for example. But the common ancestry is as common sense as that an apple will fall to earth
I thought it was pretty well accepted that it’s basically “Genetic defects happen, sometimes they don’t prevent reproduction and pass down to the next generation, then it’s a lottery, maybe it will last, maybe it won’t, maybe it’s beneficial, maybe it isn’t 🤷”
Maybe at some point a human was born with knees that would never wear out but they died before having the chance to reproduce from being eaten by a tiger, we’ll never know!
Except that horizontal gene transfer happens.
Genes are not always gained from ancestors
Yeah the real issue in a way is that there’s just so much evidence of evolution happening that it’s hard to find a single shared pattern to study
I mean do we understand evolution better than gravity?
The last panel indicates someone at the bleeding edge of science, at that level too, surely there’s mystery in biology as well?
i would say yes. there likely isn’t going to be some fundamental re-thinking of evolution. sure, there are details and interactions we surely don’t know about yet, but the general principles and mechanisms are astoundingly clear.
on the other hand, gravity is central to the problem of combining general relativity and the standard model. so afaik, something significant will need to change in at least one of them to resolve the issue of gravity. so we know we have a pretty massive gap in our understanding somewhere.
Is that really the case? I’m a layman so I may fuck this up - but do we truly understand why the locus of an allelomorph can change and how and why which phenotypic traits are affected or unaffected by addition and deletion?
I get the impression there is not model for why sometimes thousands of base pairs can fuck off with no impact, and sometimes it changes the organism unrecognizably.
The theory does not need to explain why. It needs to explain how, and prove that it’s happening. We know how traits change over time to form new species, and we know that this does in fact happen. There’s always more to learn about specifics, but it’s almost certainly not changing that evolution is happening, and the mechanisms for that are pretty well understood.
I get the impression there is not model for why sometimes thousands of base pairs can fuck off with no impact, and sometimes it changes the organism unrecognizably.
No there’s many known reasons that can happen. Here’s just some of them, but in the end it all comes down to understanding that genes code for proteins, little molecular machines. Sometimes there are multiple copies of genes that code for similar proteins or even the same protein, so losing one or even more doesn’t really do anything as there’s more where that came from. Sometimes there are genes that used to be important but no longer have a role or were made redundant, and are free to sedit. If a gene codes for a protein called an enzyme, sometimes a change in the active site that binds the chemicals for the reaction it assists might be catastrophic, but a change elsewhere doesn’t do much because it’s not as necessary to the function of the protein. Sometimes changes even result in the a similar amino acid or the exact same amino acid getting put at thag spot (since the genetic code has some redundancies, a different combo might still end up being the same).
Many genes code for proteins called transcription factors. Transcription factors help control expression of many other genes, some of which might also be transcription factors that in turn affect other genes, etc. This can create huge cascades. For instance there are things called hox genes that are very important for creating a cascade that leads to the formation of different body segments, and differentiating the different body segments. Mutations in these genes can be devastating, in some animals leading to the dissappearance or redundant addition of whole body segments.
There is tons more to learn of course on specifics in terms of evolution, genetics, and molecular biology of course. I don’t think it’s comparable to gravity though, which we seem to have a fundamental gap and irreconcilable theories.
At least coming from a background of life sciences personally, it seems to me evolution is probably better understood than gravity. I think a better comparison to gravity in the life sciences might be abiogenesis (how pre life conditions give rise to life to begin with). Once life is going, evolution, that we have a ton on. Not that we know nothing about abiogenesis, but that it’s a difficult outstanding problem.
am biologist who used to work in phylogenetics lab
there is a lot of fucking mystery
In the details or the fundamentals? Because Physics has the tiny problem that if our gravity models were correct, that would mean that we don’t know where like 95% of our galaxy’s mass is
Both details and fundamentals. And when the fundamentals get questioned things get dramatic. In like, an irritating way that reminds me of religious zealotry, uuuuuuugh
The "where is 95% of all the mass!?" seems a bit more dramatic in the grand scheme of things though, damn.
I witnessed grown adults outright bully teenage and young adult interns and grad students for presenting solid evidence that challenges paradigms (you know, like how we advance our understanding of science…?) but I can’t imagine it’s much better if everyone regardless of experience is just staring into a void of conflicting observations and nobody knows what the fuck any of it means
I audited a class on the topic. The professor said something like, “Some folks think evolution isn’t a fact, it’s just a theory — but they have it backwards! It is a fact…but it’s a lousy theory.”
A fact is something that happens. If you read “theory” as “model” it makes more sense.
So evolution occurs. Our model of it is crap. Gravity exists. But Newtons model of gravity only works for human things approximately human size and speed. When it gets too big and fast we need Einstein’s model (general relativity) to explain things, if it gets too small we need quantum gravity.
Or put differently: it is a fact that I wrote these words. If you tried to describe my words with a theory/model, and it predicted which words I would write next, then you have a decent theory/model.
I hope this helps
We have tons of evidence that it happened but our models for explaining and predicting it are bad at consistently and reliably explaining everything we’ve already seen, and each new discovery seems to break those models even more.
The theory is the model trying to explain how it works. The fact, though, is that we have evidence showing that it did happen, even if we don’t have a unified theory of how it happened.
Imagine a car crash site, where the cars have definitely crashed, but everyone has different debates about what caused the crash. Imagine further that the specifics of any person’s explanation has a few inconsistencies with what we see. So we’d have the fact that a car crash happened, but lousy theories explaining how it happened.
