Bonus panel:
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
Except that horizontal gene transfer happens.
Genes are not always gained from ancestors
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!
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
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.
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 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).
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.
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?
We are all just part of the first self-replicating cell with funny mutations attracted to mass
