It is important to remember that, unless accompanied by convincing evidence for selective advantage, any single inheritable trait is more likely to have arisen from genetic drift, not from natural selection! There is, in my opinion, too much focus on conversation about superficial phenotypic traits like “shape of the nose” this and “angle of the eye” that, all the arguments about how one is better than another. Could the asiatic epicanthic fold give advantage against icy winds? Maaaybe… But it doesn’t even have to. What about the asiatic dry earwax gene? You’d struggle to even come up with a story of how dry earwax or wet earwax is actually better under certain conditions, or you could just say “it’s a single nucleotide polymorphism that could have spread by genetic drift” and be done.
Very few human traits have definitely been naturally selected for: light skin in non-sunny climates for better vitamin D production, sickle cell gene for malaria resistance, lactase persistence for animal milk consumption. Even there, the estimated selective advantage is actually much smaller than you’d expect: lactose tolerance confers only something like 1% advantage! There are many more possible neutral mutations than advantageous ones, and each one has a chance to be fixed in the entire population by genetic drift, meaning that any widespread human trait that is less clearly advantageous than lactose tolerance is more likely to be neutral than advantageous at all.
Even mildly disadvantageous mutations can be fixed by genetic drift, especially in humans since we have had many bottlenecks and founder effects. There was an area in Appalachia populated by blue-skinned people due to founder effect. No one is going to try to argue how having blue skin was actually advantageous for them to blend into their environment! There is an area in Dominican Republic with a very high rate of children born intersex, again due to a founder effect mutation. They are not considered exceptional and live normal lives as their culture has adapted to treat them as routine, as a kind of third gender. But they are not some kind of new level of human evolution, an adaptation for an intersectional era!
The only mutations that definitely cannot spread by genetic drift are those that definitely kill you.
i cannot understand everything (far from it) but here is the part where I believe is an alternative explanation for the CMB :
Equations (2.38), (2.39), (2.40), and (2.53) all illustrate that the creation rate of particles with energies larger than the inverse expansion time, ρ, is exponentially suppressed. Parker [11] has noted that these exponential factor are similar to those which appear in thermal spectrum at finite temperature.
So unfortunately the article they reference by Parker is paywalled. I have access but can’t share it easily. The article is essentially the foundation of quantum field theory in curved space time - in other words the genesis of the standard cosmological model. Cosmological particle production in an expanding universe isn’t an alternative to the Big Bang, it’s an essential part of it.
May I take another route and ask you what you know about the history of science … about paradigm shifts … and about how people very knowledgeable on the current paradigm cannot see (most of times historicaly) that a paradigm shift is about to happen ?
how people very knowledgeable on the current paradigm cannot see (most of times historicaly) that a paradigm shift is about to happen ?
I’m not sure I’d agree with that assessment. Generally a new model or understanding of physics arises because of known shortcomings in the current model. Quantum physics is the classic example that resolved a number of open problems at the time: the ultraviolet catastrophe in black body radiation, the photoelectric effect, and the interference pattern of the double slit experiment, among others. In the years leading up to the development of quantum theory, it was clear to everyone active in physics that something was missing from the current understanding of Newtonian/classical physics. Obviously it wasn’t clear what the solution was until it came about, but it was obvious that a shift was coming.
The same thing happened again with electroweak unification%20and%20the%20weak%20interaction.) and the standard model of particle physics. There were known problems with the previous standard model Lagrangian, but it took a unique mathematical approach to resolve many of them.
Generally research focuses on things that are unknown or can’t be explained by our current understanding of physics. The review article you linked, for example, details open questions and contradictory observations/predictions in the state of the art.
We are discussing here in a community dedicated to science and clearly I have to acknowledge that your arguments here are much better than mine 😆 and that you are very knowledgeable in the current paradigm of science.
Unfortunately for me, there is no community at Lemmy dedicated to the history of science where “very knowledgeable on the current paradigm” would be so telling for historians knowledgeable in this field.
Unfortunately for me, there is no community at Lemmy dedicated to the history of science
I agree! The history of science is often even more interesting since you get both the science and the personalities of all the people involved, plus the occasional world war in the mix. It’s a shame there isn’t an “askhistorians” type community here.
As for solar panels I think the word you're looking for is "albedo"
Off the top of my head I think it's close to earth's natural albedo anyway. Or even if it is a lower number and more energy/heat is absorbed it's so negligible. Only the tiniest fraction of the earth's surface would be/are covered in panels
It would turn scary if the atmosphere would become as dense as the core of a star. Then too, a lot of stuff depends on the type of star we’re talking about. Are we talking about some wimpy red dwarf core density? Yeah, we’ll fuse the hydrogen in the atmosphere/on the surface all right. U wanna fuse nitrogen? Oof. U’r gonna need a much bigger star than that.
So basically, to become scary, ur atmosphere would have to be a lot more dense than what it would be if it was fkin solid (like if the gases were literally solid). It wouldn’t thus be an atmosphere.
You and the person on a chair on the beach next to you will both get sunburnt. In the same way, radio waves washing around your house or car interacts with everything, antenna or not.
I know otters blow bubbles into their fur to isolate themselves, but this also makes them extra buoyant. For the babies this is quite handy (less drowning etc) but for adults idk if it really helps.
It really depends on the fur texture probably, seals are also coated in fur but streamlined to perfection.
Gravity is “emitted” by an object with mass. So to use what might be a better example, if a massive object popped into existence at a particular place, it would start “emitting” gravity waves from that time. Another object one light-minute away would start feeling its gravity about a minute after it appeared.
I’m no expert, but I just scrolled through the Wikipedia article for Eusociality, because I know that’s a really interesting topic in the field you describe, and then picked out all the links to scientists:
And well, descriptive words that get mentioned relatively often: entomologist, biologist and sociobiologist.
Sociobiology is almost a competing theory to sociology, though, in that it tries to explain social behavior with evolution.
The Wikipedia article on sociology does say rather strongly that it is about humans.
My best guess is that while e.g. eusociality would offer a broader range to study, I guess, humanity is just not as interested in the specific details, as they are when studying humans. So, that’s why sociology for animals is presumably not a field of its own, but rather lumped into entomology/biology.
Thanks for the pointers, I’ll have to give’em a look! Eusociality does sound right in line with what I was wondering about, but hadn’t heard of it before!
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