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
"Theory" of Evolution (SMBC)
Submitted 11 months ago by SorteKanin@feddit.dk to science_memes@mander.xyz
https://feddit.dk/pictrs/image/3bbf67d1-eb8b-4962-b56b-d1c428b3bb4c.gif
Comments
lugal@lemmy.ml 11 months ago
Kecessa@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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 an human was born with knees that would never wear out but they died in before having the chance to reproduce from being eaten by a tiger, we’ll never know!
EarthShipTechIntern@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Except that horizontal gene transfer happens.
Genes are not always gained from ancestors
janus2@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
bacteria and some others, preparing for horizontal gene transfer: “im about to ruin man(kind)'s whole career”
Poogona@hexbear.net 11 months ago
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
EarthShipTechIntern@lemm.ee 11 months ago
The pioneers in some fields are calling for studying (or renaming it) INvolution as opposed to evolution, as it has much to do with involved interactions with other life forms (bacterial, fungal).
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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?
niartenyaw@midwest.social 11 months ago
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 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.
funkless_eck@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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.
janus2@lemmy.zip 11 months ago
am biologist who used to work in phylogenetics lab
there is a lot of fucking mystery
onion@feddit.de 11 months ago
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 galaxies mass is
CodexArcanum@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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!
qjkxbmwvz@startrek.website 11 months ago
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.”
BuboScandiacus@mander.xyz 11 months ago
I don’t get it
Speculater@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Probably meant we know that it happens and approximately how it happens, but the publicly communicated version is just vague enough to sound like hand-waving.
Ack@lemmy.ca 11 months ago
That was great. :)
mayo_cider@hexbear.net 11 months ago
We are all just part of the first self-replicating cell with funny mutations attracted to mass
mumblerfish@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Come on now. We all know that evolution is the expination to gravity! Look, all things that does not fall down, fall into space and die, hence only the things falling down to earth can live on and reproduce! Gravity is an emergent propery of evolution! Duh!
Thorry84@feddit.nl 11 months ago
People always confuse multiple things.
There is gravity, the actual effect we see every day all around is. 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.
TexasDrunk@lemmy.world 11 months ago
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.
MonkderDritte@feddit.de 11 months ago
We still don’t know how it happens.
lennivelkant@discuss.tchncs.de 10 months ago
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.
booly@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
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.
Thorry84@feddit.nl 11 months ago
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.