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
MatterUnicorn).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.
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.
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
bacteria and some others, preparing for horizontal gene transfer: "im about to ruin man(kind)'s whole career"
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.
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."
That was great. :)
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!
