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rudatron posted:Actually it's cool and good. Scientism is the philosophical position that no statement is true unless it can be empirically or logically verified. This statement cannot be empirically or logically verified.
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Jan 17, 2016 17:13
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The Belgian posted:Not really and who knows if it's even actually impassable. No, we have a pretty solid understanding of why the light speed barrier exists and that it's impassable. The second part is not the result of anything moving faster than light. It's the result of the space between the two objects expanding while they move. This gives the appearance of FTL travel.
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Jan 17, 2016 17:29
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The Belgian posted:Why are you so confident that the local SO(3,1) symmetry of our universe isn't (weakly) broken? People would have had the same confidence in P symmetry in the past. The Larch fucked around with this message at 17:56 on Jan 17, 2016 |
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Jan 17, 2016 17:51
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Ytlaya posted:Wait, what? Why is it necessary that life only started once? Why couldn't it have started many times in different places and just taken a while to successfully spread/survive? It seems very doubtful that there was zero life and then suddenly life appeared in one single place and from there spread across the entire world, especially given that countless locations would have the same building blocks and be subject to the same environmental conditions. The available evidence suggests that all life currently existing shares a common ancestor. If there were multiple abiogeneses, only one of them took.
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Feb 3, 2016 21:16
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Ytlaya posted:^^^ Yeah, I'm not doubting that. I'm saying that it seems entirely possible that this common ancestor could have formed multiple times and not immediately successfully spread. The same building blocks and environmental conditions were in many different places, so this seems very possible.
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Feb 3, 2016 21:24
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SHISHKABOB posted:What if they mooshed together. I've read that mitochondria and the photosynthesis cell organs may have been "consumed" by the larger cell. Mitochondria and chloroplasts have their own DNA. We've even identified their closest free-living relatives.
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Feb 3, 2016 22:15
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McDowell posted:Have you heard of RNA Granules? Beyond stress response they are being studied for hereditary / morphogenesis. I see that as a hint at the abiotic world- viruses are nucleic acids that have survived on piracy this whole time. I believe the current thinking is that viruses evolved from bacteria. Quite a few times, actually. Could be wrong on this though.
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Feb 3, 2016 22:49
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Who What Now posted:Look at this scrub who doesn't know about persistence hunting. We are the goddamn T-1000's of the animal kingdom. God, the whole idea of persistence hunting being some amazing thing needs to die already. Yes, it's a hunting technique that has been used in the past and is still used by some groups today. It's also entirely dependent on our ability to carry water and doesn't work because we have any sort of spectacular endurance (we don't), but because we're smart enough to not run after the prey.
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Feb 24, 2016 15:26
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blowfish posted:
Is there any explanation as to why the points are where they are on the x-axis? I can't make out all the numbers but the placement seems rather arbitrary. Coelenterata looks like it could be when the group first evolved, but the first point for Aves looks to be about halfway between the first bird and the modern day. Although frankly, every single point should be at the absolute end of the x-axis because that's the only point in time where the metabolic rate per unit mass of any of those groups has been measured. Bonus: As all the non-bird reptiles with a high metabolic rate are extinct, including birds in Reptilia is the only way you could have that group not have a higher average metabolic rate in the past than it does today. The only reason I wouldn't expect the average metabolic rate for Reptilia as a whole to have been higher in the past than it is today is because about half of all living reptile species are birds. (I'm also being generous here and using Sauropsida. Reptilia proper is the crown group, which most likely contains every single sauropsid with a high metabolic rate that has ever lived.)
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Feb 27, 2016 15:33
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McDowell posted:Or here's a funny thought - maybe the fossil record is the worst source of evolutionary trends because this one didn't live long back in the Cambrian days. We're the descendants of winners who didn't get fossilized. The losers died and were subducted to become our industrial fuel. Generally, you'd expect the "winners" to have a better fossil record since they have more chances at fossilization. Granted, I'm not totally sure what you're even proposing here. Are you trying to say that basal members of lineages seen today are actually highly derived and radically different from the ur-organism of that lineage? Because there's not much you can change on, say, Pikaia and still end up with a plausible ur-chordate.
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Mar 6, 2016 17:18
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