RE: Darwin Proven Wrong?
September 12, 2014 at 12:42 pm
(This post was last modified: September 12, 2014 at 12:43 pm by sswhateverlove.)
(September 12, 2014 at 12:22 pm)Cthulhu Dreaming Wrote:
(September 12, 2014 at 1:58 am)sswhateverlove Wrote: Um... you may want to check your facts. Dark energy has not been observed, only it's assumed effects.
http://science.nasa.gov/astrophysics/foc...rk-energy/
Let me illustrate by way of an analogy why this sort of hair-splitting is absurdly foolish.
Have you ever visually observed(*) wind directly? No, and nor has anyone else. We observe it only by it's interaction with other things that we can observe. Certainly today we know that wind is the movement of air, which is comprised of molecular oxygen and nitrogen, carbon dioxide, and a host of trace gases. Yet, there once was a time when we did *not* know this, and yet we still knew *something* caused the effects we observed, something we could not see. Only by making observations of the effects did we learn about wind.
We are now in the early stages of learning about what thing causes the expansion of space to accelerate against the force of gravity. That we don't know the exact nature of this thing in no way invalidates it's existence. The force exists, we can observe what it does, even if we can't directly observe it or currently know what causes it. Nonetheless, we can and have learned some of the constraints on the properties this "thing" has.
A hundred years ago, we were in largely the same situation with respect to gravity - and in many ways, still are.
Fair enough.
(September 12, 2014 at 12:38 pm)Mister Agenda Wrote:
(September 12, 2014 at 2:29 am)sswhateverlove Wrote: Pretty interesting that we've come to the point in science where the scientific community is generally accepting an invisible and undetectable "force" driving the acceleration of the expansion of the universe. I think it's cool. I'm looking forward to what comes next.
It may be picking a nit, but if it were undetectable, we wouldn't be aware of it. Detecting pretty much anything is a matter of observing its effects on the environment. Dark energy has been detected, we just don't know much about it yet.
There is at least one very interesting hypothesis, though: virtual pressure, the idea that in the vast distances between galaxies, the pressure of the virtual particles in the space between them grows greater the farther apart they get.
(September 12, 2014 at 2:52 am)sswhateverlove Wrote: The issue I was posing was that genetic mutation may not be responsible for evolution and differentiation, so yes, it is a question about whether we understand how it works.
There's nothing about epigenetics that implies evolution is not natural selection acting on genetic mutations. Genes are what we inherit. Epigenetics is amazing, but it doesn't directly cause speciation.
(September 11, 2014 at 7:38 pm)sswhateverlove Wrote: Perhaps we're having an issue regarding semantics?
"un·de·tect·a·ble
synonyms: unnoticeable, imperceptible, invisible"
Is it not invisible? I would say that observing effect is not the same as observing the cause (the force) itself. I was agreeing with everything else you were saying. How was I being disingenuous?
Yes. But it's not unnoticeable. We noticed it.
Fair enough.