I am fairly sure the anomalies that lead to relativity have to do with inconsistencies related applying Maxwell's equations in different reference frames. The speed of electromagnetic radiation in a vacuum is constant even when you switch to a moving reference frame. In addition, in the rest frame of an electron, it creates no magnetic field, but when we use a reference frame in which it's moving, the electron does create a magnetic field. Taken to an extreme, what happens then when we try to put ourselves into the rest frame of electromagnetic radiation?
I find the history of this fascinating, and you've prompted me to remind myself of it. But is the relevance to an evolution vs. creationism debate?
Not directly; I suggested it was near to a hijack; and was prompted by something in the post I was responding to.
Thermodynamics is connected to the atomic theory through statistical mechanics. Boltzmann, Gibbs, and the others certainly had atomic theory in mind when they developed the statistical connections to heat.
Again fascinating, but, relevance?
By Thermo, I was thinking of *classical* thermodynamics -- Carnot cycles, reversibility, and the like.
Yes, stat mech gives the connection: but it is a testament to the earlier scientists' genius and rigor that their principles dovetailed so well, where other areas (ultraviolet catastrophe, photoelectric effect) went AGAINST classical physics and needed the atomic theory to 'save' them, not flesh them out.
Connection to thread is through the back door. (Macroscopic properties of systems, sensitively dependent upon averaged properties of many individual components.)
I find all these questions fascinating, and I am pretty sure there are plenty of others who have investigated similar questions.
The squirrels at my university do not zigzag, they run straight to where they are going.
Odd. Every squirrel I've ever seen on the road darts back and forth as though they can't make up their minds.
Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side.
Why did the squirrel cross the road? Playing chicken with the traffic.
Regarding modeling mutation rate, genetic drift, and such, there are actually many proposed models that do decent jobs of matching observations. (
Models of DNA evolution - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)
The Kimura two parameter model, and Jukes Cantor were the favorite ones that I learned. Many of the techniques to answer the questions you asked can be found bioinformatics coursework. Perhaps you have a second career in this field
The connection to evolution in these later questions is clear, but I am not sure how creationism ties in.[/QUOTE]
Hmm, skimmed wikipedia; interesting, but it looked more like the joke about the physicist asked to predict the best horses to bet on for a horse race, and he comes back months later saying he didn't have a definitive answer, but the case of the spherical horse was very interesting.
Codons only got mentioned in the last line; and it is codons which specify the amino acid ordering of proteins; there is no modeling nor discussion of the *feedback* from the environment to the population of individuals, and from the individuals to the alleles chosen...in other words, these models are starting at one end of a time series, with sequence S1...and comparing to a far later state of the time series, with sequence Sn. And these models are looking solely at the DNA sequence
in vitro as it were, and over time: I was considering the distribution *within a species*, and how that is a function of the environment; and then, how *that* changes over time, correlating to environmental changes.
The changes are not strictly random: for some changes to the gene, create disease states which result in the individual dying before breeding; other changes to the gene result in a survival advantage, and (over time) DNA sequences with that change show up more often in a population; but some genetic changes are the result of entire sequences being moved from one chromosome to another (resulting in correlation of certain frequency changes, rather than all independent point changes in frequency); and the survivability is dependent upon the external environment.
(Think of the nylon bug, for example (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nylon-eating_bacteria); experiments on it basically had a bunch of germs of whatever species in a tank, incubated with plenty of moisture and heat, and no nourishment except the nylon; over time a series of mutations allowed some of the critters to *subsist* on nylon. IIRC, several rounds of the experiment showed that the same mutation kept recurring. But in the real world, you don't always get a large predation free environment, with just the one food source; this would affect the RATE at which such mutations propagate, should they occur. And presumably there are other complex organic substances which would never be able to be used as food without explicit genetic engineering.)