I’ve just started Philip Ball’s book How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology and I’ve already learned that the way biologists have conceived of the functioning of DNA and genes is wrong from beginning to end.
Does that make science wrong, perpetrating an elite view that shouldn’t be trusted?
Not at all. The wrongness lies in the unexpected and deep-lying complexity of DNA’s functioning. Learning anything about genetics is difficult and DNA is very non-cooperative. Some genes overlap, some proteins control areas a million base pairs away, the stuff between genes has numerous functions, certain areas still appear to do nothing, other areas do two things. Disabling a gene in a lab animal may do different things at different times or nothing at all. Bodies may have a redundant backup system or they may be able to move the necessary steps around the obstacle.
No sane creator would design a system to work like this; the gods would be mad indeed even to conceive of it. Trillions of tiny steps might if each tiny step produced an improvement, however slight. Delving deep enough into such a system would naturally lead to dead ends and false paths, because some simplification is absolutely necessary for even a specialist scientist to understand a subject.
Each year, therefore, thousands of tiny steps - published academic papers - combine to grant greater understanding. The earlier understandings were the best available at the time. They shouldn’t be thought of as “wrong” any more than a 1920s telephone was “wrong”. It was the best available at the time, and a marvel all to its own.
I really recommend the YouTube series “Star Talk” by Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He explains in layman’s terms how science works, how things like Einstein’s theories have been repeatedly validated, even though some have been added on to. He readily admits that we know very little about the universe: for instance, nobody knows WTF dark matter is, other than it makes up the majority of the observable universe. And nobody has a clue as to what happens inside of a black hole. But we’ve gotten very good at figuring out how things work in the visible universe, and so far none of it has disproved Relativity. Now, there may be different (and unknown) laws that govern behavior inside of a black hole, but so far, the things we can see follow the rules.
I may have garbled some of that, but it’s basically what I’m taking away from the talks.
So many things amaze and confound me, because I am made of meat and finite. The water thing seems simple compared to infinity, or even: how does the sun keep burning? WHAT is the sun burning? (Cuz all I knows about stuff burning is that you need something to burn plus oxygen and heat so the sun seems like a different category…)
And how does any finite, meat-based being wrap their mind around the Big Bang? What was before? And before, and before and before?
The sun burning is a very interesting topic. In 1862 Lord Kelvin calculated that the Sun would only produce 3000 years of heat if it were made of combustible materials (such as coal and oxygen). https://zapatopi.net/kelvin/papers/on_the_age_of_the_suns_heat.html
Kelvin thought the answer might lie in a constant rain of meteors falling onto the sun, but that would not be adequate either.
When the concept of radioactivity was discovered, Rutherford though the Sun was powered by radioactivity; but when Cecilia Payne determined that the Sun was mostly made of hydrogen that seems to be unlikely. It wasn’t until the concept of hydrogen fusion was developed in the 1930s that the true source of the Sun’s light was determined.
Hydrogen fuses with hydrogen to produce energy and helium; the Sun uses up 600 billion kg of hydrogen every second to produce its sunlight. Older stars, and larger stars, can support other types of fusion that produce even more energy, which is why older stars and larger stars are brighter.
The sun isn’t “burning” (undergoing a combustion reaction where hydrogen bonds with the product and releases energy); it’s a fusion reaction (hydrogen atoms are merged into helium, etc).
@Stoid I highly recommend watching as many episodes of How the Universe Works on the Discovery or Science channels. These are shows that include the top scientists, and also do a great job in describing the science in laypersons’ terms. Another great resource is PBS SpaceTime on YouTube. You probably want to start with the earliest episodes and then move forward.
Well first of all they are not thrown around as “facts”. They are thrown around as possibly theories that are supported by what facts and observations they have.
Secondly, have you considered that the communities of people with multiple PhDs from places like MIT, CalTech and Stanford who spend their entire lives studying this shit may come up with theories that seem counter-intuitive to you?
That said, a lot of how the universe works can only be explained as abstract concepts and mathematical constructs. Take a black hole for example. Originally it was just a mathematical theory. It seems like a straightforward concept though. Based on the equations for mass and energy (E=MC^2 for example) and gravity and acceleration as a function of distance and whatnot, if you compress a large object to a small enough space, the escape velocity is such that nothing, including light, can escape from it.
Like I get the concept and understood how the equations worked from physics class. But I can’t wrap my brain around it it real life. Like it “bends” space and time? What the fuck does that even mean? And if I toss a rope across the event horizon, an astronaut can’t climb out? What happens to the rope? Does my end get pulled in? Does the astronaut just keep climbing forever? What was that time travel bullshit Mathew McConaughey did in Interstellar? And the “fact” that we live in a universe that has it’s own “event horizon” at the edge of the observable universe travelling away from us at the speed of light might mean WE live in a black hole? Is that BAD?
Humans have learned so much about how stuff works that, over the millennia, we have been able to turn this (a nature scene) into the very message board you are typing on, involving modern computers, LCD screens, mobile phones, global informational networks, etc. It is fair to say that most people have no idea how any of this works at a deep level. There is a crazy amount of specialized knowledge, both scientific and technical, represented in going from that nature scene to the SDMB.
Does it seem remarkable to you that we have, say, mobile phones? The very, very tall knowledge stack required to make your cell phone is the same sort as what’s required to know that the sun is fusion reaction. If you weren’t holding your phone and someone started yapping about, say, quantum tunneling or hybridized molecular energy levels or whatever, you would say “How can you be so confident about all this stuff you can’t even see or touch!?” But you can hold your mobile phone and play Candy Crush on it while FaceTiming your friend – it all definitely works, so you can’t question here the confidence of scientists in the countless areas of study involved.
Stuff like the fusion in the sun is no less factual than all that, even though it’s not in the palm of your hand. (Solar fusion is arguably a much easier “get” from a scientific perspective than what’s needed to build up to the mobile phone.) The mobile phone is easy to take for granted because it’s so familiar. But it should look no more or less magical.
It’s also important to recognize that 99.999% (who knows how many nines) of stuff scientists “know” is so rock solid that you don’t even think about it. A layer of confusion and discovery lies between the immense amount of established stuff and the shrouded unknown. When working within that layer, theoretical stuff gets thrown around, sure, but the overwhelming majority of stuff isn’t “coming from theory” any more than your very real, very operational mobile phone is. It’s just stuff we know, thanks to millennia of progress in understanding. Pop sci media naturally reports on things happening in the thin layer of confusion and discovery, but that isn’t representative of the huge chunk of stuff that is simply known (and that is, thus, not newsworthy.)
I have been reading an FB group that is just… wow.
There really are a whole bunch of people who believe the earth is flat. As this thread shows, I am in no way good at this stuff, but holy hell…
I’m sure there’s some psychological terminology to explain people who wholeheartedly throw themselves face first into every conspiracy theory they stumble across and completely reject the possibility that the world has told them the truth in the form of their education and news sources, etc. It satisfies something in them, but it’s really hard for me to imagine what.
I don’t know if this is considered a reputable study, but it is a fair analysis of what bothers Stoid and LSLGuy, among others. Astral Codex Ten on Real Raw News, a “bat-shit-crazy” site run by “one Michael Baxter” (yes: one. That seems to be enough):
What stands out isn’t the silliness of these particular theories, but that I saw them sequentially endorsed by the same people.
Some of these people are smart enough to notice inconsistencies, at least when they’re pointed out, so why don’t they bother them? To some extent, I think it’s for the same reason people don’t care that every Batman story doesn’t perfectly line up. Consistency isn’t the point! What actually matters is enjoying individual stories and the wider genre they fit into. Covid vaccine haters don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, they’re driven by a core impulse of “distrust the new vaccine that people I distrust are promoting,” and every conceivably story or tale that feeds that genre of thought is, for them, worthwhile.
The whole article is very readable and leaves me, who has never encountered such conspiracy promoters or believers IRL scratching my head in a mix of wonder and horror.
A mind which truly hates the act of thinking carefully will develop a LOT of different ways of getting through the day without that thinking.
Just as folks who truly hate to work will expend tremendous effort being failed criminals or inventors or get-rich-quick schemers or con-men. They’d make more money for less effort working at WalMart, but what they do isn’t “work” in their mind while being a Walmartian would be “work”.
I recently learned about the “Need for Cognition” scale. People who score high on the scale enjoy thinking and contemplating. They are much more comfortable with uncertainty, ambiguity, and randomness in the world.
People who score low don’t like to think much. Their world is/should be certain, clear, and orderly.
The differences manifest in everything from political views to preferences in art & entertainment.
Relevant here is low scorers struggle trusting science because the built-in uncertainty. For all science has taught us about the universe, we don’t know everything, and anything we think we know can be proven wrong with me evidence. Woo and religion are presented as certain and unchanging. Conspiracy theories remove randomness from the world.
