Delta1212

The problem isn't the speed itself, it's hitting something. In this case, the air. That's why most vehicles that travel especially fast are enclosed rather than open air like that.

There is literally no difference between traveling at a constant speed of 300 mph and just sitting still unless you hit something. Acceleration is what has the effect and, incidentally, is what causes all the damage when you hit something or when something hits you. Drive a car into a concrete wall? You're experiencing the acceleration of going for 60 mph to 0 mph very, very quickly. Hit by a car? It accelerates you from 0 to 60 mph a lot faster than your body is comfortable with. Simply moving at any given speed is going to do precisely nothing to you, however.

121 cannot be divided by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 or 9. It can, however, be divided by 11, so it is not prime. In binary, 11(3) * 11(3) = 1001(9) 1001(9) can be divided by 11(3), therefore 1001(9) is not prime. 1011(11) cannot be divided by 10(2), 11(3), 100(4), 101(5),110(6), 111(7), 1000(8), 1001(9) or 1010(10), therefore 1011(11) is prime.

A- It wasn't really an observation. I coded those miutation rates into the program. The difference in rates largely came down what I thought were bigger vs smaller mutations. So there'd be a 1 in 20 chance of the new circle mutating to have a bit more red in its coloring and a 1 in 100 (or 200 or whatever, I don't remember the exact number) chance of the circle switching its diet from plants to other circles (or back again). E- I say that because I didn't program in a motive to evolve. All I programmed was the ability to reproduce, mutate (randomly) and die. There is literally nothing else in the program to cause evolution, which means those must be sufficient conditions to see the observed variety evolve.

I'd say a more accurate statement would be "If someone is advertising a product to extend your lifespan, it doesn't work (unless you have a fatal disease that it treats, but even then, be cognizant of who is selling it)."

Actually, mutation, natural selection and genetic drift do fairly well explain where all of the variety comes from. As one of my very first programming projects, I built a simple little Darwinian evolution simulation. I started with a circle that I gave a set of attributes and some little green dots that would slowly multiply over time (representing plant life as food). As the circle moved around the screen, it would lose energy. If it ran into food, it would gain energy. If it reached zero, it would "die" and be removed. If it reached a sufficient threshold, it would reproduce. The traits were: it's size and speed (the faster it moved and larger I was, the more energy it used up), color, ability to detect up to four colors, the distance at which it could perceive those colors, how to react to the colors (either move toward, move away or ignore) and change speed while reacting, and whether it "ate" plants or other circles. The initial dot was black (0 red, 0 blue, 0 green), could see anything (0 detection distance), had no ability to distinguish color even if it could see (upper bound set to 255 and lower to zero for R, G and B in all four color detectors so literally any color would trigger a detection if it could detect anything) and all four reactions set to ignore while moving at the starting speed. Every time a circle reproduced, the new circle would copy the values for each variable of its parent, but there was a small chance (ranging from, I believe, 1 in 20 to 1 in 100 depending on the trait) that a trait would "mutate" to another number. So I programmed in some simplistic genetics, the ability to mutate and a selection pressure in the form of food availability (and, potentially, predation), and that's it. No goal to strive toward, no perception of beauty or ideal forms for the circles. Just a bunch of trait-defining variables that mutated completely at random. That randomness meant no two runs were exactly identical, but there were some common patterns that cropped up. In about half of my runs, I'd get circles that would see the plants and move toward them. Those would be very successful for a time but very frequently burn out after a while because they'd eat the food faster than it replenished itself leading to population booms and crashes. Eventually one of the crashes would kill them all off and that would be that. When those cropped up, a predator that would just sit on a plant until other circles ran into it would almost always take hold, both because it was a fairly easy mutation from one to the other and because it tended to be most successful when it's food would run rat at the plant it was sitting on (though it did ok otherwise since the plants tended to clump and circles tended to reproduce in a little swarm when they hit a clump of food, so any predators hanging out in those clumps would snag a few good meals). Of course, the presence of predators occasionally lead to circles that would move toward plants and run from most other circles. Those were less common because of the complexity involved, but I always liked them. I was hoping to get some predators chasing prey out of that but never did. Eventually I figured out that predators that chased other circles did occasionally appear but we're very, very short lived. They weren't distinguishing between prey and other predators and would literally wind up cannibalizing themselves into extinction. What I did get, though, were predators whose coloring would mimic plant life and lead to other circles making a beeline for them. The trait to run towards plant life died out very quickly whenever that particular predator appeared on the scene. (Once I learned that the circles in a particular run that were attracted to plants were actually attracted to the R value of the plants' coloring when a predator appeared that they all ran towards despite it being a bright magenta). One of the most stable configurations that would set in (it wasn't particularly common, but when it did take over I never saw them die off or develop any real competition even if I left things running for hours) was a small circle that would move very slowly and then dart rapidly at the nearest plant as soon as it entered its radius of detection. Without a predator around, they could quickly take over the screen and starve out all their competition for food, leaving things with the screen filled with very small, regularly spaced, barely moving circles that would periodically go through a brief scurrying as plant life recovered a bit, eat it all and then go back to their slow dormant state waiting for it to recover again. That doesn't touch on any of the many variations in speed and size that all of the above could come out in, and even that is a small sampling of some of the more interesting behaviors and strategies and doesn't touch on dozens of others that would all be swarming over the screen at the same time. All exclusively from random mutations and selection pressures, which I'm fairly confident in because I didn't personally program in any of those behaviors nor a desire to achieve those behaviors into the simulation. And that variety was with a very, very small number of potential traits. Biological life as unimaginably more potential for complexity. It's really not necessary for there to be any direct response to the environment. I certainly didn't program it to have traits become more likely to appear when they were most beneficial. It's all an emergent behavior of the system. Anything that reproduces with variation undergoes natural selection. It's both a necessary and sufficient condition for evolution to occur.

No.

That only seems like a high number of mutations until you consider that it's 250 mutations out of 3 billion base pairs.

I haven't seen any of the show, but from what I've gathered from conversations online, it has a lot better writing than a typical kid's show, "girly" premise notwithstanding. Edit: While I haven't seem MLP, I did enjoy Power Puff Girls when I was younger. Not to the point of fandom, but still. I imagine it's something similar in that just because a quick glance at a show makes it seem like the target demographic is young girls doesn't necessarily mean that it's written in a way that other groups won't enjoy.

Why does it need to be moving at a constant speed with regard to a universal frame if it has the exact same behavior in every frame? Additionally, two objects moving at the same speed but in different directions are not in the same rest frame. Since light can move in different directions, even if you could establish a frame for light, which you can't, all light would not be in the same frame.

Good for you?

I did grow up playing them, and I'm still the person who takes bugs outside and releases them rather than squashing them. So I'm going to go with "probably not."

Well, that was a non-sequitur.

I suspect there is quite a bit we don't know about how imagination works. I also suspect that there is quite a bit of what we do already know that I don't. But I'm not the one claiming that the ultimate cause of the universe is an unsubstantiated force of imagination the existence of which would fly in the face of everything we do know. And I do know enough about how evolution actually works to know that the idea that idea that it needs consciousness driving it entirely misses the point of what evolution is and how it operates. It's like saying a stone rolling down a hill must have some purpose guiding it.

Wisdom and imagination are emergent properties of complex neural networks developed through natural selection to aid in the survival and reproduction of the complex chemical organism that houses them. We value them because they are some of the primary attributes we use for survival. (Similarly, Genesis begins with "Let there be light" because we are a very visual species. A bat Bible might just as well begin with "Let there be sound!") And this is really the crux of the issue. Imagination isn't a magical force, it is an attribute of our particular kind of life, no more necessary to the existence of the universe than any other trait. A horse might well suppose that there existed some 'primal running' that gave the Big Bang its momentum. A bird might suppose that the complexity of the universe is the result of some 'primal song.' Ultimately, the belief that there must be imagination behind the creation of the universe boils down to the idea that the universe must have been created by 'something like me' or at least be based on 'something I value' which is the same egocentric thinking that allows for the creation of creator gods in the image of humanity. The universe is under no obligation to think we're special just because we think we are.

As an open-ended problem? Yeah, there's probably some way it could be more efficient.

Living thing don't change. A rabbit will always be a rabbit. But children are not identical to their parents nor to each other. Some of those differences will lead to one child being better at surviving than another and so those particular differences are more like to be passed down to the next generation. Dinosaurs didn't turn into birds, but the more bird-like of the dinosaur's children were better able to survive, and the less birdlike children weren't able of "sustaining their life" and so died out. Sometimes more than one group is capable of surviving well and so instead of one change succeeding over the other, both do in different groups and so you get diversity.

You'd have to spend money to cure the disease in your children despite already going through the treatment yourself, true, but once the germline "correction" is made, that covers all future generations. This goes to the fact that, yeah, it's not "fair" that people miss out on treatments that could have helped them but arrived too late, but that's the nature of medical technology. We develop new treatments because people need them, which mean there are and we're inevitably people who needed it before it was available and didn't get it.

Be careful with science information you come across in documentaries and on TV. They tend to sensationalize things a bit (or a lot) and a lot of nuance tends to get lost in favor of making things sound cool.

If I see a kitten and it triggers a feeling if protectiveness because my mammalian brain registers "small furry thing with baby proportions" and I feel the urge to help it, am I being altruistic or is my brain confused about what creatures I'm supposed to want to help to protect my genetic legacy? Edit: To clarify, most people do not make decisions on whether to help someone or some thing based on how much genetic material they have in common. In practical terms, it may actually work out that they do, but no one sits down and thinks "how much is this going to contribute to the propagation of genetic material contained in my DNA" before making a decision to provide aid. Our brains have some shortcuts for making those determinations that make us want to provide help under certain circumstances, and those circumstances tend to heavily favor carries of our own genetic material. But it's rather easy to spoof those shortcuts and get the feelings of protectiveness and altruism to apply outside of the optimal range of individuals from a genetics standpoint. And if humans aren't making those high level calculations as conscious choices, other animals certainly aren't. So how much distance is there between "the dog decided to help the kitten because it triggered the instincts associated with protecting puppies" and "the dog was confused and thought the kitten actually was a puppy."

Why would tachyons only exist for an instant?

Of course, at some point it may just be that what happens between points A and B just isn't knowable with absolute confidence. We have some pretty good ideas, and people have made some solid attempts at coming at it from an angle, but fundamentally what we're talking about is finding a way to test what a particle is doing when no one is testing it to see what it's doing.

And how much of a difference is there between those two things?

I think if you're going to talk about a "primary driver" you need to specify what is being driven. Mutation seems to be the primary driver of variation and natural selection the primary driver of adaptation. I'm not sure it is fair to call one or the other (or genetic drift, which is probably one of the larger drivers of speciation) the primary driver of "evolution." As an explanation for the variety of life we see around us, why it is the way it is and how it got that way, mutation, natural selection and genetic drift are all necessary but not sufficient elements. It's a bit like asking whether the primary driver of a bike is the pedals, wheels or rider. You might be able to make a stronger case for one or another if you really wanted to, but remove any of those elements and your bike isn't going to get very far before it runs into problems.

And, in fact, we can trace the point of divergence not only in the fossil record but through DNA analysis as well. Put simply, there are certain types of mutations that become fixed in a population at a steady rate. By comparing the differences at specific locations in genome of two species, we can trace how far back in time they diverged. Obviously, it's more accurate the more related two species are (and therefore the more recently they diverged) as different species can have clocks that run at slightly different rates depending on things like generation length, but if you know how fast a particular species's clock runs and have fossil evidence to help calibrate, it's another method of timing when two species diverged, and when used it does agree well with both the fossil record and, otherwise, with what we'd expect based on our current understanding of evolution.