Delta1212

There is some probability that the wave will be absorbed at that point, but there is also a probability it won't interact (i.e. That the photon "passed through one of the slits"). The wave doesn't automatically collapse the moment it reaches something that it could potentially interact with if there is some probability that it could travel down a path that doesn't run through the barrier.

That, and not every dead animal falls into a peat bog. Most dead things simply don't become fossils, not every fossil that forms survives to modern times and not every fossil that exists had been found. The sampling we do have though shows plenty of intermediate stages and conforms very well to what we'd expect to find given evolutionary theory.

I'd expect to see more of a match between humans and spider monkeys than humans and (e.g.) ostriches. I'd also expect to see more of a match between humans and ostriches than between humans and trees. In fact, having absolutely no match at all with spider monkeys would go against the predictions of evolution. The fact that there is some degree of match is a prediction of evolution, not evidence against it.

The "missing link" hasn't been missing for decades. We constantly find intermediate fossils for all sorts of species. We can trace theropod dinosaurs to modern birds fairly well as a non-human example.

I think it's also important to note, I think, that Darwin could have gone about developing his theory in a completely unscientific way and it wouldn't make a lick of difference to modern evolutionary theory. We've had a century and a half since Darwin both to better develop the scientific process and to make sure the modern theory of evolution fits the more rigorous criteria of a scientific theory. As noted above, a lot of people have worked on it since Darwin and it is considerably updated since his time. He got a surprising amount right considering the limited information he was working with as far as the genetics and the mechanism for inheritance go, but, again, it doesn't really matter how much he did or didn't get right as the theory has moved on since his time. On the Origin of Species is an interesting historical text but it isn't a textbook on our current understanding of evolution. One of the great things about science is that the idea have lives independent of their originators. It is entirely possible to base good science on an idea that came from a crackpot as long as someone puts in the work to make the idea conform to scientific standards, updating it as necessary. Darwin wasn't a crackpot, but his ideas have undergone that same process, so whether or not evolution fit the criteria for a good scientific theory at the moment he wrote it is entirely irrelevant to whether it fits those criteria now, which it does.

Television in general is just not a reliable source for science education, no matter what channel it (and some of the channels that are supposedly devoted to being "educational" are actually the worst. I'm looking at you, History Channel). Even the better programs out there (I like what I've seen of the rebooted Cosmos) are almost always tackling the subject matter on a very superficial level. The nuts and bolts of most scientific theories (especially the actual math) are frequently not considered sexy enough to put on screen and anything more in-depth generally requires at least a passing familiarity with how the math works. Honestly, even if you aren't mathematically inclined, you should at least look at the equations for a theory and learn what they're used for, even if your math skills aren't up to doing anything with them yourself. Most of the stuff you'll come across otherwise is likely to be analogies for attempts to explain what the math says or people parroting analogies for other people attempts to explain the implications of the math. A lot tends to get lost in translation and without being familiar with what the theory already says, it can be difficult to tell which explanations are actually good and which parts of the analogy are actually applicable and which parts start to break down when you try to apply them to reality.

This is a bad assumption.

What they're doing is 26 + 17 =? 26 rounded to the next 10 is 30. 30 - 26 = 4 17 - 4 = 13 26 + 4 = 30 30 + 13 = 43

Life has long since evolved to be better at evolving, basically.

And yet, it still happens. Look, photons are not treated as waves. Nor are they treated as (classical) particles. They do, however, have both wave-like and particle-like behaviors. Like a wave, they can interfere with themselves. Like a particle, they don't get partially reflected.

A few things. First, in almost all cases, the differences in appearance between parents and offspring are not the result of new mutations, they are the result of novel combinations of genetic material from each of the parents. A new mutation is exceedingly unlikely to make a particularly noticeable difference in appearance unless it "breaks" something and you wind up with a genetic disease. Second, you are drastically underestimating how long evolution takes. Outside of some very extreme selection pressures, you're not going to see a difference in the population from one generation to the next. Evolution occurs faster the more frequently you reproduce, but for anything large that reproduces at a rate measurable in years or decades, evolution isn't going to take place in a span of years, decades or even centuries. It will take hundreds of thousands to millions of years for enough changes to accumulate for really significant changes to a phenotype to become apparent. Evolution hasn't slowed down; it has always been a very slow process. It's more readily observable in small things that reproduce quickly like bacteria which can go through hundreds of generations very quickly. That's what causes a lot of our antibiotics to become ineffective. The ones that are most susceptible are killed off by the medicine leaving only resistant strains that the medicine can no longer combat. Third, on that subject, the initial life on Earth would not have been a bacterium. Bacteria, while single-called, are actually fairly complex organisms and the result of billions of years of evolution. The initial life form(s) would have been much simpler. You seem to have some misconceptions about how evolution works, which is fine. It took a couple years of reading about it in my spare time before it really clicked for me. Some of that is simply down to the fact that everything you see on TV or movies, pretty much everything you can absorb through cultural osmosis about evolution other than "there is something called evolution that happens" in fact, is completely wrong. Before I dive into that, can I ask how much you know about how genetics works? Understanding evolution, at least the basics, doesn't require a particularly in-depth understanding of genetics but knowledge at least on the level of what a Punnett square is and how dominant and recessive traits work is exceedingly helpful.

If the initial fertilized egg that will become you somehow managed to be cancerous, you would never develop to the point of being born. Cancerous cells do not function the way they are supposed to. They reproduce unchecked without regard to the structure of the rest of the body. That's what cancer is. If every cell that made up your zygote was cancerous, you would never develop into a baby.

No. It is possible that you could have a mutation in all of your cells that makes it more likely that any one of those cells could sustain a further mutation that causes it to become cancerous, if you inherited that mutation from your parents. It is not possible for a mutation to spread from cells with the mutation to cells that did not have the mutation and convert other, healthy cells into cancer. The only way for every cell in your body to become cancerous is for each individual cell to independently sustain a mutation that causes it to become cancerous, which is a statistical impossibility. The combination of mutations that allows cancer to happen is so unlikely that a collection of trillions of cells (ie you) can endure a century of exposure to constant mutagens and just general replication errors and still only have something like a 30% of it cropping up. That's just for it to occur once. There is no way in hell that is going to happen a trillion times all at once in the same person. And if it did, you would die pretty much instantly as you would no longer have a single cell left in your entire body that was functioning the way it is supposed to. So no, your entire body cannot be converted into cancer cells.

Yes, a germline mutation is a mutation in the gametes that is passed on to the offspring, as I've said repeatedly. Of course in that case, every cell in the child's body will have the mutation because the mutation was present in the initial cell and is part of that person's DNA. At no point did the child have any "healthy" cells that did not contain the mutation and which were subsequently infected.

That isn't how cancer works. Cancer is the mutant cells that divide unchecked in the body. You can inherit mutations that make it easier for cancer to develop. You can have a healthy cell get damaged (e.g. by radiation or some other mutagen) and develop a cancer-causing mutation. You do not have cancerous cells "infecting" healthy cells and turning them into cancerous cells. You have cancerous cells reproducing out of control and killing off healthy cells as the cancerous ones soak up resources and displace said healthy cells. You cannot have all the cells in your body converted into cancer cells just waiting for the right circumstances to trigger the cancer. That's not how cancer works,

Did you miss where I said that mutations in the gametes would be inherited by your offspring?

Observers are not required to be alive. If you bounce a tennis ball off of a wall, the wall has observed the tennis ball by interacting with it.

Alright, think of it like this: If you're playing pool and you hit the cue ball into the 8 ball, the 8 ball "measures or observes" the position and momentum of the cue ball at the time of the interaction, because those properties matter to how they interact and how the 8 ball moves (how fast and in what direction) after getting hit. The 8 ball does not measure the color of the cue ball because it has absolutely no bearing on the interaction. A property of an object is observed if the object interacts with something in such a way that the state that that property is in matters to the interaction. An object is "sealed away from observation" if it isn't in a position to interact with anything else (in a way that whatever property you are attempting to keep in a superposition has an effect on the interaction). This is generally very difficult to do with any large object over any length of time, which is why Schrödinger's Cat is purely a thought experiment, because there is no way to fully isolate a cat in a box from the rest of the universe such that it is completely impossible to detect anything whatsoever from inside the box. For smaller particles that you can keep at temperatures around absolute zero in a near vacuum, it's a bit easier to isolate them from everything else for extended periods of time to keep any interactions from happening.

Cancer is made up of the descendants of the cell with the initial mutation. It isn't a corruption of neighboring cells. It happens when an unfortunate set of mutations accumulate in the same cell that knock out some of the protective mechanisms that keep cells from dividing out of control and results in the cell, well, dividing out of control. The resultant cancer cells can then spread to other parts of the body, but that's the result of cells with that mutation physically moving (usually through the blood stream) to other areas and continuing to divide and grow. Healthy cells don't "catch" the cancer mutation.

There is a complete copy of your DNA in every (nucleus-containing) cell in your body. Some cells contain mutations in that DNA from replication errors or damage, and if those errors are present in gametes they will be passed on to any offspring, but "your DNA" doesn't change throughout your life. Mutations are isolated to single cells and their descendants and won't propagate to the rest of your body.

Any interaction collapses the superposition, and we only detect something when it interacts with something else. So the only way for us to observe or measure something is by causing it to interact and seeing the result. So any observation we make collapses the wave function, but it isn't the fact that we observed it that is responsible, it is the interaction. "Observation collapses the wavefunction" is sort of a shorthand that can be misleading because the definition of 'observation' is slightly different than we'd typically use and doesn't require an agent to do the observing.

On average, it's actually pretty close. I know most of my fellow humans about as well as I know I god.

The human eye (humans in general) have nothing to do with observation in the quantum mechanical sense. The wave function collapses as soon as there is an interaction for which the relevant property is measured. A wall can observe a tennis ball if the ball bounces off of it. Inanimate objects are fully capable of being observes in a quantum mechanical sense. An object in superposition doesn't require someone looking at it to collapse.

If scientists were satisfied by the status quo, they wouldn't be scientists. The job of a scientist isn't to sit around writing textbooks about what we already know. It's to figure out what we don't. That is what the majority of scientists get paid to do.

I'm not sure it's fair to compare the guy who sent us into an unwinnable hell hole for no particularly good reason with the guy who pulled us out because it was an unwinnable hell hole. Sure, neither "won" but the circumstances aren't exactly equivalent. And if GWB and Obama are equally ineffective in their second term, that also doesn't reflect well on GWB since he managed it without having to deal with literally the least effective and most obstructionist Congress we've had in at least a century. W is also responsible for tipping the ideology of the Supreme Court enough to allow for some of the truly atrocious rulings lately that have seriously fucked up US politics even moreso than it already was. (See: Citizens United). Obama's not the best President we've ever had, not is he a champion of liberalism, but any comparisons to Bush are born of a very short memory.