Can science explain everything?

[Cherry Eyed Hamster]

Doubt it, considering #Science can't even come up with its own creation myth.

Semites: In the beginning there was darkness, and then God created light.
Science: In the beginning there was darkness, and then Bang created light.

The Big Bang is technically speculative since it’s literally the dawn of the universe we’re talking about, and thus as nobody was around to witness it it will never be 100% known how the universe came to be, however your statement still couldn’t be more incorrect. Science in its purest sense is not defining “the truth” but rather going through the processes with which the truth can be found. I hate to sound like a smug atheist, but religion almost always asserts that what you are reading is truth, whilst in science there is always an opportunity to present theories and evidence that might go against what is accepted for the time, even if the road to doing so may be difficult.

The evidence we have for the Big Bang happening occurred over a period of decades and through which multiple discoveries were made to piece a puzzle together. I highly recommend reading this article for more information on how the process of coming up with the Big Bang Theory occurred, and how the empirical evidence for the theory came about. It’s very interesting, but far too long for me to sperg about here.

 

[MadStan]

Go back to the 17th century and ask this.

It is the same answer today:

It is a process with a high probability of eventually finding most answers to most questions relating to the Universe. Some of those questions won't be answered for several hundred or more years even today.

 

[Sulla]

Can science explain everything? Are there things it can’t explain, and if so why?
Also to discuss the philosophy of science. And how we know what we know.

Technically speaking, our understanding of science is incomplete. So yes there are things we can't explain (eg. we currently have no mathematical models that can explain astrophysical jets from black holes) Eventually however we will invent the means to understand things we currently dont.

Proper Science is just a means to understand and manipulate the world. After all, in Christianity even god has to resort to tricks and work arounds.

 

[SpergioLeonne]

I hate to sound like a smug atheist, but religion almost always asserts that what you are reading is truth, whilst in science there is always an opportunity to present theories and evidence that might go against what is accepted for the time, even if the road to doing so may be difficult.

Someone should’ve told this to the CDC in 2020

 

[FamicomGorby]

Everything but magnets.

In all seriousness, the main limit of science is that if you can't measure something then it really can't be explained via science. So can't really answer the meaning of life unless someone figures out a way to measure reality itself.

 

[teriyakiburns]

if you ever have the misfortune of finding yourself or your loved one inside an MRI machine, this is the man to thank for the theoretical basis upon which this miraculous and life-saving diagnostic instrument is built.

I fell asleep in one of those. Very restful. Now I know who to thank

 

[Otterly]

I will refrain from sperging about his work here because it would be impossible to do it justice without writing an Iliad-length novel

No please do, that’s what the thread is for. Sperg away!

That’s a fun one.

How do birds?

The process is so slow that it had to be a disadvantage at certain points to redirect metabolic resources towards growing useless feathers, or to lose the functionality of limbs that would eventually become wings.

Feathers they think were first insulation, then co-opted into flight. I can actually see how birds arose - things like sugar gliders are a good example of ‘stuff that jumps and glides’ and then as actual flapping flight happens you need the claws less.
Now how you get metamorphosis as a process to evolve, that’s the one that blows my mind. How did that get going?
From a ‘creator’ perspective evolution makes sense. If you make a world that has any kind of change in it, you need to set the life in it up with a way of adapting to that change.

 

[SpergioLeonne]

No please do, that’s what the thread is for. Sperg away!

Feathers they think were first insulation, then co-opted into flight. I can actually see how birds arose - things like sugar gliders are a good example of ‘stuff that jumps and glides’ and then as actual flapping flight happens you need the claws less.
Now how you get metamorphosis as a process to evolve, that’s the one that blows my mind. How did that get going?
From a ‘creator’ perspective evolution makes sense. If you make a world that has any kind of change in it, you need to set the life in it up with a way of adapting to that change.

Insulation is a good point and a good step, though I think the real place where it doesn’t make sense to me is that a life form doesn’t go from no feathers to even penguin feathers in a single step, does it?

Like, what is the maximum morphological difference you can achieve with a single gene mutation? How many other genes need to do things to offset the new requirements? There’s a ton of complexity in the question and I’ve never seen it explored in satisfactory depth.

As far as metamorphosis in its entirety as a system, yeah, it’s in the systems that I lost faith in randomness. Nuclear fusion needs to work before any biological process. It all could’ve been meaningless dust, if it even formed into dust.

 

[Otterly]

Like, what is the maximum morphological difference you can achieve with a single gene mutation?

Lots, within a limit. It’s a good question and I know there are examples, let me have a think and see if I can find some good ones. You can tweak one gene in chickens and give them teeth. That’s a bit different becasue it’s unmasking something that’s already there, but you can get fairly big single gene changes within limits. So back to feathers, they’re modified from the same root as scales and hairs. A single gene change might do something like change a stubby scale to a long one or a monofilament protofeather to a fluffy one. It’d be u likely that a single gene would do a lot of diverse things unless they all sprang from the same set of progenitor cells. Feather development has a good fossil record and you can see them go from weird scales to filaments to branched filaments to flood to barbed and then from there the barbs allow a lot of diversity and proper flight.
Selection works on variation within a population and it’s non directional. I think the idea of evolution is broadly correct although I suspect there are a few places within it where we have got stuff wrong. You can see speciation happen and you can see selection pressure drive changes - like bacterial resistance to antibiotics.
Let me have a think about really big single gene changes. Of course ‘the bacteria are making oxygen now’ was a biggie

 

[YourFriendlyLurker 2.0]

The more I read on how biology and our brain chemistry, the more I think that yes, at some point in the far future it would be able to exlpain pretty much everything what people observe including people themselves. Still, I think that most of population (given homo spieces wouldn't change drastically) would prefer to remain in the dark. Most people prefer a bit of magic in their worlds.

 

[SpergioLeonne]

You can tweak one gene in chickens and give them teeth. That’s a bit different becasue it’s unmasking something that’s already there

And we have a framework for understanding how the other stuff that’s there got there, so that seemingly redundant recessive genes function more like a selector switch that changes a trait, which allows something not particularly fit for emergence to maybe possibly develop in the background sometimes?

The gene doesn’t HAVE to be expressed to be carried.

Feather development has a good fossil record and you can see them go from weird scales to filaments

Filaments sounds awkward. Not quite armor, kind of shitty for insulation. Say “boom, ice age, bitches.”

Now a species can have a die off and potentially avoid extinction because some portion of it will be born with protofeathers instead.

What kind of dietary nutrients are used to produce protofeathers? They’re likely keratin based, right? So protein? Alright, now something else needs to give up some protein. How does it know to do that? Were the instructions packaged into the same gene? Resource management is important, especially when the non-flight worthy feathers are only a net-positive for increasing thermal efficiency, but require an up-front investment that in warmer conditions was not helpful.

The complexity does not benefit the case of randomness

 

[ArnoldPalmer]

Science has no power over the unfalsifiable, and is the wrong tool for the job when it comes to the humanities, psychology, and psychiatry.

 

[Otterly]

What kind of dietary nutrients are used to produce protofeathers? They’re likely keratin based, right? So protein? Alright, now something else needs to give up some protein. How does it know to do that? Were the instructions packaged into the same gene? Resource management is important, especially when the non-flight worthy feathers are only a net-positive for increasing thermal efficiency, but require an up-front investment that in warmer conditions was not helpful.

Honestly, I don’t think we know. There’s a lot of neutral mutation though that changes stuff and isn’t acted on - that source of variation is probably more impactful than we think. Protein may not have been a rate limiting item in our fuzzy monofilamented animal. Maybe a thousand monogilamented animals arose and died out due to having insufficient resource to allocate u til one happened to be in an environment where it gave a marginal advantage?

You asked about big changes and I had a think. There’s a gene called Ubx (ultrabithorax) which does what it says on the tin. It duplicates a body segment and creates a four winged fly from a two winged one. That’s a big change. Again, maybe a billion of them died because they didn’t have another simultaneous mutation that allowed them to benefit - that can happen in humans too. A single gene can make you massively muscular (myostatin.) one gene can give you ectrodactyly, extra fingers or extra limbs. One gene can duplicate a body segment in a simple animal.
Genes also act within the context of all the other genes in the animal. Some are physically linked so a crappy one gets dragged along when a good one is selected for (linkage) We’ve seen mutations that should kill you stone dead but do t becasue you’ve also got another one that masks or helps it (here’s an interesting article.) https://archive.is/rtc1a

The complexity does not benefit the case of randomness

I dont think mutation is always random, and I do think complexity can help or hinder. Some bits of code are more prone to mutate than others. Some genes have more flexibility to mutate and riff off a theme - others will be lethal of changed even slightly and you can see this in action. There are genes that are highly conserved between not just species but genera. There are genes that can have lots of changes and no bad effects, I guess coat colour in mice or flower petals colour. But the complexity can hinder or it can help. It’s the total sum of the various bits of information that ends up being acted upon in that generation by environmental pressure. If that animal breeds, the genes are passed on. There’s no value judgement or direction and a lot of crap will be pulled along for the ride as well.

Ther will undoubtedly have been a LOT of amazing mutations that just died off because they arose once, or ten times but the creature was gimped by something else, or loved in a marginal environment. But overall it’s a theory that works (IMO anyway, and maybe I’m right or wrong…)

A creator should create a way for his creation to adapt and change. Life is inherently ‘changey’ and unless you create a totally static universe, your life forms need to be able to adapt and change as the planet does.

 

[SpergioLeonne]

Life is inherently ‘changey’ and unless you create a totally static universe, your life forms need to be able to adapt and change as the planet does.

Let’s bring it back around to the question in the title of the thread.

Whether science can or could possibly explain all things.. I talked in another thread about information density being a limit to knowledge of a thing because we have no evidence of a limit to complexity.

If we supposed that it were possible to moot that through technology, specialization, etc, then whether there’s an “everything” to know or not depends on whether randomness exists.

Randomness could always just cheat and break the rules of whatever system you were trying to work the bugs out of.

It’s funny, because we don’t generally observe randomness in systems we have a good command of. If anything goes wrong in machining, which is my world, it has a cause written in a book somewhere. I think Machinery’s Handbook is an excellent example of scientific thoroughness. Of course not perfect, but aren’t we still looking for the Higgs Boson?

We don’t observe a lot of randomness in machining.

 

[Lemmingwiser]

And on that note.

Minor PL but I was given painkillers years ago (tramadol in one instance, vicodin in another) and... well, they're part of the reason I question stuff.

I had heard for years that these were addictive and would cause an "escalation" effect where I'm taking more and more just to feel that happiness they gave me initially, but.... that's not what happened. Actually, any time I took more than one tramadol I got sick, so it was an unpleasant experience. There were actually days I completely forgot to take it, as well, so I never experienced the withdrawal effects people describe.

As for vicodin.... I never got a pleasant experience from that at all. And again, never experienced WDs.

And whenever I tell people this, they give me blank looks or even outright accuse me of lying, because apparently these things happen 100% of the time and I'm the first exception in human history.

Medicine in general is one of the weirdest of the sciences. We may all use a same language but none of us have the same DNA. None of us experience things exactly the same even before you factor in all the environmental effects that color how we experience things, but when you look also at how our bodies respond to chemical substances so much of it is just a crapshoot.

 

[teriyakiburns]

The complexity does not benefit the case of randomness

The conceptual mistake you're making, and that a lot of people make, is that natural selection is selecting "beneficial" characteristics, when it's actually the opposite that occurs most of the time. Natural selection weeds out things that are detrimental to species survival. Selective pressure is against features, rather than for them. If something isn't detrimental - especially if it's not detrimental enough to prevent reproduction - it generally doesn't get removed from the genome. This is why a lot of degenerative or hereditary diseases have stuck around in humans; with rare exceptions, they only express after reproductive age, or are non-dominant features, so they aren't actually detrimental to the continued survival and reproduction of the species.

So, a mutation that gives a dinosaur weird fluffy scales is likely to be preserved simply because it isn't detrimental. There is no selective pressure against it. Individuals expressing the new scales aren't harmed by it and are able to reproduce without incident. As that characteristic continues to change over time, its expression will continue to change; if the changes become detrimental to the long-term survival of the species, they will disappear. If they don't, they stick around. Over a long enough period, preserved traits will begin to present benefits and subsequent evolution will be driven by selection against mutations that are detrimental to those benefits. In the case of feathers, I might speculate that the initial benefit was warmth, increasing the ecological range of the critter, and perhaps the possibility to slow a fall enough to survive a longish drop.

Essentially, you get birds by the process of fluffy dinosaurs falling out of trees.

 

[SpergioLeonne]

The conceptual mistake you're making, and that a lot of people make, is that natural selection is selecting "beneficial" characteristics, when it's actually the opposite that occurs most of the time. Natural selection weeds out things that are detrimental to species survival. If something isn't detrimental - especially if it's not detrimental enough to prevent reproduction - it generally doesn't get removed. This is why a lot of degenerative or hereditary diseases have stuck around in humans; with rare exceptions, they only express after breeding age, or are non-dominant features, so they aren't actually detrimental to the continued survival and reproduction of the species.

So, a mutation that gives a dinosaur weird fluffy scales might tend to be preserved simply because it isn't detrimental. Individuals expressing the new scales aren't harmed by it and are able to reproduce without incident. As that characteristic continues to change over time, its expression will continue to change; if the changes become detrimental to the long-term survival of the species, they will disappear. If they don't, they stick around.

Essentially, you get birds by the process of fluffy dinosaurs falling out of trees.

Somewhere above, recessives were discussed. I understand the concept.

Also, in a highly competitive environment, a beneficial characteristic in some IS a detriment to those without it. Die off events are probably fair to classify as highly competitive.

When I say complexity doesn’t benefit the case of randomness, it has to do with where you find randomness.

You find randomness where there are no other leads to follow, and then randomness is unfalsifiable, until another lead to follow pops up.

The role of randomness discredits itself

 

[Otterly]

Medicine in general is one of the weirdest of the sciences.

Agree. I don’t think the average consumer understands just how subjective medicine is. We had a brief flourishing of evidence based medicine in the early part of this century but it’s now under threat.
Covid, transgenderism, political annd social control systems and massive, massive amounts of sweet sweet profits have nothing to do with it I’m sure.

 

[Lemmingwiser]

Agree. I don’t think the average consumer understands just how subjective medicine is. We had a brief flourishing of evidence based medicine in the early part of this century but it’s now under threat.
Covid, transgenderism, political annd social control systems and massive, massive amounts of sweet sweet profits have nothing to do with it I’m sure.

It's not under threat. It's fucking gone out the window. With full regulatory capture and even doctors too afraid to speak out.

I had an indirect connection to one doctor I trusted, and he fucking killed himself. 3 children and a wife and he decided to suddenly jump out of his high rise apartment, supposedly. I'm convinced he didn't kill himself.

 

[Otterly]

It's not under threat. It's fucking gone out the window. With full regulatory capture and even doctors too afraid to speak out.

Yeah, you’re right. It’s pretty depressing.

You find randomness where there are no other leads to follow,

Like an infinity signalling an error?
I think the idea of ‘random mutations getting selected for’ is one of the things that’s taught about evolution but it’s not really true. Like @Thomas Eugene Paris says, it’s more about live/die in the moment, and lots of junk gets carried along for the ride. It’s more like a process of every possible mutation happening and options being pruned off in response to the environment. It’s neither random nor directed.
We’ve got whole worlds full of stuff that thrived and then went extinct, and might have made it of the environment was a bit different. The ediacaria fauna being an example. Evolution is just how life adjusts to environmental change. It’s still constrained by boundaries of chemistry and physics. Stuff can only get so big, or so small.