Evolution Definition and 706 Threads

I am an electrical engineer. Just curious about evolution. I was watching a documentary about evolution. So evolution happens because of mutation. But what exactly trigger or starts mutation. The DNA or part of DNA which turns ON/OFF other DNA, what exactly is it called. Where can I read...

My girlfriend is christian and completely denies the existence of evolution. She's always reading or watching anti-evolution books and movies, and doesn't seem to actually understand what the theory of evolution is about or claims. I, on the other hand, do accept evolution. She wants me to...

I'm getting bogged down in what is probably a very basic subject and it's holding me back. I'm not really sure how to determine the wave function \psi(x,t) given a function \psi(x,t=0); and since this is pretty much the under-pinning of every homework problem I've seen so far it's a huge issue...

Hi everyone. I am given a somewhat common potential well V(x)=0 for ¦x¦<a and infinite elsewhere. I am told that at t = 0 my particle is in a state represented by the wavefunction \psi(x,0)= A(\sin{(\frac{\pi x}{a})}+ \sqrt{2} \cos{(\frac{3 \pi x}{2 a})}) where A is a constant use for...

Ok so I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this thread but I figured Earth/evolution? If not I can always move it to the biology section. Anyway I was speaking to a friend today who claimed that there have been periods of advanced human evolution in which the human mind over a...

As the thread: Why haven't the brain among different species developed in general to a size comparable to Homo Sapiens. And even though the brain among Neanderthal was considered to be bigger than Homo Sapiens, did the evolution considered that it was too "big" or too "clumsy" and the race died...

1 - 'Current socio-economic system is an artifact of (thus-far) intellectual development' -a fact of biological and anthropological sciences. 2 - Genetic imperative drives the life-form to 'live as long as possible as a life-form' -human in particular here -a same such fact of biological...

Do other animals besides humans commit suicide and what is the evolutionary benefit(s) for a species that has members that commit suicide, basically what advantages does a suicidal species have over one that is not

I think this is the right forum for this.. are there any physical reasons to assume the evolution of a quantum system is given by a group of unitaries rather than a semigroup of isometries (or, if you're in the Heisenberg picture, group of automorphisms rather than semigroup of endomorphisms)...

Yes we are all taught today that Lamarck and his crazy idea are hogwash, true I suppose, but his idea, that all animals are influenced by their environment in a designed way, opens up a simple idea. Lets take a hypothetical Bacterium that produces a compound that degrades penicillin, the...

I am wondering if millions of years from now if the Earth and Moon became a true double planetary system, where one side of each body continually face each other, if it could have affects on the height of humans. If people living on the "lunar side" would be taller on average than people on the...

I'm a novice at science and I am quite ignorant about many scientific endeavors. I have become an evolutionist in the last 2 years but I frequent a Christian website that allows both christians and athiests to participate. Anyway, my problem is the man who owns this website also has a call in...

Hi i am new to this forum, i hope i post this in the right thread. I am developing a 2D artificial evolution program and i am wondering what other people here think about the idear and maybe discuss this in depth. The system The system is a black box with x analog input signals. 10 of...

Hello, Maybe a strange question here (I'm not 100% current with the standard model), but does the standard model say anything about a change in the ratios of fermions as the universe expands? (I see Generations I, II & III listed)

Hi all, I'm new here so please forgive me if this has been explained somewhere already. Lately I've been reading about cosmic evolution and I find it hard to understand how it cannot be a generally accepted theory within the scientific community. At least according to wikipedia it seems...

hey guys, sorry for coming here with these potentially stupid topics, but tbo, this is the closest thing I have to biologists or biology enthusiasts on the subject. My question came from creationist who does not accept evolution...He says that evolution is false because mutations are repaired...

OK so we all know that when (for example) a population of mammals evolves into something else, whatever it evolves into it will still be a mammal, but it won't be able to produce viable offspring... This is well understood for taxonomic classes (like mammals) but what about species? What if...

I had a thought last week about all the speices that have lived on this planet. I think that something besides natural selection might be at work. After many more hours of thought, I came up with this. Every so offten the magnetic poles switch, and for a wile there's no magnetic shild to protect...

As the title says, I am confused - very confused. I know that the 2nd law of thermo means that the universe is increasingly disordered on a universal scale, even though there has been an apparent increase in order since the "Big Bang." Does that mean entropy isn't exactly synonymous with a...

Hi all, I have 3 lists of data where lists; A={numbers}, B={numbers} and C={{y,m,d,h,m,s},{...}} (i.e. C is in the form DateList). I have no problem plotting using DateListPlot for the 2D case (C VS A) but can't seem to plot all 3 sets of data together. Mathematica seems not to be able...

My background is not physics. This might be simple for many of you. I wonder if the following is possible. I wish to build a simulation, where ‘particles’ move about on the monitor according to Brownian Motion. Initially, at t = 1, particles are confined to square arrangement, but are then...

Me and a friend were talking in the pub the other day about evolution, and how some people hold the view that, because of modern engineering and medicine, human evolution by the process of natural selection has stopped. What do you think? Has evolution stopped? If not, how are "good" or "bad"...

OK...I'm not sure how well I'll word this or if it's a coherent idea biologically but I'll throw it out there anyway... Regarding the evolution of senses - let's take the detection of sour tastes as an example. I know little neuroscience but I know that there's the involvement of H+ ions as the...

Hello! Here is my question: Consider a particle of mass m, whose initial state has wavefunction \psi(x), in an infinite potential box of width a. Show that the evolution under the Schrodinger equation will restore the initial state (possibly with a phase factor) after time...

I argue with a ton of people that I know, and most of them ask me why I believe in evolution. I always ask them to look at the evidence some day and to stop being arrogant, but they deny the fact, because it gets in the way of God. What can I say to them? I get the usual response, Adolf...

Hello everybody, I was wondering how on Earth the hypnosis evolved as an ability in humans. I see how this can be helpful to a non-omnipotent designer who is willing to violate the free will, so this argument cannot be used by most theists as evidence that omnipotent being created us. But...

I am just learning about the theory of Evolution and wonder how parallel evolution of unrelated species during the same period of time is explained.

I have kept the title of this thread quite general because, depending on how it goes, there are a few different points that I’d like to discuss, and that’s really the general theme, as it were. I know the format preferred on this website is for those of us with less expertise to ask questions of...

I am writing a browser based multiplayer game. The basic idea is that you are the leader of a very advanced spacefaring civilization. Your objective is to gather resources and develop your technology further. You gather resources by mining stars. The more stars you control, the more resources...

Hallo everyone, I have a 1-D diffusion equation with decay as dA/dt = d2A/dx2-L*A with initial condition C(x,0)=C0=exp(-ax) and boundary condition= -Ddc/dx = I0 where L= decay constant A = certain concentration the concentration A is not in equilibrium. We can solve the above...

Hello, I'm trying to derive a differential equation as requested in the attached exercise (thermal1.jpg). I'm not quite sure my solution is the right answer (my_solution1.jpg). How do I get rid of the energy dU ? Thnks Ted

done for mankind? I was in a debate recently and the subject came up of just what good is understanding evolution? Many will make the claim it is the single greatest scientific achievement of mankind but what has it done to further mankind or science? Yea it's pretty cool and answers lots of...

It requires more than that: a well-defined, selfadjoint Hamiltonian. See http://arxiv.org/pdf/quant-ph/9907069 for a gentle introduction and counterexamples. An in depth discussion is given in Vol. 1 of the math physics treatise by Reed and Simon, or Vol.3 of the math physics treatise by...

Find the (short) article http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/08/science/08creationism.html?ref=education".

Forgive me if this is a poorly asked question but I am not yet completely fluent in quantum mechanics and was just looking at the energy eigenvalue equation H|\Psi\rangle = i\hbar \frac{\partial}{\partial t}|\Psi\rangle = E|\Psi\rangle . We've got the Hamiltonian operator H acting on the state...

A little while back I heard a scientist speak of a division that will happen as humans evolve further. He said that humans would either be about 10 foot tall or around 2 foot tall. So around half the population would be realllllllly really tall and the other half rather small. I believe...

I am writing a program which simulates the evolution of stars for my A2 computing project, and need help understanding what happens after the hydrogen in the core has been fused, because I have read a lot of contradictory information. My understanding is: For a low mass star (~1 SM)...

The first part of QFT seems to be almost entirely mathematical formalism, without really requiring a whole lot of physical insight to proceed. For instance, we can start with the free-field scalar Lagrangian, minimize it using the Euler-Lagrange equation to arrive at the Klein-Gordon equation...

Here on physicsforums, there is a diverse range of political and moral belief. I am interested in the subject of how people form their political views. At what age did you become politically aware? What was the biggest influence on your worldview? Did your morals and beliefs change over...

I know the general accepted theory to the birth of our solar system. One or more nearby stars went supernova and the shock waves caused our gas cloud to collapse forming our solar system. However, i wanted an opinion from those with more knowledge on a hypothesis that seems to make some sense...

Hi This is the first time I am posting in Biology forum. I didn't study any biology after grade 10. But I always found it fascinating. So I have a question about the theory of evolution. Now as I understand it, theory says that the parts of human body, or the behavior tend to get...

I recently had a probelm in QM to find the time evolution of a hydrogen prepared in a state with a wave function that is not an energy eigenfunction: specifically, psi = Y21*R2p where Y is then the D spherical harmonic. Of course, n=2 hydrogen doesn't have d oribtals. So the problem is I...

The time evolution operaton may be written formally as: This is an actual solution to: only in the case that [H(t1),H(t2)]=0 (that is: the hamiltonian commutes in different instants of time) Of course, this includes the case of a time independent hamiltonian. If this is not the case, the...

The question is: what is the quantum state of a free particle t time after its detection at the position r0 in t=0? I know I have to use the evolution operator with the hamiltonian of a free particle. My actual problem is more stupid than that: I don't really know how to express the STATE of...

As different individuals and races are very different comparing this trait, alcohol tolerance has/is probably under heavy genetic selection. As there isn't much alcohol outside human society, i wonder whether people craved alcohol by accident already before it became abundant or did that trait...

Hello firstly are Homosapiens evolved from Neanderthals or are we a different all together or did Homosapiens evolve side by side with Neanderthals did we interbreed ,sorry i know my English is terrible i just have an unquenchable thirst for answers.thankyou

*** Yikes .. this got moved from General discussion to Biology. This isn't about Biology, before you jump down my throat! ***** Life evolves, businesses evolve, products evolve, web sites evolve, ideas evolve etc. etc. This always seemed like a good thing to me - the right way to go. But...

What is the empirical evidence that the red dwarves we observe nowadys were once like our sun in magnitude and luminosity? Thanks in advance for any reference.

Homework Statement I'm trying to find the geometric phase for the adiabatic widening of the infinite square well. Griffiths defines the geometric phase to be: \gamma=i* \int^{w2}_{w1}<\psi_{n}|\frac{d\psi_{n}}{dR}>dR Where R is the aspect of the potential that is changing and w1, w2 are the...

Liver and Kidney Evolution! Please Help! I'm writing several papers for a comparative vertebrate anatomy course, in which, among other things, I will discuss the reasons for anatomical differences in the liver and kidney of various organisms. I have the class data set for the weights of the...