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SO ENDS this first of two weekends on the theme of mutations. Darwin’s theory of evolution depended on “descent with modification”, but at the time, nothing was known about genes or mutations. Today, mutations are exquisitely understood, but surprisingly rarer than expected, and even a single mutation can have an enormous phenotypic effect, causing diseases including Sickle-cell anemia, cancer, color blindness, Tay-Sachs disease, and neurofibromatosis. https://lnkd.in/dbDruwJm View in LinkedIn

EXAMPLE. “Imagine a physicist at time T1 creating an electron and a positron from a photon, storing them until time Tn when the antiparticle is annihilated by another electron. He describes the situation as negatively charged, positive energy electrons and a positively charged, negative energy positron, all moving forward in time.” https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn

BAD ACTORS? “How do hypermutators invade populations? The immediate effect of an increased mutation rate on fitness is invariably negative, on average, because more mutations are deleterious than beneficial (Box 1).” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

POOR RECEPTION. “From our viewpoint of events proceeding from the past to the future, the general distaste for the Feynman-Stueckelberg interpretation is understandable, but is it justified?” https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn

HYPERMUTATORS. “It is fairly common for some populations in adaptive evolution experiments to become dominated by hypermutators that have increased mutation rates.” https://www.nature.com/articles/nrg3564 View in LinkedIn

QUANTUM + RELATIVITY. “Indeed, the phenomenal accuracy of quantum electrodynamics is, according to Feynman, the result of painstaking calculation of more and more complex and unlikely paths, and adding their contribution to the result. He saw his theory as a marriage of quantum mechanics and relativity.” https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn

CUBISM AND RELATIVITY. “There has been much controversy on the more specific issue of the possible relationship between Cubism and Einstein’s concept of space-time.”" " " " https://lnkd.in/gh462Xjw View in LinkedIn

THE HIDDEN LANDSCAPE. “I travelled to Haverfordwest to get to the past. From Paddington Station a Great Western locomotive took me on a journey westwards from London further and further back into geological time, from the age of mammals to the age of trilobites...Under the River Severn and into Wales, I was back before the time of the dinosaurs, to a time when Wales steamed and sweated with the humid heat of moss-laden and boggy forests in coal-swamps, where dragonflies the size of hawks flitted in the mist; and then on back still further in time, so far back that life had not yet slithered or crawled upon the land from its aqueous nursery.” (Richard A. Fortey, 1993). https://lnkd.in/gmRTQ2gq View in LinkedIn

ANTIPARTICLE REALITY. “Causality proceeds forward in time as far as the observer can see. If we can believe that each collapse of the wave function eliminates or drastically reduces the future contribution of superpositions of states of the particle which are inconsistent with the events at, say, T2 having occurred, how is this different for the antiparticle?” https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn

DETAILS OF CONJECTURE. “Consider the direction of causality in this example. At T2 when the physicist measures the particles they exist in one state of position and momentum each. Via the U-process they arrive at T3 in positions and momenta consistent with physical law and their states at T2 and so on with each measurement until Tn after which they can no longer be detected.” https://lnkd.in/gDaxUYAS View in LinkedIn