Thursday 26th of March 2026

the luck and accidental opportunism of nature…..

 

 In 1898, Hermon Bumpus gathered 136 house sparrows immobilized by an ice storm, noting that the averages of several morphological traits differed between survivors and nonsurvivors. This was one of the first attempts to measure the phenotypic selection component of Charles Darwin’s thesis, that adaptation is driven by heritable traits that affect fitness.

 

Since then, a vast literature on quantifying associations between trait values and fitness has emerged (1). The quantification of Darwin’s second evolution component—that such traits are heritable—required the development of quantitative genetics by Ronald Fisher in 1918 (2). Although the selection and genetics components can be combined to determine the expected change in any trait, of greater interest is the general adaptive potential of a population. On page 1012 of this issue, Bonnet et al. (3) present a meta-analysis of 19 studies showing the abundance of heritable variations in fitness and the potential for adaptation.

Fisher famously stated that “natural selection is not evolution,” meaning that if a trait is not heritable, no amount of selection will result in a change in the offspring of surviving parents. Fisher’s key to deciphering heritability was noting that parents pass along specific variants of a gene (alleles), rather than entire genotypes, to their offspring. The sum of all the single-allele effects for a given trait carried by an individual is defined as their breeding value (BV) for that trait. BVs are best understood in terms of deviations from the mean, so that a random individual has an expected BV of zero, which implies that its offspring will, on average, be average. The expected deviation of an offspring from the population mean is simply the average of the BVs of its parents. As a result, parents with exceptional BVs have offspring that, on average, deviate substantially from the population mean. Conversely, offspring from parents with modest BVs fall close to the mean.

The spread of individual BVs is a measure of the evolutionary potential of a trait. This is the basis of the additive variance of a trait, defined as the variance among BVs for that trait in a given population. If this variance is small, offspring have very little resemblance to their parents, whereas if it is large, exceptional parents tend to have exceptional offspring. If there is no additive variance for a trait, it will not evolve. More generally, if there is no additive variance in fitness, no trait will genetically respond to selection.

 

Thus, one of the holy grails in evolutionary genetics is to estimate the additive variation in fitness itself, which gives a general measure of the evolutionary potential of a population and places limits on the maximal response for any trait. This challenging estimation problem was tackled by Bonnet et al. using a collection of 19 long-term vertebrate population studies (covering a total of 561 cohorts and ∼250,000 individuals) from North America, Europe, Africa, and Oceania. The meta-analysis showcases an immense, but doable, effort in estimating this fundamental evolutionary parameter.

Bonnet et al. used total number of offspring, also known as lifetime reproductive success (LRS), as the measure for the fitness of an individual. The LRS parameter is converted to relative fitness simply by dividing LRS for an individual by the average LRS of the population, which allows for quantifiable comparisons across studies. In statistical terms, if a population shows a significant additive variance in fitness among its individuals, this implies that parents with higher LRSs than the population average also have a high BV for LRS, and thus their children also tend to have high LRSs.

Estimating BVs, and thus additive variance, is a common problem in modern animal breeding, built around using pedigree information. A BV exists even when the trait is not displayed, as it is a measure of how exceptional an offspring from that parent would be, if produced. In the case of milk production, information on the BV of a bull is provided by the observed yields of his mother, sisters, and daughters. The same pedigree machinery used by breeders can, in theory, be applied in natural populations to estimate the additive variance of any measured trait. Pedigrees for natural populations can be constructed using molecular markers, and closed populations of vertebrates are well suited for such analyses. Even with perfect pedigrees, the transition of pedigree methods from a large and well-structured domesticated population to a small wild population has been somewhat rocky (4). Domesticated pedigrees tend to be much deeper and denser than those for natural populations, resulting in greater precision in BV estimates. Furthermore, fitness is a problematic trait for standard pedigree methods, which assume trait values are continuous and follow a Gaussian distribution, whereas fitness data are highly discrete—a parent can only have an integer number of offspring, with a large point mass at zero, that is, individuals with zero offspring. Although there have been a few attempts to estimate the additive variance in fitness in wild populations using standard pedigree methods, the failure of the Gaussian assumption suggests that these are likely rather biased.

Bonnet et al. extended these pedigree methods by using a discrete Poisson distribution with an inflated zero value instead of a Gaussian and provided a much better fit for the fitness data. Using the improved fitting, their resulting average estimate of the additive variance in relative fitness, VA(w), was two- to fourfold larger than previous values. To put it in a more tangible context, this means that if the fitness of a population drops by a third, it would take roughly 10 generations to recover back to normal fitness levels. Hence, populations with shorter generation times might have a better chance to somewhat mitigate anthropogenic changes.

In nature, the target of selection is almost certainly a constantly shifting, high-dimensional (i.e., multi-trait) phenotype that may poorly project onto individual traits or even a set of traits. Most studies of adaptation are structured around some assumed edifice of traits that affects fitness. A poor choice of traits can give a misleading impression of population adaptation. Fortunately, an estimate of VA(w) provides an upper bound, and therefore a maximal possible change in any trait independent of selection. For example, a typical trait heritability of 0.3 will mean that 30% of the trait variation is due to variance in BVs, and the maximal possible change in the average value of a trait in the population is about one standard deviation every four generations. A more reliable way to estimate VA(w) can help to better quantify the nature of selection and the robustness of a population to major environmental changes.

 

SCIENCE

26 May 2022

Vol 376, Issue 6596

 

 

 

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repeats…...

Nature is about repeats and rhythms through "abstract harmonics" of irrelevant numbers.

67% are true

33% are not committed (random)

0% are false

 

MORE TO COME...

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW @@@@@@@@@@@@@@@

of temperature and mass…….

Cosmological observations from the Early Universe provide an invaluable probe of Physics Beyond the Standard Model (BSM). Observations of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), epitomized by the Planck mission [1] and further developed e.g. by the ACT [2] and SPT [3] collaborations, paint a picture of a Universe that is dominated by non-baryonic dark energy and dark matter, well-described by the ΛCDM model [4–6]. Equipped with the CMB inference of the small cosmological baryonic abundance, ΩB ∼ 4%, the theory of Big Bang Nucleosynthesis (BBN) within the Standard Model (SM) of Particle Physics is highly predictive, and confronted with accurate measurements of primeval elements such as the mass density fraction of helium-4, YP, and the relative abundance of deuterium, D/H, offers important constraints on New Physics (NP) [7–10] active during the first few minutes of the lifetime of the Universe [11–14].

At present, measurements of deuterium in quasar absorption spectra provide the best proxy for the determination of a primordial abundance. The most recent measurements from damped Lyman-α systems achieve better than 1% precision [15–17], yielding a weighted average of D/H × 105 = 2.547 ± 0.025 [18]. This remarkable precision appears to be in tension with the SM at about the 2σ level [19], although this remains under debate [20, 21] in light of the uncertainties plaguing our understanding of the key nuclear reactions involved. This highlights the primary importance to assess the impact of uncertainties in the nuclear network rates on the predictions from BBN [22]. A notable recent advance in this direction is the improved determination of the D(p,γ)3He rate by the LUNA collaboration [23], which has an important impact on BBN constraints from primordial deuterium on various NP scenarios....

 

READ MORE:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2206.00693.pdf

 

What does this mean?.... 

 

According to some theories, the early universe only had leptons — while GRAVITY and mass as we know it did not exist. Why? According to the theory the temperature was too high for them to be part of the system. According to OBSERVATIONS, the Higgs boson "does not exist" passed a certain point of high temperature, yet a high mass neutrino existed in the high temperatures...

 

Massive sterile neutrinos in the early universe: From thermal decoupling to cosmological constraints

 

Leonardo MastrototaroPasquale Dario SerpicoAlessandro MirizziNinetta Saviano We consider relatively heavy neutrinos νH, mostly contributing to a sterile state νs, with mass in the range 10 MeV ≲ms≲mπ∼135 MeV, which are thermally produced in the early universe in collisional processes involving active neutrinos, and freezing out after the QCD phase transition. If these neutrinos decay after the active neutrino decoupling, they generate extra neutrino radiation, but also contribute to entropy production. Thus, they alter the value of the effective number of neutrino species Neff as for instance measured by the cosmic microwave background (CMB), as well as affect primordial nucleosynthesis (BBN), notably 4He production. We provide a detailed account of the solution of the relevant Boltzmann equations. We also identify the parameter space allowed by current Planck satellite data and forecast the parameter space probed by future Stage-4 ground-based CMB observations, expected to match or surpass BBN sensitivity.https://arxiv.org/abs/2104.11752

 

The expansion of the universe led to its cooling, at a point which mass, baryons and gravity became part of the system while the neutrinos "disengaged" into "massless" units and fields. This was the end of the Lepton-only EARLY universe... etc...

 

 

FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOW.............

 

majorana....

 

 

Ettore Majorana: genius and mystery

24 July 2006

Antonino Zichichi provides a dual insight into Ettore Majorana: the genius of his many contributions to physics, and the mystery that surrounds his disappearance.

Ettore Majorana was born in Sicily in 1906. An extremely gifted physicist, he was a member of Enrico Fermi’s famous group in Rome in the 1930s, before mysteriously disappearing in March 1938.

 

The great Sicilian writer, Leonardo Sciascia, was convinced that Majorana decided to disappear because he foresaw that nuclear forces would lead to nuclear explosives a million times more powerful than conventional bombs, like those that would destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Sciascia came to visit me at Erice where we discussed this topic for several days. I tried to change his mind, but there was no hope. He was too absorbed by an idea that, for a writer, was simply too appealing. In retrospect, after years of reflection on our meetings, I believe that one of my assertions about Majorana’s genius actually corroborated Sciascia’s idea. At one point in our conversations I assured Sciascia that it would have been nearly impossible – given the state of physics in those days – for a physicist to foresee that a heavy nucleus could be broken to trigger the chain reaction of nuclear fission. Impossible for what Enrico Fermi called first-rank physicists, those who were making important inventions and discoveries, I suggested, but not for geniuses such as Majorana. Maybe this information convinced Sciascia that his idea about Majorana was not just probable, but actually true – a truth that his disappearance further corroborated.

 

There are also those who think Majorana’s disappearance was related to spiritual faith and that he retreated to a monastery. This perspective on Majorana as a believer comes from his confessor, Monsignor Riccieri, who I met when he came from Catania to Trapani as Bishop. Remarking on his disappearance, Riccieri told me that Majorana had experienced “mystical crises” and that, in his opinion, suicide in the sea was to be excluded. Bound by the sanctity of confessional, he could tell me no more. After the establishment of the Erice Centre, which bears Majorana’s name, I had the privilege of meeting Majorana’s entire family. No one ever believed it was suicide. Majorana was an enthusiastic and devout Catholic and, moreover, he withdrew his savings from the bank a week before his disappearance. The hypothesis shared by his family and others who had the privilege of knowing him (Fermi’s wife Laura was one of the few) is that he withdrew to a monastery.

 

Laura Fermi recalls that when Majorana disappeared, Enrico Fermi said to his wife, “Ettore was too intelligent. If he has decided to disappear, no-one will be able to find him. Nevertheless, we have to consider all possibilities.” In fact, Fermi even tried to get Benito Mussolini himself to support the search. On that occasion (in Rome in 1938), Fermi said: “There are several categories of scientists in the world; those of second or third rank do their best but never get very far. Then there is the first rank, those who make important discoveries, fundamental to scientific progress. But then there are the geniuses, like Galilei and Newton. Majorana was one of these.”

A genius, however, who looked on his own work as completely banal: once a problem was solved, Majorana did his best to leave no trace of his own brilliance. This can be witnessed in the stories of the neutron discovery and the hypothesis of the neutrinos that bear his name, as recalled below by Emilio Segré and Giancarlo Wick (on the neutron) and by Bruno Pontecorvo (on neutrinos). Majorana’s comprehension of the physics of his time had a completeness that few others in the world could match.

Oppenheimer’s recollections

Memories of Majorana had nearly faded when, in 1962, the International School of Physics was established in Geneva, with a branch in Erice. It was the first of the 150 schools that now form the Centre for Scientific Culture, which today bears Majorana’s name. It is in this context that an important physicist of the 20th century, Robert Oppenheimer, told me of his knowledge of Majorana.

After having suffered heavy repercussions for his opposition to the development of weapons even stronger than those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oppenheimer had decided to get back to physics while visiting the biggest laboratories at the frontiers of scientific knowledge. This is how he came to be at CERN, the largest European laboratory for subnuclear physics.

At this time, many illustrious physicists participated in a ceremony that dedicated the Erice School to Majorana. I myself – at the time very young – was entrusted with the task of speaking about the Majorana neutrinos. Oppenheimer wanted to voice his appreciation for how the Erice School and the Centre for Scientific Culture had been named. He knew of Majorana’s exceptional contributions to physics from the papers he had read, as any physicist could do at any time. What would have remained unknown was the episode he told me as a testimony to Fermi’s exceptional opinion of Majorana. Oppenheimer recounted the following episode from the time of the Manhattan Project, which in the course of only four years transformed the scientific discovery of nuclear fission into a weapon of war.

There were three critical turning points during the project, and during the executive meeting to address the first of these crises, Fermi turned to Eugene Wigner and said: “If only Ettore were here.” The project seemed to have reached a dead-end in the second crisis, during which Fermi exclaimed once more: “This calls for Ettore!” Other than the project director himself (Oppenheimer), three people were in attendance at these meetings: two scientists (Fermi and Wigner) and a military general. After the “top secret” meeting, the general asked Wigner, who this “Ettore” was, and he replied: “Majorana”. The general asked where Majorana was so that he could try to bring him to America. Wigner replied: “Unfortunately, he disappeared many years ago.”

By the end of the 1920s, physics had identified three fundamental particles: the photon (the quantum of light), the electron (needed to make atoms) and the proton (an essential component of the atomic nucleus). These three particles alone, however, left the atomic nucleus shrouded in mystery: no-one could understand how multiple protons could stick together in a single atomic nucleus. Every proton has an electric charge, and like charges repel each other. A fourth particle was needed, heavy like the proton but without electric charge. This was the neutron, but no-one knew it at the time.

Then Frédérick Joliot and Irène Curie discovered a neutral particle that can enter matter and expel a proton. Their conclusion was that it must be a photon, because at the time it was the only known particle with no charge. Majorana had a different explanation, as Emilio Segré and Giancarlo Wick recounted on different occasions, including during visits to Erice. (Both Segré and Wick were enthusiasts for what the school and the centre had become in only a few years, all under the name of the young physicist that Fermi considered a genius alongside Galilei and Newton). Majorana had explained to Fermi why the particle discovered by Joliot and Curie had to be as heavy as a proton, even while being electrically neutral. To move a proton requires something as heavy as the proton, thus a fourth particle must exist, a proton with no charge. And so was born the correct interpretation of what Joliot and Curie discovered in France: the existence of a particle that is as heavy as a proton but without electrical charge. This particle is the indispensable neutron. Without neutrons, atomic nuclei could not exist.

Fermi told Majorana to publish his interpretation of the French discovery right away. Majorana, true to his belief that everything that can be understood is banal, did not bother to do so. The discovery of the neutron is in fact justly attributed to James Chadwick for his experiments with beryllium in 1932.

Majorana’s neutrinos

Today, Majorana is particularly well known for his ideas about neutrinos. Bruno Pontecorvo, the “father” of neutrino oscillations, recalls the origin of Majorana neutrinos in the following way: Dirac discovers his famous equation describing the evolution of the electron; Majorana goes to Fermi to point out a fundamental detail: ” I have found a representation where all Dirac γ matrices are real. In this representation it is possible to have a real spinor that describes a particle identical to its antiparticle.”

The Dirac equation needs four components to describe the evolution in space and time of the simplest of particles, the electron; it is like saying that it takes four wheels (like a car) to move through space and time. Majorana jotted down a new equation: for a chargeless particle like the neutrino, which is similar to the electron except for its lack of charge, only two components are needed to describe its movement in space-time – as if it uses two wheels (like a motorcycle). “Brilliant,” said Fermi, “Write it up and publish it.” Remembering what happened with the neutron discovery, Fermi wrote the article himself and submitted the work under Majorana’s name to the prestigious scientific journal Il Nuovo Cimento (Majorana 1937). Without Fermi’s initiative, we would know nothing about the Majorana spinors and Majorana neutrinos.

One of the dreams of today’s physicists is to prove the existence of Majorana’s hypothetical neutral particles.

The great theorist John Bell conducted a rigorous comparison of Dirac’s and Majorana’s “neutrinos” in the first year of the Erice Subnuclear Physics School. The detailed version can be found in the chapter that opens the 12 volumes published to celebrate Majorana’s centenary. These volumes describe the highlights leading up to the greatest synthesis of scientific thought of all time, which we physicists call the Standard Model. This model has already pushed the frontiers of physics well beyond what the Standard Model itself first promised, so now the goal is the Standard Model and beyond.

Today we know that three types of neutrinos exist. The first controls the combustion of the Sun’s nuclear engine and keeps it from overheating. One of the dreams of today’s physicists is to prove the existence of Majorana’s hypothetical neutral particles, which are needed in grand unification theory. This is something that no-one could have imagined in the 1930s. And no-one could have imagined the three conceptual bases needed for the Standard Model and beyond.

Particles with arbitrary spin

In 1932 the study of particles with arbitrary spin was considered at the level of a pure mathematical curiosity, and Majorana’s paper on the subject remained quasi-unknown despite being full of remarkable new ideas (Majorana 1932). Today, three-quarters of a century later, this mathematical curiosity of 1932 still represents a powerful source of new ideas. In fact in this paper there are the first hints for supersymmetry, spin-mass correlation and spontaneous symmetry breaking (SSB) – three fundamental concepts underpinning the Standard Model and beyond. This means that our current conceptual understanding of the fundamental laws of nature was already in Majorana’s attempts to describe particles with arbitrary spins in a relativistically invariant way.

Majorana starts with the simplest representation of the Lorentz group, which is infinite-dimensional. In this representation the states with integer (bosons) and semi-integer (fermions) spins are treated equally. In other words, the relativistic description of particle states allows bosons and fermions to exist on equal footing. These two fundamental sets of states are the first hint of supersymmetry.

Another remarkable novelty is the correlation between spin and mass. The eigenvalues of the masses are given by a relation of the type m = m0/(J+1/2), where m0 is a given constant and J is the spin. The mass decreases with the increasing value of the spin, the opposite of what would come, many decades later, in the study of the strong interactions between baryons and mesons (now known as Regge trajectories). As a consequence of the description of particle states with arbitrary spins, this remarkable paper also contains the existence of imaginary mass eigenvalues. We know today that the only way to introduce real masses without destroying the theoretical description of nature is through the mechanism of SSB, but this could not exist without imaginary masses.

In addition to these three important ideas, the paper also contributed to a further development: the formidable relation between spin and statistics, which would have led to the discovery of another invariance law valid for all quantized relativistic field theories, the celebrated PCT theorem.

Majorana’s paper shows first of all that the relativistic description of a particle state allows the existence of integer and semi-integer spin values. However, it was already known that the electron must obey the Pauli exclusion principle and that it has semi-integer spin. Thus the problem arose of understanding whether the Pauli principle is valid for all semi-integer spins. If this were the case it would be necessary to find out the properties that characterize the two classes of particles, now known as fermions (semi-integer spin) and bosons (integer spin). The first of these properties are of statistical nature, governing groups of identical fermions and groups of bosons. We now know that a fundamental distinction exists and that the anticommutation relations for fermions and the commutation relations for bosons are the basis for the statistical laws governing fermions and bosons.

The spin-statistics theorem has an interesting and long history, the main players of which are some of the most distinguished theorists of the 20th century. The first contribution to the study of the correlation between spin and statistics comes from Markus Fierz with a paper where the case of general spin for free fields is investigated (Fierz 1939). A year later Wolfgang Pauli comes in with his paper also “On the Connection Between Spin and Statistics” (Pauli 1940). The first proofs, obtained using only the general properties of relativistic quantum field theory and which include microscopic causality (also known as local commutativity), are due to Gerhart Lüders and Bruno Zumino, and to N Burgoyne (Lüders and Zumino 1958; Burgoyne 1958). Another important contribution, which clarifies the connection between spin and statistics, came three years later with the work of G F Dell’Antonio (Dell’Antonio 1961).

It cannot be accidental that the first suggestion of the existence of the PCT invariance law came from the same people engaged in the study of the spin-statistics theorem, Lüders and Zumino. These two outstanding theoretical physicists suggested that if a relativistic quantum field theory obeys the space-inversion invariance law, called parity (P), it must also be invariant for the product of charge conjugation (particle-antiparticle) and time inversion, CT. It is in this form that it was proved by Lüders in 1954 (Lüders 1954). A year later Pauli proved that PCT invariance is a universal law, valid for all relativistic quantum field theories (Pauli 1955).

This paper closes a cycle started by Pauli in 1940 with his work on spin and statistics where he proved already what is now considered the classical PCT invariance, as it was derived using free non-interacting fields. The validity of PCT invariance for quantum field theories was obtained in 1951 by Julian Schwinger, a great admirer of Majorana (Schwinger 1951). It is interesting to read what Arthur Wightman, another of Majorana’s enthusiastic supporters, wrote about this paper by Schwinger: “Readers of this paper did not generally recognize that it stated or proved the PCT theorem” (Wightman 1964). It is similar for those who, reading Majorana’s paper on arbitrary spins, have not found the imprinting of the original ideas discussed in this short review of the genius of Majorana.

https://cerncourier.com/a/ettore-majorana-genius-and-mystery/

 

 

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"RELIGIOUS" SCIENTISTS TEND TO BEHAVE FUNNY... AS WE HAVE SAID MANY TIMES ON THIS SITE, RELIGION AND SCIENCE DO NOT MIX...

SEE ALSO:

it is a quite ludicrous that in order to sell and validate religious beliefs, some Christians still try to claim sciences as their own, as if science was a daughter of Christianity — through "Christian" scientists. In fact, most of the work of scientific value was done by clever humans, despite the Church — as the reality of experiments and observations did not fit any of the religious teachings. 


Scientists often had to battle the hocus pocus of religion. Some of the "Christian" scientists also indulged in the hocus-pocus of the occult.
Sure, one can say that clever people such as Copernicus were Christian. Copernicus held some degree in Christianity. Good. But he also studied Greek and Roman philosophers, mathematicians and scientists, especially Aristotle. It was through these "classical" studies, that he got some of his inspiration to restructure the still accepted erroneous religious views of the solar system in the 16th century — in which a more or less-flatish earth was deemed to be the centre of the world. 
Copernicus' contrariant new views were not challenged by the church at first, but soon after his death his work was rejected, to be "forgotten". 

READ MORE: https://yourdemocracy.net/drupal/node/30319