Science facts that amaze you?

Candie wrote: »

* Some people (mostly Europeans) have a deletion on the CCR5 gene and this gives them strong resistance to HIV, smallpox, bubonic plague, Lassa fever, and other viruses including Nile fever.

Likely because Europeans suffered more rolling waves of various plagues for longer than any other population. Every European reading this are the end result of their ancestors surviving the black death and many other pathogens(including malaria as far north as here in Ireland. Cromwell's end was hastened by it and he may have caught it here). In the middle ages and on to the 18th century there was usually at least one "plague" per year in Europe. Going further back to Rome it was very common too. It's one theory why Europe hasn't suffered nearly as many HIV/AIDS infections and deaths compared to other populations. IIRC there are two types of resistance. A large chunk of the European population has one or the other, a smaller percentage have both and having both means you're essentially immune to HIV infection.

take everything wrote: »

This is more what science can't tell us.
My perception of blue could well be very different to your perception of blue.
You can extrapolate that beyond mere perception obviously.

There may be something to that. It can vary across cultures too. The Greeks described the colour of the sky as "bronze" and the sea and sheep and goats as "wine coloured". Dodgy wine they were drinking. Bronze to them was shiny not dark brown as we would think of it as they polished their bronze to look like gold. Still they had no word for blue. Neither did the writers of the Old Testament and the Japanese used to use the same word for green and blue. In the ancient world colours were pretty much restricted to black, white, yellow, green, red, metals like gold and silver and descriptions of bright or dull. The rainbow was described as only having three colours. Mad or wha?

The naming and evolution of colour perception continued up until quite recently too. Take the Robin redbreast bird. It clearly has an orange breast, but was seen as red. To the degree that the folk tales of it it trying to remove the nails from Christs hands left his red blood on their chest. It was named before the naming of the colour "orange". That came from the fruit that was introduced to Europe in the 1500's. Pomme d'Orang(sp) by way of Arabic and Persian. To us we can see and perceive orange as a separate thing, but to someone in 1400 AD they obviously saw the same colour but called and perceived it as "red". So in a way by naming a colour we see it.

Contrary to popular the human brain is getting smaller. Throughout our evolution it got larger and larger, peaked about 30,000 years ago in our own species and has slowly gotten smaller since. Some have posited that the average Homo Sapiens "caveman" may have had, or had the potential to have a higher intelligence and problem solving ability(because of the stresses of the environment) to the average human today. Maybe, maybe not. The biggest brains in any human? Neandertals. And while they were a very clever people they weren't close to us in smarts or abstract thought. We were different. Very different. In the entire evolutionary history of our species before modern humans, possible examples of art and abstract thought so far found would comfortably fit in a small briefcase. Then we come along...

endacl wrote: »

Leads to another interesting scientific fact! Deoxyribonucleic acid is common to all organisms. There's no 'frog DNA', human DNA', 'lizard DNA', 'cabbage DNA'...

The molecule is the same in each instance.

Which leads to another conclusion. Life kicked off here, but it only did so the once. All living things are related. There are no "aliens" on earth. So far found anyway. Life likely exists elsewhere in the universe. The sheer scale of the place pretty much guarantees it. However we're arguing this debate from the position of a planet that has life. and that life only kicked off once. And most of the time it was and indeed is bacterial/single celled in nature. Complex life that we can see with our eyes is by a long way the minority in the biomass and has been for the history of our world.

It took some pretty flukey happenings to come up with complex life too and to come up with a creature like us was impossibly flukey. Humans have been around for over 1 million years. Were never very common in the landscape and nearly died out on a fair few occasions. Even so humans like us were very different and even more flukey(and at one point were down to 10-20,000 individuals).

So life may not be that common in the universe and if it is present it's overwhelmingly likely to be unicellular. Complex life will be rarer and intelligent abstract thinking philosophical life like us is likely to be vanishingly rare.

So the current vibe that well we're not really that special, we're just another animal is decidedly bogus. Every single person reading this is an incredibly rare creature that is here in the face of almost impossible odds.