{"id":1501,"date":"2009-12-31T16:48:10","date_gmt":"2009-12-31T21:48:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/?p=1501"},"modified":"2009-12-31T16:48:10","modified_gmt":"2009-12-31T21:48:10","slug":"genetic-drift-and-the-uncertainty-principle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/2009\/12\/31\/genetic-drift-and-the-uncertainty-principle\/","title":{"rendered":"Genetic Drift and the Uncertainty Principle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have previously argued that the history of species must be treated like a evolutionary trajectory: we can only appreciate a species in a relative sense, just as we must evaluate physical trajectories relative to our own motion.<\/p>\n<p>But what happens when we try to measure the very small in physics?\u00a0 We find there is a limit to the precision at which we can measure, as given by the <a title=\"Wikipedia: Uncertainty Principle\" href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Uncertainty_principle\">uncertainty principle<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>This suggests that there may be some similar limit when it comes\u00a0 to measuring small changes in species.\u00a0 The more we try to pin down exactly what a species is, the less sure we will be about its future and the more we measure the direction the species is heading, the less sure we will be about exactly what constitutes that species.<\/p>\n<p>If genetic drift is just another way of saying that we cannot pin down the exact genetic make-up of a species then <strong>drift may be considered to be an instance of the uncertainty principle<\/strong>.<\/p>\n<p>and HAPPY NEW YEAR<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have previously argued that the history of species must be treated like a evolutionary trajectory: we can only appreciate a species in a relative sense, just as we must evaluate physical trajectories relative to our own motion. But what happens when we try to measure the very small in physics?\u00a0 We find there is a limit to the precision at which we can measure, as given by the uncertainty principle. This suggests that there [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,7,45,26,27,32,34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1501","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biology","category-evolution","category-measurement","category-philosophy","category-physics","category-relativity","category-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1501","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1501"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1501\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1501"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1501"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.noahgreenstein.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1501"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}