Posted on 05/13/2015 6:43:17 PM PDT by Kaslin
RUSH: From the UK Daily Mail. And I think this is -- well, I'll withhold my characterization of it, just give you the headline.
"Poor People’s DNA is Declining in Quality, Say Scientists: Study Reveals How Stressful Upbringings Damage Genes. Stress can leave damaging and lasting imprints on the genes of the urban poor. This is according to a new study that claims poor people's DNA is declining in quality as a result of difficult upbringings.
Now, is that even possible? DNA as a result of sociological circumstance? This story claims that not only is it likely, it's happening. "The results are based on the finding that people in disadvantaged environments have shorter telomeres -- DNA sequences that generally shrink with age -- than their advantaged peers. The study looked at the telomeres of poor and lower middle-class black, white, and Mexican residents of Detroit."
Now, again, telomeres, if I'm pronouncing that right, telomeres "are the protective caps on the ends of the strands of DNA called chromosomes, which house our genomes." And by now I know I've lost the people in Rio Linda, but I'm nevertheless gonna persevere here. "In young humans, telomeres are about 8,000-10,000 nucleotides long." (laughing) How long is a nucleotide, Snerdley? (laughing) And these nucleotides, they shorten with each cell division and as a result of stress.
"Previous research has found telomere length can reliably predict life expectancy in humans. The study found that low-income residents of Detroit, no matter their race, have shorter telomeres than the national average." length of a telomere. (interruption) It is. It's telomere inequality. It's chromosome inequality. It's nucleotide inequality brought on by living conditions inequality.
"Dr. Arline Geronimus, a visiting scholar at the Stanford Center for Advanced Study said in an interview with The Huffington Post," which should give you a lot insight here, "There are effects of living in high-poverty, racially segregated neighborhoods." I'll tell you, this is a first for me, that living in poor minority neighborhoods can make your DNA worse and in fact can telegraph your future. Now, some of you I'm sure will remember this, but you know my first reaction to this? And I had many. But my first reaction to this was that this story can now be trumpeted by the left to validate abortion among poor people.
I remember when I first started getting involved on the radio as a participant in the abortion debate, both locally in Sacramento and then nationally as this program went on the air, I began hearing all kinds of justifications for it. We heard, for example, that it's actually an illness, pregnancy is an illness and that it's unfair that women are saddled with this and sometimes abortion is a cure. Now, Snerdley, no calls on abortion. It's not what this is about. This is about the left seeking yet again to advance its agenda while dividing the people of this country on any kind of line they can, racial, economic, sociological, you name it. This is despicable.
We also heard that not only was pregnancy a sickness, but that a fetus was an unviable tissue mass, and we heard all kinds of excuses. One that we heard frequently was, "Well, would you want to bring a baby into that world," meaning one of poverty and dilapidation and thirst and socioeconomic disaster, and this prompted a number of us to start doing research into famous people and find out what their backgrounds were.
We found out a tremendous number of famous experts, people who had become stars in entertainment, stars of medicine, many of them had come from poverty. Many of them had survived poverty or very bad socioeconomic circumstances. And we were forced to do this because the left, in its continual perversion, was looking for any justification whatsoever for abortion and to call it something other than what it was. And when I saw this story, that DNA, that poverty and being poor and disadvantaged becomes part of who you are, becomes part of your DNA?
How do you escape your DNA, folks? Has anybody ever told you how to escape your DNA? You can't, right? Your DNA is who you are. Your genealogical history, that's who you are. Your genome is yours. No two DNAs are alike. DNA convicts people. DNA is a unique identifier unlike any other identifier we have. I've never heard anybody say that you can escape it. I've never heard anybody say that you can change it. I mean, not with behavior.
I know that some people say you can mess around with medicine, surgery, who knows what, splicing, I know that, but I'm talking just in terms of these people are saying that they're not doing anything medically to make this happen. They're just living continuously in poverty and that is affecting their DNA. You know how ridiculous this is? Until the last century, this is again part of the whole discussion of American exceptionalism.
Folks, I'm not making this up. Until the last century, just about everybody in the world came from poverty. The world! Everybody in the world came from, was born into poverty. Such was the average economic circumstance for most people, I mean the vast majority. The story of humanity from the beginning of time has been one of tyranny and bondage.
Thanks for posting this. Heard him talking about it and wanted to listen, but I had work to do that required making noise. I said to myself “I bet Kaslin will have a post on this later...” ;)
Which makes a key point about Communist persistence: Never, ever give up, never concede you were wrong about 2 + 2 = 5, never abandon an old doctrine that worked for a while once before. Just shift your ground, shift your emphasis like a boxer going over from right- to left-hand punches, and bide your time.
Then bring out all the old b.s. all over again, and dump it on a brand-new audience of ingenues who have no idea what enormous b.s.'ers you are.
They better be careful what they wish for...
How about the stress that taxpayers have trying to hold a job, raise a family and pay taxes? What does that do for the middle class dna? Can’t be good for it.
Liberals embraced the science frauds Paul R. Ehrlich, of “The Population Bomb”, and James E. Hansen, who created MMGW out of whole cloth. So it should be of no surprise that they are now embracing Trofim Lysenko.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trofim_Lysenko
“Folks, I’m not making this up. Until the last century, just about everybody in the world came from poverty. The world! Everybody in the world came from, was born into poverty. Such was the average economic circumstance for most people, I mean the vast majority. The story of humanity from the beginning of time has been one of tyranny and bondage.”
There could be some affects from drugs, toxic environment, even conceivably constant stress but Rush’s last paragraph above put the stress part in perspective (anyhow our ancestors must have been stressed competing with lions and tigers for food - toss the stress then).
This sounds nonsensical, blaming chromosome damage on poverty.
Labeling this theory as Lysenkoism does not disprove it.
It’s either true or it isn’t.
My mother was teaching 3rd grade in the same northern New Jersey middle class neighborhood for about 20 years, around 1955 to 1975. She would comment on how the quality of the children was deteriorating year after year. We came to the conclusion that the massive shift to junk food was a significant factor. Since then the influence of good nutrition has become much better known so that middle class and higher families are paying much more attention. The poor unfortunately, don’t know as much, can’t pay as much, and often live in “food deserts” where well stocked supermarkets are rare.
Sounds a little like Lamarckism to me... And yep, the commies loved that theory and continued to perpetuate it well after it had been debunked in the 60s.
Old wine, new skins, etc.
DEVO - Mongoloid (Original Version) 1977
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9cg-1HwhO4
Not a major task.
 Comrade Dr Lysenko gives a speech in the Kremlin 1935 |
Lysenko was a quack in the right place at the right time. From the link:
Lysenkoism was “politically correct” (a term invented by Lenin) because it was consistent with certain broader Marxist doctrines. Marxists wanted to believe that heredity had a limited role even among humans, and that human characteristics changed by living under socialism would be inherited by subsequent generations of humans. Thus would be created the selfless new Soviet man.
actually, their comments on telomeres is correct.
it is what they did with that information that is stoopid
start watching
2 guys won a nobel prize on this, IIRC, on stopping telomere decay in cell replication
http://www.dnalc.org/view/16888-2009-Nobel-Prize-in-Medicine-or-Physiology-Telomeres.html
Interesting.
Sorry, perhaps I could have worded my comment better.
Labeling this claim Lysenkoism does not mean it is Lysenkoism and as such untrue.
Any more than Lysenko and his followers labeling Mendelianism as imperialistic and anti-socialist made it untrue.
We are finding more and more evidence than DNA is not as immutable as once thought. It is now believed that some viruses, for example, can make permanent changes to DNA.
In other words, it ain’t as simple as we once thought.
But the theory presented in this paper will be proven or disproven by the scientific method, not by labeling it.
Just as studies showing differences in average human intelligence of groups are not disproven by labeling them racist. It is what it is.
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