Today you get a 
Posted on 10/12/2011 6:26:05 PM PDT by decimon
WASHINGTON (AP) — Scientists have cracked the genetic code of the Black Death, one of history's worst plagues, and found that its modern day bacterial descendants haven't changed much over 600 years.
Luckily, we have.
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In devastating the population, it changed the human immune system, basically wiping out people who couldn't deal with the disease and leaving the stronger to survive, said study co-author Hendrik Poinar of McMaster University in Ontario.
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(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Read the Bible much? Probably not so much GOVERNMENT FUNDED research there. But seek for the answer where the answer lies.
Through abortion, the left is actively cleaning the gene pool of genes responsible for the spectrum of traits that cause leftism. Unfortunately, that cleaning of the gene pool comes at a high cost.
I said the very same thing about the 1917 influenza pandemic and was scoffed and laughed at. I wonder if I was right.
Apparently about 2/3 of the population already had the resistant traits.
If they had had to wait for the resistant traits to "evolve", then mortality in the exposed population would have been nearer 3/3.
No 1/3 already had resistance, 2/3 died leaving the the 1/3 “strongest” in relation to this selection pressure to survive as the “fittest” . Evolution was a combination of the variation that led to the resistance coupled with the selection pressure of the disease acting on the entire population leaving only the resistant population to procreate and pass along their resistance to the next generation.
Oops! 2/3 had,1/3 died,2/3 left
Yee—aahh, pretty much what I said. And somehow different conclusions. Mmkay.
You see it as proof that something evolved. I see it as proof that something already existed and had no need to evolve.
Like, I dunno, People. Or tigers.
Tree-ring patterns are intellectual property, not climate data
Apparently thinning the herd for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.
A number of things like that is likely going on with us presently.
Who would have guessed that cancer is contagious...wouldn't that be something, eh?
Today you get a
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| GGG managers are SunkenCiv, StayAt HomeMother & Ernest_at_the_Beach | |
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Thanks decimon, and thecodont and blam. |
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I'm sorry, but I do not see how the Bible will give me any insights as to the particular genetic makeup of the survivors as compared to the non-survivors. But give me a good selection of samples from each group, a well-stocked lab, and a hundred thousand dollar or so grant, and I'll figure it out.
If they had had to wait for the resistant traits to "evolve", then mortality in the exposed population would have been nearer 3/3.
They had the particular mutations because evolution is going on constantly. In the absence of selective pressures, the mutations tend to remain at fairly constant levels throughout the population. (That is, if 5% have the mutation in an initial population, about 5% of each subsequent generation will also have the mutation.) When selective pressures are added, giving those with the mutation a survival advantage, the incidence of the mutation throughout the population increases.
In this case, there were already selective pressures on the population to spread this particular mutation (there were lots of infectious diseases in Europe), which is why 2/3 of the population already had it when the Black Plague hit.
In other words, what is described in the article is exactly what we expect to see happen in an evolutionary scenario.
Grr, I should have pointed out that mutations don’t happen in response to evolutionary pressures. They happen randomly as a result of the chemistry of DNA, for the most part. Technically speaking, evolution occurs when the mutation confers a survival advantage to an environmental challenge.
Maybe we just have less rats.
In another moment I had scrambled up the earthen ram-
part and stood upon its crest, and the interior of the redoubt
was below me. A mighty space it was, with gigantic machines
here and there within it, huge mounds of material and strange
shelter places. And scattered about it, some in their over-
turned war-machines, some in the now rigid handling-
machines, and a dozen of them stark and silent and laid in
a row, were the Martians—DEAD!—slain by the putrefactive
and disease bacteria against which their systems were unpre-
pared; slain as the red weed was being slain; slain, after all
man’s devices had failed, by the humblest things that God,
in his wisdom, has put upon this earth.
For so it had come about, as indeed I and many men
might have foreseen had not terror and disaster blinded our
minds. These germs of disease have taken toll of humanity
since the beginning of things—taken toll of our prehuman
ancestors since life began here. But by virtue of this natural
selection of our kind we have developed resisting power; to
no germs do we succumb without a struggle, and to many—
those that cause putrefaction in dead matter, for instance
—our living frames are altogether immune. But there are no
bacteria in Mars, and directly these invaders arrived, directly
they drank and fed, our microscopic allies began to work
their overthrow. Already when I watched them they were
irrevocably doomed, dying and rotting even as they went to
and fro. It was inevitable. By the toll of a billion deaths
man has bought his birthright of the earth, and it is his against
all comers; it would still be his were the Martians ten
times as mighty as they are. For neither do men live nor die in
vain.
I heard it’s unwise to play that on the radio without a warning that it’s fiction.
“Until now I always felt a stranger in this town, and that I’d no concern with you people. But now that I’ve seen what I have seen, I know that I belong here whether I want it or not. This business is everybody’s business.”
“... once the faintest stirring of hope became possible, the dominion of the plague was ended.”
About ten percent of Europeans are totally immune to it, they could go swimming in a pool full of the stuff and walk away without even a sniffle.
They have a mutation called Delta-32 that does something to the cell membranes around their immune system cells, and the bacteria can’t get past it.
And this same mutation makes them totally immune to another killer - HIV.
Thing is, you have to have two copies of the gene, one from your mom and one from your dad. If you only have one copy, you have a much, much better chance and higher resistance to both diseases, but you are not 100% immune.
Uh-huh; mmkay.
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