Posted on 11/11/2005 4:47:36 PM PST by Wolfstar
Each year in the United States, about 150,000 babies are born with birth defects ranging from mild to life threatening. While progress has been made in the detection and treatment of birth defects, they remain the leading cause of death in the first year of life. Birth defects are often the result of genetic and environmental factors, but the causes of well over half of all birth defects are currently unknown.
Following is a partial list of birth defects:
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Achondroplasia/Dwarfism |
Hemochromatosis |
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Alpha-1 Antitrypsin Deficiency |
Huntington's Disease |
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Anencephaly |
Hydrocephalus |
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Arnold-Chiari Malformation |
Klinefelter's Syndrome |
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Ataxia Telangiectasia |
Leukodystrophies |
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Blood coagulation disorders/Hemophilia |
Marfan Syndrome |
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Brain malformations/genetic brain disorders |
Metabolic disorders |
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Canavan Disease |
Muscular Dystrophy |
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Cancer: Neonatal, newborn, infant and childhood |
Neural tube defects/Spina Bifida |
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Cerebral Palsy |
Neurofibromatosis |
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Cleft lip and palate |
Niemann-Pick Disease |
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Club foot/club hand |
Osteogenesis Imperfecta (brittle bone disease) |
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Congenital heart disease |
Phenylketonuria |
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Conjoined twins |
Prader-Willi Syndrome |
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Cystic Fibrosis |
Progeria (advanced aging in children) |
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Down Syndrome |
Sickle Cell Anemia |
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Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome |
Spinal Muscular Atrophy |
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Eye, ear and speech defects |
Tay-Sachs Disease |
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Fragile X Syndrome |
Tuberous Sclerosis |
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Gaucher's Disease |
Turner's Syndrome |
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Genital and urinary tract defects |
Wilson's Disease |
Some birth/genetic defects, such as near-sightedness, are mild and do not affect the person's ability to lead a normal life. Others are so severe that the person has no chance to even live. Efficiency and economy are part of intelligently designed systems. If the "design" of human systems is so intelligent, why do tragic inefficiencies such as the following occur at all? Warning, the linked photos are graphic medical images, and are very, very sad.
Conjoined twins, i.e., monozygous twinning in which there is fusion of the twins. The popular term is "Siamese" twins. This happens when identical twin embryos become fused together during the very early stages of development. Conjoined twins occur in an estimated one in 200,000 births, with approximately half being stillborn. Here are links to three photos of severely conjoined twins:
Photo 2: essentially one torso between two babies
Neural tube defects are are one of the more common congenital anomalies. Such defects result from improper embryonic neural tube closure. The most minimal defect is called spina bifida, with failure of the vertebral body to completely form, but the defect is not open. Open neural tube defects with lack of a skin covering, can include a meningocele, in which meninges protrude through the defect. Here is a link to a severe neural tube defect.
Defects of the head/brain: In the linked photo a large encephalocele that merges with the scalp above is protruding from the back of the head. The encephalocele extends down to partially cover a rachischisis on the back. This baby also has a retroflexed head from iniencephaly.
The form of neural tube defect in the next linked photo is known as exencephaly. The cranial vault is not completely present, but a brain is present because it was not completely exposed to amniotic fluid. Such an event is very rare. It may be part of craniofacial clefts associated with the limb-body wall complex, which results from early amnion disruption.
Congenital and pediatric neoplasms: One type that can occur is a teratoma. The next linked photo shows a large nasopharyngeal teratoma that is protruding from the oral cavity.
Tumors: In the next linked photo there is a large mass involving the left upper arm and left chest of the baby. This congenital neoplasm turned out to be a lymphangioma. This baby and the one in Photo 9 were essentially riddled with cancer before birth and shortly afterwards.
Next is a gross neuroblastoma arising in the right adrenal gland. It is the most common pediatric malignancy in infancy, and 75% of cases are diagnosed in children less than 4 years old. These tumors most often present as an abdominal or mediastinal mass.
Man sinned and caused a perfect world to deteriorate. Once sin happened, everything, all creation, suffered from the effects of sin. The world and Gods Creation are no longer perfect. It isn't Gods fault but man will continue to blame Him out of ignorance and even fear. Few want to recognise that there's satan or the devil so since it's frightening they'd rather blame God than blame sin and it's effects and Lucifer.
Storms are referred to as "acts of God" but they are not. Every aspect of nature is at war with itself because of sin. Because it's no longer perfect.
(birth defects) Most likely caused or partially caused by long term inbreeding and incest which are known genetic monkey wrenches.. course chronic drug abuse including alcohol can be a long term factor as well.. You know, pretty much as the bible lays out..
1. Direct your post to the user "From many - one." not to me. I was not even arguing with you I was simple stating that it was the user "From many - one." that was confused. I knew what you meant.
2. Don't say jeese to me... I knew what you meant. Jeese...
I consider it a damn sight more impolite to be told I can have no possible moral objection to pedophilia or infanticide. If I can't have any legitimate ethical objections to those horrible crimes, why should I be ethically obligated to ping someone, or to show any reticence about expressing my opinion of their posts?
I know.. jeese..
"...a bunch of babies are born does not establish a cause/effect relationship between the two. "
Are you calling my mother a liar? ;)
What rude students.
If they don't want to know what scientists think, they should not take science classes.
It's a custom. Don't follow it if you don't want to. It does, though, give them a chance to explain themselves.
You can have a moral objection to pedophilia.
Without God, though, your moral objection is simply some local or personal convention that means nothing in the long run.
Without God, different time/different place and a culture using kids sexually however they wish, and it really won't make any difference, will it?
It'll just be their way as opposed to your way.
And both ways will end up meaninglessly blown up in a supernova some day, and no one will give a rip.
Nice catch on my sloppy thinking there.
My designer was in essence Farmer Brown breeding whatever.
What was in my mind was diversity of kinds, but I have no justification for it. I sort of had a mental image of bacteria chomping on teeth and getting calcium out for the designer to have more calcium in usable form.
I've just pulled an all nighter, I take responsibility for my sloppy thinking but not for the wierd mental images.
Trying to be more coherent: ID would not preclude evolution as many of its proponents agree. The designer would be the guiding hand culling out "errors" and wrong pathways. It could be perfectly scientific if we just change the scale and re-evaluate the goal of the designer. We could even devise experiments designed to reveal traces of a designer.
The idea that what you are calling "morality" is a function of believing in God is flat wrong.
Believe it or not good morals are also good biology and evolution.
I am a little confused what you mean here. How does making it the exception all the better?
You seem to be unconcerned about birth defects because they're exceptions rather than the rule. It struck me as sounding rather callous.
Let me sort of repeat myself by saying that given all the babies ever conceived (not necessarily born) sometimes the building process can go wrong. It doesn't mean they were designed that way but it means that the building process went wrong. Can you clarify your statement of "That they're exceptions makes it all better"?
I think I did above. But if the "building process" went wrong, wouldn't that demonstrate bad design ... the bad design of the building process, in this case.
G: What's makes you think they're not by design; how do you know?
I was responding to the pictures where none of these babies lived. I do not know if they were designed to be this way or not but my guess is they were not. Do not get me wrong. I am not attempting to belittle people who do live but who are... let's say "conjoined twins" or they are born with birth defects that either make them blind, mentally retarded, or whatever. But up until recently (last 200 years) many children with severe birth defects did not live. Even "small" birth defects by today's standards would have made life difficult before modern medicine. A baby born blind in a mudhut in ancient Europe or Asia would not have lived very long would they?
So that is my only clue that these defects were not by design... because if they were they would have lived much longer.
So you're attempting to infer design by relative lifespan?
G: All true, but beside the point. Unless you're asserting that humans were designed by humans.
No I am not asserting that they were designed by humans. To put it in cold... callous, industrialized terms, humans were the manufacturers, not the designers or engineers. When two humans make a baby they do not sit around and decide which nucleic acid comes first in a chain of DNA. "Gee Betsy, you sure the adenosine should go before the guanine?". Nope that doesn't happen... Humans do the building (ok... women do 99.999%). Now sometimes the manufacturing process goes wrong correct?
My assumption, if I were also assuming design, would be that the designer who came up with the design for humans (a wretched job, in my opinion, but that's another discussion), also came up with the manufacturing plans, approved the design and built the plant. You've got a lot of different elements, but they're all the work of the same culprit.
G: The jury is still out on the effects of "external environmental issues," but "recessive genetic traits" are part of the design by definition, aren't they?
When I say "external environmental issues" I don't just mean mercury in the water. It could be a large number of factors such as the stress factor on the mother. Still how can you say the jury is still out? How many medications do you read that says "Do not take if you are pregnant"? Do I have to post the millions of cases where pollution and stress caused many birth defects? With all due respect your proverbial jury has decided this a long long time ago.
Some of these have been demonstrated to have deleterious effects on unborn children (like specific medications as you say), and some have not, power lines, for instance. That's what I was getting at with the "jury's still out" comment.
You are correct about genetic recessive traits being "part of the design". But autosomal recessive disorders, where the baby has a disorder because both mother and father have the recessive gene and passes it on, can be quite fatal. Take for example the very terrible disease of Tay Sachs. There is no cure and fatal for children.
I cannot say if this is by design but for something like Tay Sachs to happen, both parents have to have it and then they have to pass it on to their children. About 1 in 30 persons of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry carries the Tay Sachs gene (see:http://www.lpch.org/DiseaseHealthInfo/HealthLibrary/genetics/recessive.html).
For a baby to get Tay Sachs both parents would need to have the recessive gene and then both would need to pass it on. Statistically it ends up as being the exception that the baby suffers from it, not the rule.
But if you postulate that humans were designed, the gene wouldn't be there at all unless it had been by design, right? It doesn't matter how rarely this all happens, it's that it happens at all that points to a middling, at best, designer.
What was it that killed Woody Guthrie ... Huntington's Disease? It doesn't manifest itself until the sufferer is past the usual childbearing years, thereby allowing itself to continue among an unsuspecting population (at least until recently. I think there's a test now). But if you say there's a designer, then he/she/ must be responsible. If it was on purpose, it was malicious. If it wasn't on purpose, it was incompetence. Some choice.
Given how complex human life forms are it is amazing it doesn't happen more often...
G: Why?
Because the process of creating a baby (or any life) is very, very complex. There are many, many places in the building of a baby where things can go completely wrong. Not to mention that the DNA sequence is quite long and if a mistake is made in even a small place in the sequence during replication(depending on where it is) the baby may not live.
One would expect that humans would have been designed more simply, then.
I have read a decent number of articles saying the a man is actually gaining an evolutionary advantage by having sex on the sly with as many women as possible. Also, that the woman who finds a "better" male specimen does better in evolutionary terms.
That sort of flies in the face of evolutionary thought lending itself to Judeo-Christian morality.
Expressing a negative opinion of "a post" is perfectly kosher here on Free Republic, but when you accuse one of the posters (Particualry Alamo Girl) of being a "charlatan", you have crossed the line in my book.
No one here questions your motives or your honesty, only your ideas. You may have some legitimate objections to Alamo Girl's conclusions regarding the evidence that she presents or analyzes, but when you question her honesty in that endeavor, you have clearly crossed the line.
I believe an apology is in order.
Kindly explain how the theory of gravity might lend itself to Judeo-Christian morality.
Your comment doesn't track with the discussion we were having. If you can tie it in, then I'll comment on it.
But, I don't see how it can be made to fit what was being discussed.
I tend to agree with you, PM.
Maybe protocol and custom can be put aside, though, when we enter the SBR? Isn't this supposed to be the place where mud wrestlers are allowed to be themselves?
To: Wolfstar
[ Such cases are not just tragic, but extremely cruel. They not only argue against "intelligent design," but also are capable of shaking one's faith in religion. ]
Most likely caused or partially caused by long term inbreeding and incest which are known genetic monkey wrenches.. course chronic drug abuse including alcohol can be a long term factor as well..
You know, pretty much as the bible lays out..
hosepipe in post 178:
"To: js1138
[ You are the one claiming birth defects are the result of misbehavior. ]
So then, I was right.. pity.. since its a proven fact birth defect can be one result of misbehavior.. Truth is a hard taskmaster to those that hate it.."
Let's just clarify this whole thing.
hosepipe: Whose misbehavior?, What has the Bible got to do with it? What has truth being a hard taskmsaster got to do with it?
I then asked how the theory of gravity might lend itself to Judeo-Christian morality.
I believe you are mistaking an observation (utterly unremarkable, in my opinion), that the more widely an organism's genes are distributed, the greater evolutionary advantage it has, for a prescription that this actually happen. No one is saying is a good way to run a society.
My point is that the Theory of Evolution is no more aligned with Judeo-Christian morality than any other scientific theory.
I'd be interested in how you back up that statement.
I was responding to another poster who stated, in the context of a discussion on morality that we were having, that our Judeo-Christian morality is good biology and good evolutionary thought.
My comment was meant to indicate that evolutionary thought does not track with Judeo-Christian morality.
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