@Numpty,
Numpty;62521 wrote:Once again I marvel at your knowledge. Thanks for the lesson, I learned alot there.:thumbup:
No problem
If you want to dig a bit deeper and see the "blind watchmaker" at work, there are a few other factors surrounding CCR5delta32 that make it of interesting note.
1. It occurs in those of European blood almost exclusively. Asians, Africans and other outlying regions have nearly a zero percent chance of expressing this mutation.
2. HIV/AIDS has not been infecting humans long enough to put the pressure required to go from 1 in 20,000-50,000 some 500 years ago to its roughly 1 in 10 (of European descent) today.
So what's been the push? A quick flip through the history books reveals that. Europe has had one thing that most other countries have not... pandemics, and lots of them. Everything from the black plague to typhus and cholera... Europe has historically had more than the lion's share of fatal diseases.
Diseases are natural selection's supercharger. Nothing shreds through a population like a pandemic.
Research initially showed that the Black Plague was responsible for bringing this mutation to the forefront... it affects its host in a similar way to HIV/AIDS. However further tests showed that the mutation provided no real immunity to the Plague. But what tests did show is that CCR5delta32 also provides immunity to
smallpox, which was rather nasty, killing half a million people in Europe a year. That provides the natural selection oomph required for such a pronounced mutation in such a localized area.
Scientists are now studying this mutation and using it as a possible avenue towards a vaccine that can be administered. And people say evolutionary biology provides no useful research data...
