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Sickle-cell a "beneficial mutation"??

 
 
gustavratzenhofer
 
  1  
Reply Sun 19 Feb, 2006 09:07 pm
That was an interesting outburst, Lash. I like your spunk.
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Lash
 
  1  
Reply Sun 19 Feb, 2006 09:15 pm
<smiles briefly...looks about with crinkled brow for French speaking aliens...>
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raprap
 
  1  
Reply Sun 19 Feb, 2006 09:21 pm
Lash

I asked this because
gungasnake wrote:
Simple enough. The actual evidence we have indicates the following:

That somewhere in recent prehistoric times, the engineering and re-engineering of complex life forms was some sort of an industry or ongoing process on this planet, and that more than one pair of hands was involved.
sounds consistent with Raelian dogma.

Rap
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Lash
 
  1  
Reply Sun 19 Feb, 2006 09:32 pm
Hey, raprap-- You're right. I can't tell you what his religious...? beliefs are, but it definitely does bear a striking resemblance to the Raelian stuff you brought. Thanks for the education. I hadn't heard of the sect before.
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Lash
 
  1  
Reply Sun 19 Feb, 2006 09:53 pm
Don't Mormons believe some alien stuff, as well, and the Tom Cruise religion...? Scientology?

Hmmm
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gungasnake
 
  1  
Reply Sun 19 Feb, 2006 10:29 pm
I'm not a realian or a rastafarian or any such.

Hitler paid lip service to Christianity but was in no wise a Christian, and the theory of evolution was at the bottom of his ideology.

Christianity cannot serve as a basis for racism; evolution can and does. Even when the Christian world was under threat of extermination by the Mongol and Turkish empires and a little bit of racism would have stood them in good stead they were not able to manage it. So long as Christianity held sway in Europe, racism never had a foothold there.




Newt Gingrich once stated the problem of evolutionism and morality about as succinctly as is possible in noting that the question of whether a man views his neighbor as a fellow child of God or as a meat byproduct of random processes simply has to affect human relationships.

Basically, every halfway honest person with any brains and talent who has taken any sort of a hard look at evolution in the past 60 years has given up on it and many have denounced it. A listing of fifty or sixty such statements makes for an overwhelming indictment of that part of the scientific community which goes on trying to defend evolution and they (the evolosers) have a favorite term ( "quote mining") which they use to describe that sort of argument.

My own response to that is to note what I view as the ultimate evolution quote by the noted evolutionist (actually, FORMER evolutionist) Jeffrey Dahmer:

Quote:




Dahmer converted to Christianity before he died. The basic tenets of true religion appear to be inprinted upon most of us biologically which is the only reason that Islammic societies and "secular humanist" societies like Britain and Canada function at all. A psychopath like Dahmer is basically somebody on whom that imprint did not take. For those guys, it has to be written down somewhere, and it has to be written down accurately; the bible does that. Telling somebody like Dahmer that we all evolved from "lucky dust" is a formula for getting people killed.

Evolution was the basic philosophical cornerstone of communism, naziism, the various eugenics programs, the out of control arms races which led to WW-I and WW-II, and all of the grief of the last 150 years. Starting from 1913, Europe had gone for a hundred years without a major war. They didn't even have to think. All they needed to do was act cool, go to church, have parades, formal balls, attend board meetings, and they'd still be running the world today; they'd be so fat and happy they'd not know what to do with themselves. Instead, they all got to reading about Darwinism, fang and claw, survival of the fittest and all the rest of that nonsense, and the rest as they say is history.


The most interesting analysis of that sad tale is probably Sir Arthur Keith's "Evolution and Ethics"



Keith apparently viewed belief in evolution as some sort of duty of the English educated classes, nonetheless he had a very clear vision of the problems inherent in it and laid it out in no uncertain terms:

From Sir Srthur Keith's "Evolution and Ethics:


Chapter 3

The Behavior of Germany Considered from an Evolutionary Point of View in 1942

....It is worth noting that Hitler uses a double designation for his tribal doctrine National Socialism:

Socialism standing for the good side of the tribal spirit (that which works within the Reich); aud Nationalism for the ethically vicious part, which dominates policy at and outside the German frontiers.


The leader of Germany is an evolutionist not only in theory, but, as millions know to their cost, in the rigor of its practice. For him the national "front" of Europe is also the evolutionary "front"; he regards himself, and is regarded, as the incarnation of the will of Germany, the purpose of that will being to guide the evolutionary destiny of its people....

... "Humanitarianism is an evil . . . a creeping poison." "The most cruel methods are humane if they give a speedy victory" is Hitler's echo of a maxim attributed to Moltke. Such are the ways of evolution when applied to human affairs.


...I have said nothing about the methods employed by the Nazi leaders to secure tribal unity in Germany methods of brutal compulsion, bloody force, and the concentration camp. Such methods cannot be brought within even a Machiavellian system of ethics, and yet may be justified by their evolutionary result.


12.


....No aspect of Hitler's policy proclaims the antagonism between evolution and ethics so forcibly as his treatment of the Jewish people in Germany.... ...Hitler is an uncompromising evolutionist, and we must seek for an evolutionary explanation if we are to understand his actions....

It must not be thought that in seeking to explain Hitler's actions I am seeking to justify them. The opposite is the case. I have made this brief survey of public policy in modern Germany with a definite object: to show that Dr. Waddington is in error when he seeks to place ethics on a scientific basis by a knowledge of evolutionary tendencies and practice.

Chapter 4

Human Life: Its Purpose or Ultimate End

IN THE COURSE OF GATHERING INFORMATION concerning man's morality and the part it has played and is playing in his evolution, I found it necessary to provide space for slips which were labeled "Life: Its Ultimate and Proximate Purposes." Only those who have devoted some special attention to this matter are aware of the multitude of reasons given for the appearance of man on earth. Here I shall touch on only a few of them; to deal with all would require a big book. The reader may exclaim: Why deal with any of them! What has ultimate purpose got to do with ethics and evolution! Let a man with a clearer head and a nimbler pen than mine reply. He is Edward Carpenter, who wrote Civilization: Its Cause and Cure (1889).

14.

It is from the sixteenth edition (1923) I am to quote, p. 249:

If we have decided what the final purpose or Life of Man is, then we may say that what is good for that purpose is finally "good" and what is bad for that purpose is finally "evil."

...If the final purpose of our existence is that which has been and is being worked out under the discipline of evolutionary law, then, although we are quite unconscious of the end result, we ought, as Dr. Waddington has urged, to help on "that which tends to promote the ultimate course of evolution." If we do so, then we have to abandon the hope of ever attaining a universal system of ethics; for, as we have just seen, the ways of national evolution, both in the past and in the present, are cruel, brutal, ruthless, and without mercy. Dr. Waddington has not grasped the implications of Nature's method of evolution, for in his summing up (Nature, 1941, 150, p. 535) he writes "that the ethical principles formulated by Christ . . . are those which have tended towards the further evolution of mankind, and that they will continue to do so." Here a question of the highest interest is raised: the relationship which exists between evolution and Christianity; so important, it seems to me, that I shall devote to it a separate chapter. Meantime let me say that the conclusion I have come to is this:

Quote:

the law of Christ is incompatible with the law of evolution as far as the law of evolution has worked hitherto. Nay, the two laws are at war with each other; the law of Christ can never prevail until the law of evolution is destroyed.



All of that, of course, deals only with the question of ethics and the logical consequences of evolutionism. The fact that evolution is junk science argues against it as well.

http://www.evolutionisimpossible.com
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gungasnake
 
  1  
Reply Sun 19 Feb, 2006 10:34 pm
Lash wrote:
Don't Mormons believe some alien stuff, as well, and the Tom Cruise religion...? Scientology?
Hmmm


Mormons believe that prophets and prophesy exist in our own age of the world. In that, there are in the same trickbag which slammites are in.

Joseph Smith in fact claimed to have used prophesy stones (urim) to translate several heiroglyphic documents into basic books of the Mormon religion; real translations of those texts after the Rosetta Stone had been used to get a real handle on heiroglyphics, showed Smith to have been either a con man, somebody totally misguided, or somebody smoking too much reefer. He didn't get a single word of it right.
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raprap
 
  1  
Reply Sun 19 Feb, 2006 11:01 pm
Jeffery Dahmer as a defender of evolution? HEE HEE HEE! Gunge you missed your calling. You should be on stage, cause you're as ourlandisly funny as Professor Irwin Corey

Rap
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raprap
 
  1  
Reply Sun 19 Feb, 2006 11:10 pm
Hey Gunge

Racism and Genocide existed well before 1859. Usually justified by some sort of religious principal.

Or did Darwin time travel? Hee Hee Hee!

Rap
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gungasnake
 
  1  
Reply Mon 20 Feb, 2006 04:59 am
raprap wrote:
Jeffery Dahmer as a defender of evolution?


Again, Dahmer renounced the evo-loser bullshit and became a Christian before he died.

The good news seems to be that even a psychopath can get to heaven. The bad news is that evolutionites still can't.
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farmerman
 
  1  
Reply Mon 20 Feb, 2006 06:05 am
Excellent piece from LennyFlank. He had done some very good in depth reporting re: "Who are the Creationists"

We went through this very crap with gunga about 6 months ago and , even though the fact that the Soviet Union had a clear Lamarkian bent with Lysenko , and that Mein Kampf clearly showed that Hitler was a young earth creationist, GUnga keeps coming nack with the same ol ****.
Cmon gunga lets evolve a little.
PS, We even took apart the crap by SIr Arthur Keith (who was , along with Teilhard de Chradin, one of the more vocal supporters of the Piltdown Hoax) > SO his credibility was busted, not so much for forcibly believing in it, but from being an active participant in the very fraud.
Next were gonna get the DDT lecture, you watch.

If natural selection (or even punctuated equilibrium) are clap trap, how come all the evidence doesnt support any form of Creationit belief? Is it perhaps, tat there is no evidence and youre just attempting to keep perping the Creationist fraud on the internet?

Actually Gunga is nothing more than a neo Baptist.
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raprap
 
  1  
Reply Mon 20 Feb, 2006 07:16 am
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rosborne979
 
  1  
Reply Mon 20 Feb, 2006 08:03 am
gungasnake wrote:
That somewhere in recent prehistoric times, the engineering and re-engineering of complex life forms was some sort of an industry or ongoing process on this planet, and that more than one pair of hands was involved.


More than one pair of hands?

You mean like Zeus and Apollo and Athena and Hera?

Or more like a colony of space aliens from the future trying to alter the past by manipulating Earth's genetic processes?
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raprap
 
  1  
Reply Mon 20 Feb, 2006 08:07 am
Could it have been a time traveling Jeffery Dahmer?

Rap
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gungasnake
 
  1  
Reply Mon 20 Feb, 2006 08:23 am
rosborne979 wrote:
gungasnake wrote:
That somewhere in recent prehistoric times, the engineering and re-engineering of complex life forms was some sort of an industry or ongoing process on this planet, and that more than one pair of hands was involved.


More than one pair of hands?

You mean like Zeus and Apollo and Athena and Hera?



Possibly. Or it could be that men had such capabilities and misused them, and that hence such powers were taken from them.
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raprap
 
  1  
Reply Mon 20 Feb, 2006 08:28 am
gungasnake wrote:
Christianity cannot serve as a basis for racism; evolution can and does. Even when the Christian world was under threat of extermination by the Mongol and Turkish empires and a little bit of racism would have stood them in good stead they were not able to manage it. So long as Christianity held sway in Europe, racism never had a foothold there.


or as Torquemada said "Bring on the Jews"

Rap
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rosborne979
 
  1  
Reply Mon 20 Feb, 2006 08:50 am
gungasnake wrote:
Possibly. Or it could be that men had such capabilities and misused them, and that hence such powers were taken from them.


That's cool. I just love a good sci-fi/Fantasy.

So, the God(s) gave us the knowledge and power to tweak our own genetics, but we were bad boys and girls, so they took away our toys, hid all the evidence of any un-natural activities and replaced it all with an iron-clad array of evidence indicating natural evolution (complete with all the mechanisms necessary to accomplish natural evolution).

Why didn't I think of that.
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farmerman
 
  1  
Reply Mon 20 Feb, 2006 06:00 pm
because we are the evo-losers who have to manufacture our positions in the hopes that we arent found out.


My great great grandaddy helped make the primordial soup. (It was Borscht)
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patiodog
 
  1  
Reply Mon 20 Feb, 2006 06:36 pm
now don't that beet all.
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SomeoneWanderingBy
 
  1  
Reply Sat 11 Mar, 2006 02:25 am
Beneficial mutations, trolls, and actual bio research...
gungasnake started this out saying something including...

Quote:
Take "beneficial mutations" for instance. Aside from the fact that they don't really exist, the most common example of such a thing which you hear from the e-losers is sickle-cell anemia, which is supposed to confer some limited immunity from malaria.

Think about that for a minute. I mean, if I'm the chief of some African village, the only thing I could think of worse than having half the village dying of malaria, would be having half the village dying of malaria and the other half dying of sickle-cell anemia.


This has to be a troll... because it's just so wrong. To bring it up and then grossly ignore the underlying explanation... But I guess it's not a sin to feed the trolls if you spread accurate and interesting information, right?

*So*...

That would be a quarter (versus everyone) dying of malaria at the cost of a quarter of your children. It's basic genetics. Remember? Punnet squares?

Code:N = Normal allele on one chromosome.
s = Sickle cell allele on one chromosome.

ss = Leads to death by sickle cell anemia.
NN = Leads to death by malaria.
Ns = Leads to dying of something else (hopefully) after reproduction.

Assuming both parents have survived long enough to have children (and hence are Ns) the statistics on the phenotypes of those children are modeled by the following table (each outcome having equal probability).

N s

N NN Ns

s Ns ss


Thus, 2/4 survive, repeating the above travesty of human suffering. 1/4 die of malaria. 1/4 die of sickle cell. (Until we cure malaria and subsidize genetic counseling to edit sickle cell anemia out the the human genome (if I was sitting on the right sub-committees, anyway)).

Sometimes situations like this are called "super dominance". It also accounts for A and B bloodtypes... (this attempt to model the dynamics is part of the vast literature on the subject).

A really controversial but fascinating application (summarized here) is to sphingolipid metabolism and apoptosis mechanisms in Ashkenazi Jews during the "career discrimination" they faced in the dark ages. The idea was that the jobs they were stuck with required them to be brainy to get rich and have lots of kids (in a pre-demographic transition society, so: "rich"="more kids", unlike nowadays). This was "like" malaria in creating a huge new selective pressure... the hiccups like breast cancer and Tay Sachs when you get *two* copies of a smarty-gene were due to the selective pressure being very recent and very strong.

However, the whole point is kinda moot considering the better examples of beneficial mutations such as the apoA-I Milano mutation or lactose tolerance.

(Although I have to admit that gunga might have a point about Darwinism being politically dangerous in the hands of philosophically stupid people over long periods of time. Gunga being a perfect example... unless the old "no daddy in the sky means no reason to be moral" thing he got into later is just part of the troll.)

-Jennifer
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