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One thing that surprised me was the claim that the contrails left in the wake of the jets may actually be helping to reduce global warming.

Definitely not definitive, but interesting.

He thinks AIDS might not be caused by HIV but by some critical mass/combination of retroviruses.

If that's a strange thought, consider the possiblity that retroviruses alter social structure after reading this about AIDS neuropathy:

As with rabies, it appears some sexually transmitted diseases have evolved the ability to alter the amygdala of their victims so as to facilitate their transmission. In the case of rabies, the amygdala alterations generate aggressive behavior, matching the mode of transmission of the virus which tends to be via bites. Sexually transmitted diseases should produce different changes in the amygdala enhancing, not aggressive, but rather sexual behavior.

Here is evidence that increased indiscriminate sexual behavior is an extended phenotype of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus affected by amygdalar damage in the infected population:

Kluver-Bucy syndrome is described below as involving: "a profound reduction in the animals aggression and fear, a hypoemotionality, a tendency to over react to any visual stimulus, hypersexuality and an excessive oral tendency (i.e. mouthing any objects). The monkeys also tended to eat meat and feces." Note further that " destruction of the amygdala alone was sufficient enough to produce the symptoms of the Kluver-Bucy syndrome."

Finally note although the full hypersexuality component of Kluver-Bucy syndrome in humans is rare and may require damage to tissues adjacent to the amygdala, as well as the amygdala, that damage from HIV (HTLV-III) infection focuses on the amygdala, radiating outward in its degenerative effect to include all tissues destroyed in the 1930's experiments of Kluver and Bucy .

http://www.aegis.com/pubs/aidsline/1987/jul/M87702 77.html
"Subacute encephalomyelitis of AIDS and its relation to HTLV-III infection."
...
Subacute encephalitis was mainly distributed in the frontal (58%) and temporal (69%) lobes, basal ganglia (77%), amygdala (80%) , and hippocampus (64%).

(It should be noted that Simon LeVay also observed systematic differences in the brain structures of homosexuals who died of AIDS although he did not attribute such differences to HIV infection per se but rather to congenital homosexual orientation. LeVay appears not to consider the possibility that changes in brain structure might be due to a pathogen in addition to HIV.)

http://neuroscience.ucdavis.edu/amaral/Emery_Home_ Page.html
"I recently joined the lab of Dr David Amaral, Center for Neuroscience, University of California, Davis, where I am further investigating the role of the amygdala in monkey social behavior. We are looking at whether excitotoxic lesions (ibotenic acid) of the whole amygdala disrupt normal social behavior and communication in rhesus monkeys. The link between the amygdala and social behavior began with the work of Kluver and Bucy in the 1930's, when they lesioned the entire anterior temporal lobe (including temporal pole, amygdala, hippocampal formation and basal ganglia). They found a profound reduction in the animals aggression and fear, a
hypoemotionality, a tendency to over react to any visual stimulus, hypersexuality and an excessive oral tendency (i.e. mouthing any objects). The monkeys also tended to eat meat and feces. These results were replicated many times and it was found that destruction of the amygdala alone was sufficient e

Like this? (maybe not work safe)... In this case it's elephantitus, but you can also get huge bollocks from hyperthyroidism, which IS a genetic disease.

More here.

Refrences:

Should American Eat Less Meat

Humans Head Start [it's a PDF!] I'll even concede the meat might've more likely been fish met, but it was meat.

Did African Hominids Eat Meat We're not really natural herbivores at all...

I'm sure I can Google more out if necessary. We had a natural inclination towards meet as our food stuff became distributed over a wider area. We didn't have the ability to fight for the food stuff with larger animals, so we turned to meet.

I also realize that there is one piece of conflicting evidence to all this. Richard Wrangham and a few of his colleagues have argued that cooked tubers were really responsible for the massive growth of our ancestors' brains. The problem? This massive brain growth was roughly 1.8 million years ago (which Wrangham agrees), but at best we were able to control fire about 300,000 years ago. Quite a disparity. Not to mention that there's no archaelogical proof of such a diet.

The temperature of hell is > 388.36K and < 717.87K because under 1 atm pressure, molten Sulphur (".. into the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone ...") is liquid over that range.

Note that surface of the Sun is usually estimated to be about 5780K which is similar to the midpoint of the hell temperature range (5531.15K).

Therefore one might conclude that these "extreme makeovers" might be brilliant ... thus the need for sun glasses. :-)

I'm sure other interpretations exist.

. . . they have two different versions of the X-chromosome. Not the same.

And given that, "at least 98% of human DNA is identical to that of chimpanzees" how much variation do you think there is between two human X chromosomes?

However I wasn't questioning the original posters statement that two Y chromosomes are not enough to produce a healthy offspring (obviously true) - merely pointing out that a particular phrase in his post was open to mis-interpretation.

Remember sh!tt!ng your pants or not wiping sufficiently and just tossing the underwear in the hamper? Well, now people can see your poor hygiene. 8-)

It's more like the last 4 years, not the last 10 years, that "geekitude has become sexy and associated with financial success" and that only lasted for a few years.

I have an alternative genetic hypothesis, and the chutzpah to put it forth, which most people wouldn't, even though it has more evidence to support it than Byrna Siegel's. The Wired article also reports:

In the past decade, there has been a significant surge in the number of kids diagnosed with autism throughout California... Through the '90s, cases tripled in California. "Anyone who says this is due to better diagnostics has his head in the sand."

California is not alone. Rates of both classic autism and Asperger's syndrome are going up all over the world, which is certainly cause for alarm and for the urgent mobilization of research. Autism was once considered a very rare disorder, occurring in one out of every 10,000 births. Now it's understood to be much more common - perhaps 20 times more. But according to local authorities, the picture in California is particularly bleak in Santa Clara County.

What genetic change has occured in Santa Clara more than in California, in California more than in the rest of the world, and in the rest of the world more than other times in history over the last decade?

Immigration and high degrees of integration among populations that have undergone very little coevolution.

For the relevance of immigration to the potential etiology of autism-related diseases one need only look at the impact of global transport on ecosystem mixing the world over. The fact that male infants are the primary victims of autism should point to intraspecific ecological competition since, particularly in terrestrial vertebrates, males are the primary gender within which direct intraspecific competition occurs. Indeed, when we look for the physically verifiable signs of autism, we find the brain organ most clearly affected is the amygdala -- the most primitive aspect of the mammalian brain -- most directly involved in pheromonal communication -- most directly linked to the testicles by virtue of the fact that it shrinks by almost 30% upon castration in males, something that occurs in no other neuronal structure.

Furthermore, the primary increases in autism are most observable among the more stereotypically genetically recessive populations. This points to the potential mechanism being some form of extended phenotypic genetic dominance whose manifesation is intraspecific parasitic castration.

Anytime that science comes out without the peer review and editing process of a scientific journal it makes me question it. I don't know if anyone remembers the national geographic filled with the story about dinosaurs with feathers. A "find" in china was dubbed the missing link between T-rex and today's birds. Since the guys who "found" the fossil and wrote the story couldn't get published right off in a scientific journal, they published it in National Geographic - here is ABC's shorter version of the story
http://www.abcnews.go.com/sections/science/DailyNe ws/dinobird980623.html
of course, some time later, it was realized that they rushed to their conclusions and their missing link was likely a hoax.
(this story:)
http://cas.bellarmine.edu/tietjen/Evolution/Dinos/ all_mixed_up_over_birds_and_dino.htm
Anyway, I don't think that the human genome story is a hoax, but I'm not willing to buy into anything that comes out quickly claiming to be conclusive proof of anything.

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