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Researchers Find Clue to SIDS Early Detection
SpaceAdmiral writes "The Globe and Mail is reporting that scientists have found babies who die from Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) tend to have an abnormality in their brain stem. By linking SIDS to a biological cause, it may now be possible to test for the abnormality and treat babies at risk of SIDS."
While this will possibly one day be good news, the number of tests for pregnant mothers and babies is just astounding. It turns into a situation where pregnant women are told "you have a 1 in 4000 chance that your child has X," which creates a lot of worry and concern for what in 3,999 out of 4,000 cases is nothing.
Frequently, these tests are for things that can't be cured, or that have experimental cures that are sanctioned by the American Societies of Obstetrics/Pediatricians, but the treatment success rate isn't known, nor are the potential harms of a lot of the "cures."
I'm not belittling the science here, nor am I saying that this isn't a good thing, I'm just pointing out a human cost here -- the stress levels for tests and procedures during these stages of development are very high, and it is an extremely rare doctor who will/can admit that their procedures are experimental.
If you're pregnant or have a small child, do some research on the tests you'll be given. You'll be amazed at what you discover.
After scanning the posts on this topic, I crave a -1 Inhumanly Tasteless moderation option.
I have suffered from being misunderstood, but I would have suffered a hell of a lot more if I had been understood.
Natural selection is, in the most basic form, eliminating those traits that do not survive in whatever the current environment is. In this case, assuming that a defect transforms from near certain fatality to usually treatable, even if through human advancement of the 'environment', the environment simply has changed to not weed out that attribute, one way or another.
Really, if you want to have the heartiest gene pool with respect to the whole natural selection scheme of things, you keep everyone alive you can within reason, even if no apparent benefit can be objectively realized for their apparent defect. The whole deal is that when the environment changes, bizarre things can happen and the more genetic diversity your population has, the more able it is to survive radical changes.
An example is sickle-cell anemia, most common people with an incomplete grasp of natural selection would think 'that sucks, let nature eliminate that gene from the pool!'. However in the incomplete dominance model it happens to behave, a person heterozygous for sickle cell anemia happens to be much more resistant to malaria.
In the case of this article, let's assume some neurological pathogen suddenly becomes ubiquitous to the human environment, and somehow the brain stem 'defect' shields those with the trait. Assume this preliminary research is correct and leads to a cure for SIDS, for the sake of discussion. You have a hearty population with a now harmless defect that would be the only survivors. If SIDS wipes out that 'defect' and such a weird pathogen came, the species goes extinct.
To be trekkie for a moment, a good demonstration is when the TNG crew came upon a planet that eliminated all defective conceptions to not deal with the associated problems. However, their planet was saved from obliteration based on technology in Geordi's visor, which never would have come about in a society where they avoided having to make such a device. The principle is interesting fodder for science fiction, and that I think illustrates well the pitfall of 'let only the best go on'. Best is always relative to the current status quo, which is never unchangeable.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
If you understood natural selection, 'diluting' the population is never bad. Genetic diversity to the extent that a species can pull it off always means more flexibility. See my other post around here.
For example, picture the population genetic diversity represented as a bell curve, with the 'optimum' being the modal value. This curve comes about from a whole set of selection pressures, which in an abstract way in this example maps in the aggregate toward that modal value being allowed to survive.
If your gene pool is 'more pure', You have a very very steep curve with a very small stardard deviation. Suddenly some aspect of the environment shapes the landscape such that anyone within two standard deviations of that particular curve would die off, leaving a small percentage of population which may or may not be viable, with a high chance of not being viable.
Now picture a 'dilute' population all over the place with maybe a peak, maybe barely discernible. Now the same calamity comes about and wipes out exactly what would have been two standard deviations of the previously mentioned curve, but now it's only maybe a half of one standard deviation in this, and new curve or curves form to accommodate the calamity from the much more likely viable remaining population.
This is a really abstract graphical way to complement the physical examples given elsewhere.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
I think it's pretty obvious we're diluting our gene pool with a bunch of shit (the rise of nearsightedness seems like an obvious one to me), a huge number of diseases have their symptoms treated without the problem being fixed. When these people have kids.. they're just perpetuating the decline.
Depends on how you look at it. Yes, as someone who is nearsighted I would probably be dead as a caveman (well, maybe not, I'm only 20/50 but say I was 20/100 or something) because I would lack the basic skills necessary to find food and protect myself (ie, the ability to see prey and predators from a distance).
However this is not the caveman days, and to succeed today, peak physical condition is generally not as much of a requirement as a well functioning brain. So over time, this species is getting a lot smarter, and a lot less physically fit, but what does it matter? That IS natural selection, important attributes flourish, unimportant ones do not.
If an all out nuclear war drops us back into the stone age, then yes the vast majority of us will not be hardy enough to survive (nor will most posses the skills necessary to survive without a walmart). So then there will be massive diebacks, and natural selection will continue to work as always under these new requirements.
Basically, Stephen Hawking is a pretty good example of this. He would be a total liability to any stone age tribe and would be long dead by now if he lived in that scenario. As it stands now, I do not consider it a bad thing that we live in a period of time where he is able to contribute to society and not be a liability.
Finkployd
Natural selection favors traits that allow a species to survive in its environment, not in some other environment, such as the one its forbears inhabited.
So, for example, our forefathers were genetically predisposed to not be allergic to peanuts. That was simply not a trait a specimen could express and survive. Nowadays, with effective diagnosis and cortizone shots and "May contain nuts" labels all over the place, it's something you can live with. Nowadays, lots of people are deathly allergic to peanuts, and those people can breed just like everyone else
Does that mean that the current human species is less fit to survive? Well sure, but only in a habitat substantially different from our own. I kinda doubt we could survive on the ocean floor, either, even though we had ancestors that could. I don't hear any whining about that
I suppose in some gut reaction kind of way, being reliant on modern technology makes us less "tough" as a species, and that rankles. But does it rankle more than babies dying all over the place? Than having to worry if your baby in particular is going to bite it for what seems like no good reason? I hardly think so.
It's not like this "damage" is irreversible, either. Genetic drift aside, traits that don't impact fitness in the current environment will vary randomly, so should conditions change due to the science fiction scenario of your choice, the people who have the "right stuff" will survive just fine.
If you're going to be elitist, it would help to be elite.