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Prions Evolve Despite Having No DNA
An anonymous reader writes "Scientists from the Scripps Research Institute have shown for the first time that 'lifeless' organic substances with no genetic material — prions similar to those believed responsible for Mad Cow disease and similar, rare conditions in humans — are capable of evolving just like higher forms of life. The discovery could reshape the definition of life and have revolutionary impacts on how certain diseases are treated."
... the definition of life is going to have to change.
But mine will still be the same. :)
I hate Republicans, but I really fucking hate Democrats.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
You know if you've taken "Bio 102" I would hope you would know that micro-evolution and macro-evolution are biological terms. High school biology curriculum topic really.
Wikipedia link despite the US-centric poor content quality of the article, get a real textbook on biology instead, a big fat hardcover one. To say that micro-evolution and macro-evolution differs only in quantitative terms as said in the Wikipedia article is pure (American) bullshit (and the "authoritative" argument completely irrelevant in its meaninglessness --it's simply a political statement and certainly not a scientific one no matter who makes it). From a biology/science perspective alleles and genes are simply not the only components in evolution. For example the difference in alleles and genes between some apes and humans are only a few percent (and there aren't all that many percentages different between most mammals either) and far less on its own than it takes to explain the differences between the species: evolution is not simply about what data is present (alleles/genes) but also what data is read and used by the organism and how, i.e. there's far more to evolution than simple differences in alleles (specific allele changes = micro-evolution as they always happen over a fairly short period of time while the bigger picture which includes much more than series of allele changes = macro-evolution).
And the Wikipedia statement "Contrary to belief among the anti-evolution movement proponents, evolution of life forms beyond the species level ("macroevolution", i.e. speciation) has indeed been observed and documented by scientists on many occasions.[5]" is sourced to a (hopefully layman) list of "examples" that are fucking hopeless in their total disregard for the actual questions of interest and seemingly utterly confuses speciation with various forms of breeding, hybridization, and simple mutations (including fatal ones! that's a laugh), and the examples are nowhere close to the big questions and issues regarding macro-evolution.
It should go without saying that lessening the criteria for what can be determined to be observed naturally occurring speciation until the criteria are low enough will "solve" the issues, but it also of course makes doing any such completely useless with regard to science unless one is a brain dead idiot who "believes" it must be so because of assumptions (and that is not science despite how many "scientists" do it, including far too many biologists).
Bloody hard to take biology as a whole seriously with that many idiots around: they're the ones destroying science far more effectively than any strange religious micro-sized minorities.
Ah the cesspool of politicized "science" that is the US. Why does the US consistently and continually have to fuck up the meanings of words and concepts and twist them into grotesque caricatures devoid of intelligence? And not just in science, for fucks sake they've even managed to turn "liberal" into de facto "fascist"! (look closely and most US "liberals" are merely pinkish fascists, the word liberal as used when describing the political ideology meant the exact opposite originally and still does in most of the world).
Rant over but god damn it I've gotten so fed up with all the shite coming out of the US, particularly during the last twenty years. Will they stop soon?