Academic jobs are rarely describable as 'cushy' and require lots of work all the time to simply justify their existence. This doesn't mean there are no crackpots, but it does mean your general perspective on academic life as depicted here is flawed.
There have been many successful reintroductions, but the general criteria for them is that the habitat has to exist. In the case of black rhinos, the habitat is still being abused by poaching/etc, so reintroducing the animals won't help the population. The successful reintroductions tend to be with smaller species that never got the attention of poachers/collectors, but that were harmed incidentally through our actions.
The reason we care about extinction is that we probably caused them. The reason the police care about the death of a person you were arguing with is because you probably caused it.
A reason we care about extinctions that we cause is that interesting and potentially valuable species are casually discarded. We don't care about the extinction of the smallpox virus because it was an intentional process because of the incredible harm it caused us. If the Sumatran Rhino had a habit of killing everyone in any village it came across, we would be less concerned about their extinction. Instead the rhino peaceably goes about its life and we humans kill it out of spite, or to make our erections bigger, or other stupid short-sighted selfish reasons.
The point of no return for a biological species is a complicated concept. If you have one male and one female, then they can survive... but they will probably be more susceptible to the pathogenic organisms that can evolve faster than them. If you have one female of a parthogenic species, that species can survive. The low genetic diversity only impacts the likelihood of long term evolutionary survival, not their "viability" as a species.
In the case of "Lonesome George", it was only a hopeless cause because he no longer had any interest in sex. If he had lived another twenty years, we would probably have cloned him and generated females for him and thus preserved the species for repatriation to the island he came from. Should we just have made soup out of him when we realized we couldn't find any others like him?
Cheetahs show evidence of an evolutionarily recent extremely severe population bottleneck. Skin grafts can be made from one animal to any other random animal and have a decent change of success. Should we just kill off the cheetahs because there's no hope for them genetically?
The point of having a bunch of animals is that they have their own life and evolutionary trajectory to follow. If they're sickly, then selection will rapidly sort out the unhealthy versions of genes and the species will move along.
The "dealing with it" is the necessary testing part of medical science. It could be throat cancer, or a wasp stuck in her throat, or a magical fairy that doesn't like her, or a herpesvirus infection of the controlling nerve, or radiation damage from a neighbor's death ray experiments, or Bell's Palsy. Without any testing to validate the opinion, the opinion means absolutely nothing at all about what is actually going on in the medical issue.
Doctors will initially diagnose and treat for the common causes of a problem, because that will help the majority of people. The only way to know that a more complicated scenario is unfolding is to notice the standard treatment did nothing to help (or even made it worse). If the disorder is very rare, such as partial paralysis of a vocal chord, there will be no common cause to guide their treatment.
There are sensors in the aorta and carotid arteries which detect the gas levels, not in the brain. It is the level of CO2 which leads you to think you have to breath. If the O2 levels go down, your heart/breathing rate will increase to compensate, but you won't register a need to breath unless CO2 increases at the same time. If you're breathing in Ar gas, or any other inert gas, you won't realize you're in trouble until you pass out (and then promptly die).
Re:Oddly... I have a clue about this stuff lately
on
The DNA Data Deluge
·
· Score: 1
I agree, CNVs are really easy to detect if you have the read depth. I've been using the samtools pileup output to show CNVs in my study organism. However, to make the results mean anything to most people, I've got to do a few more steps of processing to get all that data in a nice visual format.
If you don't have the read depth, you lose the ability to discriminate small CNVs from noise. Large CNVs, such as for whole chromosomes, are readily observed even in datasets with minimal coverage.
They're still in the research phases, but they're the sort of technology needed to do targeted alterations as you suggest. The difficulty in the human case would be to get the protein into every single cell... but you might be able to get away with altering a batch of stem cells, which would then added back into the heart/etc to ameliorate specific clinical pathologies.
DDT leads to a thinning of eggshells in raptors, but not chickens/sparrows/crows/dugs/etc., via its metabolite DDE. There were LOTS of studies on this topic back before the general scientific consensus had been reached. Researchers stopped studying this topic because they lost interest in it.
Bald Eagles eat primarily fish. The particular fish eat primarily other fish and bugs. Perhaps you're thinking of Golden Eagles, which do primarily eat mammals on the size range of rabbits and prairie dogs. I don't know what an "American Eagle" is.
Another aspect of the success of the German cockroach (mentioned in article) is that they're colonial animals. If the food source runs out, they will simply eat each other and keep breeding... resulting in a slowly shrinking colony. Eventually the colony will starve itself out of existence, but generally the humans living near by will have accidentally given them some food that isn't the colony... resulting in the colony rapidly growing again.
It really is too bad that you have to get to the very high end of math studies before you realize the advancements are made by completely non-linear thinking.
Your model would give you the worst of both scenarios. First you don't vaccinate them, such that they're at risk from all those diseases during childhood (when most of those diseases are most problematic). If they survive that gauntlet, then you vaccinate them, such that they're at risk for the damage from the vaccine. Your perception of the dilemma is not a rational one.
I think that article might be where I originally read about the source of the RoundupReady gene, though I'd forgotten exactly the mechanism of resistance. That is a very good article all around, thank you for finding it.
Fact is, farmers have been buying new seeds every year for far longer than GM seeds have been commercially available. I could be mistaken, but i belive that contracts prohibiting keeping seeds also pre-date GM seeds. Seed companies have made their money for decades by developing deep crop improvement research and development pipelines. Because they hire lots of PhD carrying crop geneticists, they can generate more improvement from year to year than a farmer can do on his own, with his already limited time. This enables farmers to outsource their crop improvement to specialists who are more efficient, allowing them to devote more effort on what they are best at, Growing the food. GM is just a new tool to help the seed companies, and the farmers that buy their seeds achieve the goals they have been pursuing for years.
The practice of companies selling F1 hybrid crop seed has discouraged farmers from keeping seeds for a long time, while also resulting in the increased crop yields from having specialists on the job (as you state).
The details of RoundupReady gene is a little bit different than this...
Monsanto found a bacteria in their chemical plant wastewater which was eating Glyphosphate. They examined this bacteria and isolated the gene it was using to break down the herbicide. They introduced this gene into plants, which now also break down the herbicide.
In my research involving a human pathogen, the development of drug resistance to some drugs mostly involves duplications, while for other drugs it mostly involves point mutations to relevant enzymes.
Do you have a citation for what is the most common mechanism of Glyphosphate resistance in weed plants? This is not a topic where I follow the literature extensively, so I am really curious.
It isn't just the selection for herbicide resistance in the wild farm-side weeds...
The most common weeds in a farmer's field are derived from the crop of last year. Over several years these weed crops can become very good at being weeds, having evolved outside the considerations of the farmer.
The only way to avoid this, in the Monsanto-ideal world, would be to have two herbicides (and herbicide resistant strains of crops) that you use on alternate years. Roundup would kill last years crop (and weeds), but not kill RoundupReady crops. RoundupPlus would kill last years crop (and weeds), but not kill RoundupPlusReady crops. Of course, Monsanto won't do this... since this would require incorporating evolutionary theory into their basic business model.
Recent hybrids don't lose their traits when crossed to themselves.
They produce children with random mixes of the traits of the grandparent plants. Each different.
You can cross an individual plant with itself (ether if they are self fertile or by manipulating a cutting with plant hormones) and get an 'inbred' copy of the recent hybrid.
The progeny of a F1 hybrid (referred to as F2 generation) will generally not have the traits of the parent. This could easily be described as the hybrid having lost the traits when crossed to itself (inbred). The diversity of trait combinations which will appear in the F2 generation generally make them useless for a farmer who is planning on a consistent crop. That same diversity of trait combinations is wonderful for a farmer who is trying to breed up a new strain of a crop, but this only applies to the minority of farmers.
I believe a more prudent falsifiable hypothesis would run along the lines of (and I'm sorry, I'm only a software developer): Due to relaxed external selective pressures the bladderwort's RNA polymerase has become adept at writing coding errors to the 3% noncoded DNA during replication and this actually still serves a vital function -- especially if the bladderwort is to survive in a much larger window than a few generations.
As a biologist and software developer, I have a hard time understanding what you are trying to say here.
What they should have said is that there is no particular evidence supporting the model that the neocotinid pesticides are at all relevant to colony collapse disorder in North America.
Slashdot Mirror
Academic jobs are rarely describable as 'cushy' and require lots of work all the time to simply justify their existence. This doesn't mean there are no crackpots, but it does mean your general perspective on academic life as depicted here is flawed.
Biology grad students get paid to get their degrees. They may not be paid well, but they are not paid badly either.
You do realize that you're full of shit here, right? I'm not entirely sure you realize this because you're not posting as AC.
There have been many successful reintroductions, but the general criteria for them is that the habitat has to exist. In the case of black rhinos, the habitat is still being abused by poaching/etc, so reintroducing the animals won't help the population. The successful reintroductions tend to be with smaller species that never got the attention of poachers/collectors, but that were harmed incidentally through our actions.
The reason we care about extinction is that we probably caused them. The reason the police care about the death of a person you were arguing with is because you probably caused it.
A reason we care about extinctions that we cause is that interesting and potentially valuable species are casually discarded. We don't care about the extinction of the smallpox virus because it was an intentional process because of the incredible harm it caused us. If the Sumatran Rhino had a habit of killing everyone in any village it came across, we would be less concerned about their extinction. Instead the rhino peaceably goes about its life and we humans kill it out of spite, or to make our erections bigger, or other stupid short-sighted selfish reasons.
The point of no return for a biological species is a complicated concept. If you have one male and one female, then they can survive... but they will probably be more susceptible to the pathogenic organisms that can evolve faster than them. If you have one female of a parthogenic species, that species can survive. The low genetic diversity only impacts the likelihood of long term evolutionary survival, not their "viability" as a species.
In the case of "Lonesome George", it was only a hopeless cause because he no longer had any interest in sex. If he had lived another twenty years, we would probably have cloned him and generated females for him and thus preserved the species for repatriation to the island he came from. Should we just have made soup out of him when we realized we couldn't find any others like him?
Cheetahs show evidence of an evolutionarily recent extremely severe population bottleneck. Skin grafts can be made from one animal to any other random animal and have a decent change of success. Should we just kill off the cheetahs because there's no hope for them genetically?
The point of having a bunch of animals is that they have their own life and evolutionary trajectory to follow. If they're sickly, then selection will rapidly sort out the unhealthy versions of genes and the species will move along.
The "dealing with it" is the necessary testing part of medical science. It could be throat cancer, or a wasp stuck in her throat, or a magical fairy that doesn't like her, or a herpesvirus infection of the controlling nerve, or radiation damage from a neighbor's death ray experiments, or Bell's Palsy. Without any testing to validate the opinion, the opinion means absolutely nothing at all about what is actually going on in the medical issue.
Doctors will initially diagnose and treat for the common causes of a problem, because that will help the majority of people. The only way to know that a more complicated scenario is unfolding is to notice the standard treatment did nothing to help (or even made it worse). If the disorder is very rare, such as partial paralysis of a vocal chord, there will be no common cause to guide their treatment.
There are sensors in the aorta and carotid arteries which detect the gas levels, not in the brain. It is the level of CO2 which leads you to think you have to breath. If the O2 levels go down, your heart/breathing rate will increase to compensate, but you won't register a need to breath unless CO2 increases at the same time. If you're breathing in Ar gas, or any other inert gas, you won't realize you're in trouble until you pass out (and then promptly die).
I agree, CNVs are really easy to detect if you have the read depth. I've been using the samtools pileup output to show CNVs in my study organism. However, to make the results mean anything to most people, I've got to do a few more steps of processing to get all that data in a nice visual format.
If you don't have the read depth, you lose the ability to discriminate small CNVs from noise. Large CNVs, such as for whole chromosomes, are readily observed even in datasets with minimal coverage.
Look up Tale-Nucleases.
They're still in the research phases, but they're the sort of technology needed to do targeted alterations as you suggest. The difficulty in the human case would be to get the protein into every single cell... but you might be able to get away with altering a batch of stem cells, which would then added back into the heart/etc to ameliorate specific clinical pathologies.
Actually it does mean you have permission to do so. It doesn't mean the owners meant to give you permission, however.
DDT leads to a thinning of eggshells in raptors, but not chickens/sparrows/crows/dugs/etc., via its metabolite DDE. There were LOTS of studies on this topic back before the general scientific consensus had been reached. Researchers stopped studying this topic because they lost interest in it.
Bald Eagles eat primarily fish. The particular fish eat primarily other fish and bugs. Perhaps you're thinking of Golden Eagles, which do primarily eat mammals on the size range of rabbits and prairie dogs. I don't know what an "American Eagle" is.
Another aspect of the success of the German cockroach (mentioned in article) is that they're colonial animals. If the food source runs out, they will simply eat each other and keep breeding... resulting in a slowly shrinking colony. Eventually the colony will starve itself out of existence, but generally the humans living near by will have accidentally given them some food that isn't the colony... resulting in the colony rapidly growing again.
It really is too bad that you have to get to the very high end of math studies before you realize the advancements are made by completely non-linear thinking.
Never having sex with anyone who ever had sex with anyone. Simple really.
Your model would give you the worst of both scenarios. First you don't vaccinate them, such that they're at risk from all those diseases during childhood (when most of those diseases are most problematic). If they survive that gauntlet, then you vaccinate them, such that they're at risk for the damage from the vaccine. Your perception of the dilemma is not a rational one.
Why do you think that HPV is "incredibly rare"?
Population of US : ~251 million [http://www.census.gov/popclock/]
Population of US with HPV : ~79 million [http://www.cdc.gov/std/HPV/STDFact-HPV.htm]
That is ~31% of the population of a country which is aware of the disease and actively fighting it.
I think that article might be where I originally read about the source of the RoundupReady gene, though I'd forgotten exactly the mechanism of resistance. That is a very good article all around, thank you for finding it.
Fact is, farmers have been buying new seeds every year for far longer than GM seeds have been commercially available. I could be mistaken, but i belive that contracts prohibiting keeping seeds also pre-date GM seeds. Seed companies have made their money for decades by developing deep crop improvement research and development pipelines. Because they hire lots of PhD carrying crop geneticists, they can generate more improvement from year to year than a farmer can do on his own, with his already limited time. This enables farmers to outsource their crop improvement to specialists who are more efficient, allowing them to devote more effort on what they are best at, Growing the food. GM is just a new tool to help the seed companies, and the farmers that buy their seeds achieve the goals they have been pursuing for years.
The practice of companies selling F1 hybrid crop seed has discouraged farmers from keeping seeds for a long time, while also resulting in the increased crop yields from having specialists on the job (as you state).
The details of RoundupReady gene is a little bit different than this...
Monsanto found a bacteria in their chemical plant wastewater which was eating Glyphosphate. They examined this bacteria and isolated the gene it was using to break down the herbicide. They introduced this gene into plants, which now also break down the herbicide.
In my research involving a human pathogen, the development of drug resistance to some drugs mostly involves duplications, while for other drugs it mostly involves point mutations to relevant enzymes.
Do you have a citation for what is the most common mechanism of Glyphosphate resistance in weed plants? This is not a topic where I follow the literature extensively, so I am really curious.
It isn't just the selection for herbicide resistance in the wild farm-side weeds...
The most common weeds in a farmer's field are derived from the crop of last year. Over several years these weed crops can become very good at being weeds, having evolved outside the considerations of the farmer.
The only way to avoid this, in the Monsanto-ideal world, would be to have two herbicides (and herbicide resistant strains of crops) that you use on alternate years. Roundup would kill last years crop (and weeds), but not kill RoundupReady crops. RoundupPlus would kill last years crop (and weeds), but not kill RoundupPlusReady crops. Of course, Monsanto won't do this... since this would require incorporating evolutionary theory into their basic business model.
Recent hybrids don't lose their traits when crossed to themselves.
They produce children with random mixes of the traits of the grandparent plants. Each different.
You can cross an individual plant with itself (ether if they are self fertile or by manipulating a cutting with plant hormones) and get an 'inbred' copy of the recent hybrid.
The progeny of a F1 hybrid (referred to as F2 generation) will generally not have the traits of the parent. This could easily be described as the hybrid having lost the traits when crossed to itself (inbred). The diversity of trait combinations which will appear in the F2 generation generally make them useless for a farmer who is planning on a consistent crop. That same diversity of trait combinations is wonderful for a farmer who is trying to breed up a new strain of a crop, but this only applies to the minority of farmers.
I believe a more prudent falsifiable hypothesis would run along the lines of (and I'm sorry, I'm only a software developer): Due to relaxed external selective pressures the bladderwort's RNA polymerase has become adept at writing coding errors to the 3% noncoded DNA during replication and this actually still serves a vital function -- especially if the bladderwort is to survive in a much larger window than a few generations.
As a biologist and software developer, I have a hard time understanding what you are trying to say here.
Too bad then that Monsanto hasn't been inventing biological processes, just discovering them.
The gene to degrade the herbicide RoundUp was discovered in bacteria growing in the wastewater from a RoundUp synthesis plant.
What they should have said is that there is no particular evidence supporting the model that the neocotinid pesticides are at all relevant to colony collapse disorder in North America.