just as in cancer or other infectious diseases, the natural selection placed on the hiv population within the patient by therapy (haart) will make it likely for the emergence of drug-resistant strains. thus, even patients who do not have drug-resistant strains of hiv will benefit if this therapy is a success.
of course, one cannot be sure that the selection pressure exerted by the t-cells with the ccr5 (\delta 32?) deletion will not result in hiv strains capable of invading t-cells via a new mechanism.
i agree with you that the post above is not insightful; however, i will disagree that humans have a higher mutation rate than e.coli. humans have much more accurate error correction machinery than bacteria.
however, the previous post is not insightful for a multitude of reasons. the crucial error is that the anonymous coward is not taking into account various evolutionary forces. the citrate mutation could have appeared and disappeared by chance (genetic drift) multiple times if the citrate metabolism gene did not confer enough of an advantage (generally it has to be s > 1/N, where s is the advantage and N is the population). so the simple arithmetic while adorable, is deeply ignorant. to edify, get this from your library...
not all unicellular organisms belong to the same species. there are a variety of criteria to determine speciation. invisible differences between (invisible) organisms does not mean they cannot be of different species. even in fruit flies, it takes training to differentiate visually melanogaster from simulans from yakuba etc.
creationists distinguishing "macro" and "micro" is just their attempt at using semantics to deny evidence. no one has agreed on a standard definition of species; a creationist could pick and choose a definition to refute an argument as convenient.
any how, can you test creationism with a likelihood test? i do not know the answer to that, but i do know that you could sample dna from these new citrate metabolizing bacteria and test the hypothesis that positive selection was acting on certain parts of the genome corresponding to the appropriate enzymes and come up with a p-value. for some reason i am skeptical that you could do the same for a god-helped-the-bacteria hypothesis.
Many people are mentioning that Newton was wrong and Einstein found out the truth. Newton was right, but only for special cases--when an object is going at speeds much slower than the speed of light. Even the fastest space probe traveled at 1.8e5 mph, which is.03% of the speed of light(pretty insignificant I'd say).
Slashdot Mirror
just as in cancer or other infectious diseases, the natural selection placed on the hiv population within the patient by therapy (haart) will make it likely for the emergence of drug-resistant strains. thus, even patients who do not have drug-resistant strains of hiv will benefit if this therapy is a success.
of course, one cannot be sure that the selection pressure exerted by the t-cells with the ccr5 (\delta 32?) deletion will not result in hiv strains capable of invading t-cells via a new mechanism.
there are tools to help parallelize code:
http://www.stats.uwo.ca/faculty/yu/Rmpi/
http://www.sfu.ca/~sblay/R/snow.html
i agree with you that the post above is not insightful; however, i will disagree that humans have a higher mutation rate than e.coli. humans have much more accurate error correction machinery than bacteria.
http://www.genetics.org/cgi/content/full/156/1/297
however, the previous post is not insightful for a multitude of reasons. the crucial error is that the anonymous coward is not taking into account various evolutionary forces. the citrate mutation could have appeared and disappeared by chance (genetic drift) multiple times if the citrate metabolism gene did not confer enough of an advantage (generally it has to be s > 1/N, where s is the advantage and N is the population). so the simple arithmetic while adorable, is deeply ignorant. to edify, get this from your library...
http://www.amazon.com/Population-Genetics-John-H-Gillespie/dp/0801880084/
not all unicellular organisms belong to the same species. there are a variety of criteria to determine speciation. invisible differences between (invisible) organisms does not mean they cannot be of different species. even in fruit flies, it takes training to differentiate visually melanogaster from simulans from yakuba etc.
creationists distinguishing "macro" and "micro" is just their attempt at using semantics to deny evidence. no one has agreed on a standard definition of species; a creationist could pick and choose a definition to refute an argument as convenient.
any how, can you test creationism with a likelihood test? i do not know the answer to that, but i do know that you could sample dna from these new citrate metabolizing bacteria and test the hypothesis that positive selection was acting on certain parts of the genome corresponding to the appropriate enzymes and come up with a p-value. for some reason i am skeptical that you could do the same for a god-helped-the-bacteria hypothesis.
Many people are mentioning that Newton was wrong and Einstein found out the truth. Newton was right, but only for special cases--when an object is going at speeds much slower than the speed of light. Even the fastest space probe traveled at 1.8e5 mph, which is .03% of the speed of light(pretty insignificant I'd say).