Mutation and Human Evolution

Oddly, I got caught up in my bird flu research and forgot about this thread. Odd because the two topics are intertwined. According to the premise outlined here, bird flu is an evolutionary medium, a vehicle for transporting (a) new biomacromolecule(s) around the world. ...The "goal" being to harmonize the planet's molecular composition.

Hypothetically: Low level exposure is beneficial and brings the individual organism into alignment with the biosphere; high level exposure is overwhelming to the individual organism, creates the need for too-rapid change and adaptation, and causes death.

More later. Sorry for neglecting this thread.

By accident (albeit with the help of ATS' 'most recent threads' toolbar) i found the following, rather interesting, article about lifeforms lacking any genetic information.

Source

..Specifically, Louis has isolated strange, thick-walled, red-tinted cell-like structures about 10 microns in size. Stranger still, dozens of his experiments suggest that the particles may lack DNA yet still reproduce plentifully, even in water superheated to nearly 600 degrees Fahrenheit . (The known upper limit for life in water is about 250 degrees Fahrenheit)
..

Although the article emphasizes their alledgedly alien origin, the mere existance of nucleotid-deficient lifeforms has vast implications, if DNA/RNA are not required for transfer of characteristics, our emphasis on genes probably blinded science to an extent which, among other things, would allow entire classes of illnesses to be simply overlooked.

If you accept the premise that we are all part of an ecosystem, more or less, this system suddenly seems a lot more tightly knit than ever before, doesn't it?

Originally posted by Long Lance

If you accept the premise that we are all part of an ecosystem, more or less, this system suddenly seems a lot more tightly knit than ever before, doesn't it?

Yes. Hence my hypothesis that the planet's communications systems are actual, physical, and drive "evolution."



And thanks for the link.

www.dhushara.com..." target="_blank" class="postlink">Source

Epigenetic Inheritance

Speculation aside, one thing is certain. "Bizarre things are going on that we are just beginning to get a handle on," says Marcus Pembrey, a clinical geneticist at the Institute of Child Health in London. ,R Consider the pregnant Dutch women who starved during the famine of the Second World War. Not unexpectedly, thev had small babies. Far more surprisingly, those babies went on to have small babies, even though the postwar generation was well fed and no genes had been tinkered with. Then there are the perplexing findings in mice and rats. Give just one generation of male rats a drug called alloxan, which decreases the body's sensitivity to the hormone insulin, and their offspring and their offspring's offspring become progressively more prone to diabetes. Expose mice to high doses of morphine and the damage to the nervous system persists in their descendants. And one injection of the thyroid hormone thyroxine into a newborn rodent permanently depresses levels of both that hormone and thyroid stimulating hormone-and levels remain low in the next generation, too. Many of these observations are decades old and have long been relegated to the scrap heap of unexplained and inconvenient findings.

i'll add a few keywords: Diabetes, Obesity, AD/HD, degenerative disease.... our environment permanently shapes our lives, now take a look outside if you like your environment... those who fail to learn fall victim to selection, or so the story goes.

That is precisely my hypothesis - that pollution creates heritable mutations.

FYI - I posted here a couple of years ago saying that LaMarck was closer to the truth than anyone yet recognized - and Byrd jumped all over me. Or was it Nygdan?

en.wikipedia.org...

Lamarck is however remembered today mainly in connection with his now superseded theory of heredity, the "inheritance of acquired traits" (see Lamarckism).

LaMarck was working at the beginning of the industrial revolution - and was appalled at its effects.

The industrial corporatists used Darwin to discredit LaMarck's work - which primarily described the impacts of industrial pollution - and it is only now being revisited...

If you're interested, this article describes the virus-triggers-evolution hypothesis fairly simply:

The viruses that make us: a role for endogenous retrovirus in the evolution of placental species

We currently think of a virus as an agent that necessarily reduce host fitness and generally cause disease, together with other pathogenic microorganisms, such as bacteria and fungi. In this presentation I will develop the idea that in addition to this role, viruses can also invent systems of molecular genetic identity and superimpose a new combined identity onto the infected host. In so doing, a virus can allow the host itself to adapt to the environment and evolve quickly, providing a creative force that the host may further develop into systems of identity and immunity that can contribute directly to host evolution.

...the genomes of placental mammals are also highly infected with retroviruses found only in their genomes (endogenous) and because retroviruses are generally immunosuppressive, I examine the possibility that the embryo is acting like an infectious agent that produces virus to suppress the mother's immune system.
...parasitic viral-like genomes may represent one of the primary mechanisms for the evolution of higher order living systems.

The virus-triggers-evolution hypothesis dovetails with the idea of complex lifeforms (like humans) as superorganisms...

Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking "superorganisms," highly complex conglomerations of human cells, bacteria, fungi and viruses.

[Ed....I would add "macromolecules" and "nanoparticles."]

Also see Wikipedia: Superorganism

My own hypothesis is that microbes carry macromolecules between individuals and systems with the effect of harmonizing everything one with the other - a microview of the macro Gaia hypothesis. In the long term, I don't think it's a bad thing, prions notwithstanding. In the short term, only, we face "disease" as we assimilate and integrate the new molecular "information."


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