Right on, brother!Doclector said:
-sob-
At the moment, this doesn't affect me in the slightest. I dunno though, it kind of makes me worry for down the road.
Enjoy the Gonorrhea, Amercians.
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-sob-
At the moment, this doesn't affect me in the slightest. I dunno though, it kind of makes me worry for down the road.
i dont know what perceptions you have about america but the majority of us believe in evolution.Hagi said:
Speaking of ironic sex facts. Did you know that US states which ONLY teach abstinence-only sex education actually have the highest rates of teen-pregnancy? Yep, that's totally working as intendedHagi said:
Subject matter aside, stuff like this is a serious concern. Quite a few viral and bacterial infections are becoming resistant to the common treatments for them (look at some of the antibiotic-resistant tuberculosis strains that are starting to pop up nowadays). We're simply running out of effective treatments in some cases because they've already adapted themselves to resist everything else we've tossed at them. We've made a lot of common and/or dangerous diseases a non-issue for decades, but we've also begun to make those same diseases more resistant and tougher to kill, and if they ever get to the point where we run out of ways to treat them, then modern medicine has basically gone back to square one.
Personally, I think there's going to come a point where we need to come up with some whole new types of medicine and/or treatments, or the bacteria and viruses are just going to out-evolve our ability to do anything to them. Then you're looking at a world health crisis.
It's why I intentionally said that it has a reputation for it rather than straight out didn't believe in it.martyrdrebel27 said:
You have to admit, when it comes to news stories concerning school programs either rejecting evolution outright or teaching creationism or whatever as an equally viable theory it's almost always from the states. It may be a minority but it's one that doesn't really exist in other first world countries and thus enough to cement a reputation.
As someone who does not live in Canada or the USA, and has always practiced safe sex in the first place...
Natural Selection doesn't give a fuck if you replicate, breed or clone yourself with a malfunctioning transporter. If there's even the slightest difference between two offsprings they will be differently affected by their environment.2xDouble said:
If Natural Selection didn't affect asexually reproducing individuals then why are bacteria becoming resistant, why are viruses changing, why can we make E. coli grow in an environment it could by definition not survive?
Natural Selection certainly applies. Natural Selection only concerns itself with extant organisms. Adaptation/Evolution requires multiple generations with inheritable genetic material (and bacteria may not breed, but they still have multiple generations - even if you don't want to acknowledge horizontal transmission).2xDouble said:
Bleh. From Wikipedia [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_selection]: "Natural selection is the gradual, non-random process by which biological traits become either more or less common in a population as a function of differential reproduction of their bearers."2xDouble said:
So, yeah, bacteria replicate. And their replication is imperfect due to mutations and horizontal transmission.
This leads to variable survivability and fecundity, which leads to some strains of bacteria replicating more successfully than other strains.
i.e., natural selection.
To claim that it doesn't apply to bacteria because they don't bang is a little silly, especially since experiments with bacteria have been used to prove natural selection can give rise to new, beneficial traits [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E._coli_long-term_evolution_experiment].
Well Antibiotics normally prevent them from from creating new cells walls, so they break apart when they replicate.2xDouble said:
It applies.
My opinion? I already knew that. I mean more than half of antibiotics are used in livestock. Antibiotics are being dangerously overused.
The problem is, antibiotics targeting permanent biochemical targets will probably be heavy-duty and indiscriminate. Not pleasant. We'll just have to accept continuous antibiotic adaptation to target the new chemical structures of bacteria, that they have a limited lifespan for effectiveness and need to be modified every so often.Esotera said:
And also ban the excessive use in livestock.
Bacteria is beholden to random mutation, natural selection and evolution just like everything else that's alive.2xDouble said:
If there's ever proof of evolution being terrifying, it's bacteria out-adapting the entire scientific community of planet earth.
But this assumes that the target is some receptor protein that the bacteria is able to change and continue existing. Targetting something specific to bacteria which they can't change like their ribosomes would be a really effective way of an 'immortal' antibiotic that would be very hard to develop resistance to.Uszi said:
Well, I probably shouldn't worry about this, since the last (and first, actually) time I got some good stuff was around this time last year. And since then, it's been a dry well of depression, overeating and piles of used tissues...
*sob* I'm so lonely... T.T
*sob* I'm so lonely... T.T
Generally, you want your medication to be as effective as possible with as little side effects as you can manage. So most of our antibiotics is a group called beta-lactams, which works rather well because it inhibits a specific protein in a bacteria's reproduction cycle that is not present in mammalian cells so while a bacteria will lose its cell wall and thusly defense against our immune cells our body cells are fine and side effects are minimal.Esotera said:
Then there's a rather new group called cyclic lipopeptides, which act in multiple ways and inhibit synthesis of proteins, DNA and RNA, but have a rather <url=http://www.drugs.com/sfx/daptomycin-side-effects.html>long list of side effects with at least some of those symptoms present in around 5-10% of patients. It also seems to be inferior to classic beta-lactam treatment and in any case only works on Gram-positive bacteria.
And not to forget broad-spectrum antibiotics that also attack cell wall biosynthesis more effectively than the narrow-spectrum ones but are a lot more brutal to our own body's internal functions
Can you make something that dissolves DNA to get rid of infections? Sure, but that's not going to be pleasant for yourself.
The thing is that most of the antibiotics one way or another attack cell walls because that's the simplest and most logical solution. It's fairly hard to get inside a cell, you gotta abuse possible natural transporter channels and those can change then you're stuck at the start again. Bacterias haven't survived this long by hiding in a cave for 500 million years, they are damn good at adapting to any possible attack. E. coli, if I remember correctly, can transcribe its whole genome (4,6M base pairs) in about half an hour. You can do a lot of adaptions if you've got a new generation every half hour.
