Posted on 12/07/2016 8:28:25 AM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
We're very fortunate. Disasters don't seem to reach Washington County.
We have contributed a little tiny bit to Dolly Parton's "My People Fund" for the people who lost their homes and everything they owned. Parton is a true good neighbor in the sense Jesus speaks about.
My family, too, is depending on the mercy of God. Still learning to do that, at my age!
The learning never stops! Important to begin it. :-)
Glad you are far away from the horrible fire.
>>”precisely control which genes were changed”
What does “precisely control” mean; and how did folks go about effecting those precisely controlled changes before the genome of the target species had been mapped?
>>”Selection is selection”
Natural Selection is the process through which random genetic modifications impact the fitness of a species in a specific environmental context.
Random mutations are not manufactured via “precisely controlled” human technology.
Just how much of your food allotment did you spend on Pot and Beer in college anyhow?
I would say that the wheat proteins end up suffering the same fate as the majority of other proteins we eat. Being plant proteins, they are less easy to digest, so I would expect larger polypeptides to remain after the digestion process--but they would be excreted in the feces or consumed by gut bacteria, just like everything else we eat.
The overconsumption of carbohydrates is a problem. Just plain eating an unbalanced diet is a problem. Beyond that, there are no magic diets that have all the magical ingredients. You get enough of the micro- and macro-nutrients, or you don't. That is basically the essence of what decades of nutritional research have revealed.
Mhm. The same death culture that spends billions of dollars on medical research each year, looking to understand and then control or even cure the diseases that kill us.
It is pretty much as I surmised: you understand little of science, and you just want to feel like a victim so you can amuse yourself with wild conspiracy theories. You aren't interested in real knowledge. Your loss.
You do not need the entire genome of an organism mapped in order to precisely change a gene in its genome. You only need to know the sequence of that specific gene. Long before any genome was mapped, millions (billions?) of genes from thousands of species were sequenced and uploaded into a database called Genbank; even today, people publishing sequence data upload it into Genbank so that other researchers can examine it.
I spent my time in graduate school exhaustively studying the sequence and structure of two specific proteins. I made many different genetic variants of those proteins. To this day, I have no idea where they are in the genome, nor does that matter.
In order to make a precise change in a gene, there are various tactics that can be used. First, the gene is placed into a small piece of DNA for easy replication usually using bacteria. Then various methods can be used to change the gene, all of which result in the change of one or more nucleotides into different nucleotides in order to change the proteins expressed by that gene, and can sometimes add or remove nucleotides. Changes in nucleotides usually (but not always or even most of the time) cause changes in protein sequence. Changes in protein sequence can cause changes in shape and/or function. These changes have many different uses.
Natural Selection is the process through which random genetic modifications impact the fitness of a species in a specific environmental context.
Regardless, selection is selection, whether natural or not. Natural selection caused wolves to live as social animals in packs. Artificial selection caused wolves to adopt a wide variety of appearances and accept humans as pack leaders (and we call them "dogs"). Either way, selection has had strong effects on the appearance and behavior of wolves.
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Medical research has done nothing but make death more costly and likely.
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You sound very much like a crackpot new age earth worshipper.
I suppose that living until almost 80 is more expensive than dying at age 30, but I would not exactly call that making death “more costly.” And I seriously don’t know how death could be “more likely” since it already has a likelihood of 100%.
Man's “wisdom” is foolishness.
Turning to man is sure destruction.
Jeremiah 17:
[5] Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm, and whose heart departeth from the LORD.
[6] For he shall be like the heath in the desert, and shall not see when good cometh; but shall inhabit the parched places in the wilderness, in a salt land and not inhabited.
[7] Blessed is the man that trusteth in YHVH, and whose hope YHVH is.
[8] For he shall be as a tree planted by the waters, and that spreadeth out her roots by the river, and shall not see when heat cometh, but her leaf shall be green; and shall not be careful in the year of drought, neither shall cease from yielding fruit.
>>In order to make a precise change in a gene,
Is that “precise” or random gas coming out of the vociferous end of your digestive tract?
Natural Selection occurs ala random mutation.
Human genetic engineering is deliberately, precisely, targeted selection.
So, your “selection is selection” assertion is FALSE.
My experience with earth worshippers is that they believe that the earth the way it was before humans came along was somehow pristine and perfect, and that human activity destroys that pristine state.
So far, everything you have posted indicates that you believe that way.
The fact that you want to quote the Bible does not change that; your basic belief is that humans should not change anything from its “natural state.” That is the central religious tenet of earth worshippers.
The Bible tells us that we have dominion over all of the other living things on earth. Thus, it is not a crime against God to change domestic plants and animals to better serve our needs.
Well, this diet seems to work for me and many others. Given the variety in our own genome, results may vary, of course.
Natural Selection occurs ala random mutation.
Human genetic engineering is deliberately, precisely, targeted selection.
So, your “selection is selection” assertion is FALSE.
What I take from this is that you have never studied molecular biology (the study of the function and chemical form of DNA).
Alteration of DNA occurs through many natural processes, not just random mutation. Go back and read my post #28, where I describe two of the many natural processes that change DNA. There are many more processes, but it is impossible to describe them in any detail in a forum post like this.
Natural selection does not occur at the level of DNA. Selection ("natural" and "artificial") occurs at a population level. All selection means is that the population was subjected to some force that challenged its survival, and that members of the population that were better able to survive passed more of their genes to the next generation than other members of the population. Humans have applied selective pressures to every species that we have domesticated. In the Gobi desert in distant Mongolia, I saw domestic camels compared to wild camels--and they are different. That is a result of selective pressures that humans have applied to camels. We apply selective pressures to ourselves, as well. When you decide that you want to marry a sensible conservative girl who spends little time on makeup and fashion but knows how to sew and cook and can change a tire in a pinch (but would rather ask you to change it) and you avoid the pretty, primped up liberal girl who can barely recognize a kitchen, you are exerting selective pressure on humans.
As I said, selection *is* selection, regardless of the source or type of selective pressure.
I don’t think our genome has much of an effect on what a healthy diet is for any specific person. I actually think most of that is cultural—the foods you are given as a baby more or less set the stage for what is healthy for you later on. That is because the foods feed the microbiome (your gut microorganisms), and the microbiome influences your food choices and impacts your health.
In some extreme cases, probably, the genome does have an effect, but that is where living conditions limit the diet and people had to adapt (that is, they underwent natural selection) to better survive the austere diet. For example, I think that Eskimos have different ratios of digestive enzymes to deal with their diet of fat and meat. Most of us would not do well on such a diet.
And that’s what we did with wheat. We pressured it into becoming the more efficient, modern “dward wheat” common to, well, damn near anything that’s processed. Unfortunately, this selective pressuring seems to have had unintended consequences for at least some people’s health.
>>As I said, selection *is* selection,
Only in your ambiguous dictionary.
I do not think that the issue is what we (our ancestors) did to wheat, but the fact that it may be a more recent addition to our diet. It can take thousands of years to adapt to a new food.
It seems that people with a certain variant of the major histocompatibility complex—a component of the immune system—are susceptible to celiac disease. I think that it is analogous to the situation in which people who live in areas where milk is a major food have the enzyme lactase to digest the milk sugars, but people in areas where milk is not common cannot digest it. Many Asians cannot digest lactose—but Mongolians make milk a principle part of their diet, and have no trouble with it.
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