Posted on 02/15/2009 8:07:15 PM PST by neverdem
Nature News version
Is this how some of Europe’s descendants are immune from the Plague (viral, not bacterial. I think there were several different “Plagues”)
I’m still not sure how but somehow this has got to be Bush’s fault.
Thankfully, Ø-bama will fix this, possibly in the next stimulus bill.
Fascinating, that viruses can integrate into a species’ genetic code. There’s probably examples of this in a lot of other species as well. It may be that viruses are our best friend as well as our most dangerous enemies.
A number of families whose ancestors survived the Black Plague were found to have gene which had a 32 kilobase pair deletion for the CCR5 receptor, IIRC.
BEFORE they got “infected,” how did the wasps lay their eggs?
Happy Birthday, Darwin!
Ummm, the same way they lay them now. They just had a lower survival rate. Of course the caterpillars’ defenses probably hadn’t developed as much yet either.
Could explain evolution better than Darwin does...
^
Yikes! What a way to die: Paralyzed and eaten from the inside out! Let’s hope no large super-intelligent wasps on some other planet take humans for prey. Stuff of nightmares!
Transposable genetic elements incorporated into viruses have long been known to possess the ability to insert genetic sequences coding for new protiens into the chromosomes of host cells. This can be good or bad of course and it seems to me to be just another potential tool by which mutations can occur within a species of plant or animal.
Thanks neverdem! I knew I had read that somewhere before and even that they think AIDS is a distant cousin to the Plague and someone said “The plague is a bacteria” and I remember reading that only ONE of the plagues were bacterial, some were viral which is why they spread so quickly.
But Europeans (European Americans) didn’t seems to die as quickly and some were even immune to AIDS compared to those in Africa and Arabia and I think they thought it had something to do with that built up immunity in our DNA which is ASTONISHING to me. That we could have an IMMUNITY to a virus worked into our genetic code. How brilliant this world is sometimes!
“perhaps it expands upon and improves it instead.”
probably more correct. It is an interesting notion that genetic code could be transferred via virus and would go a long way towards explaining the lack of transitional fossils since genetic sequences that “took” could produce radically different phenotypes much more rapidly (it would seem).
What is even more amazing is all those people that figure that it all happened by the god of chance.
“chance” has never been that kind to me.
Are Wild Chimpanzees Dying from AIDS?
The Moon reveals its weirder side - SELENE mission reports on gravity anomalies.
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