No to sound obtuse but how is applying the grand scheme of things, which is the world we live in, a problem?Originally Posted by Egapal
How is that not relevant to the argument? Again, I am not trying to be dense I just do not understand why you think the selective pressure toward avirulence is irrelevant.Selective pressure implies that random mutation will create variations some that are more deadly and some that are less. 1000 years from now the ones that are less deadly will still be around and the ones that are more deadly will not. That's not relevant to the argument though
The odds of a more deadly strain burning up the entire population are slim though. Once the strain becomes more deadly it tends to burn up the local pocket and then die out because it can not spread.If a more deadly strain wipes out mankind and thus burns its self out you will have made a valuable point but we will all be dead.
Exactly. That is what I said but you said it was irrelevant. So where is our communication break down? Cause we seem to be saying the same thing...Odds are that an established disease will mutate randomly and the strains that kill to many hosts will die out progressing the disease toward a milder form.
I do not understand this statement. How does my being correct lead to my being dead? (Also, and yes I am just nitpicking, you can not be "more" dead. You either are dead or you are not LOLThe more right you are, the more dead you are.)
Not so. There are numerous pressures that drive an organism down a given path. One pressure that keeps virulence down is the hotter strains dropping hosts before being passed on. Another pressure is that the strains that cause the least amount of debilitation are the ones most likely to be passed on. Both are selective pressures, it is just that one is a pressure against while the other is a pressure for. The latter type need not kill anyone to get to the ideal host/pathogen relationship: infection, amplification and spread without any actual disease.One more time the PRESSURE you talk about is us all dieing.
I apologize for the misunderstanding on that front. You contended statements I was making in the refutation of that vid clip as it was being applied to this flu outbreak and so I assumed you were defending it.I was never defending the video.
I take Wiki with a grain of salt but I'll run the refs and see if they produce any additional by plugging them through PubMed.I have read a hand full of papers over the past few years but of course I can't produce links to them. I hate to use wiki as a reference but it is a great source because at the bottom are lots of good references.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_g...uman_variation
This area is of course still very actively being researched but all of the signs based on the various studies you mentioned are pointing toward not a whole lot of genetic diversity in humans. We are far from being a clonal population but we are not exactly genetically diverse. This is all my synthesis of papers I have read and my field is computer programming and server architecture so take it or leave it.
I am always willing to take in new info, regardless of the source. Like I said, human genetics is not my primary field so papers on that get about third or fourth billing in my stacks of reading material. I still think we do not have enough full sequences to make a call on the homogeneity of the species but there could be a paper or 3 out there that will prove that assumption wrong.
Cheers
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