Re: Gene pools, malaria and evolution... NashtOn beware!

Marc wrote:
I really just have to laugh.

If we don't find a new dinosaur species on a given day, we find
one the next. Today's dinosaur is from Finland and came from a
very deep core several years ago, recently being studied and
found to be a knuckle from a comon species, just happening
to be drilled through down some incredible depth. It was just
in a news report in either the SMH or NYT newspapers (or one
of their AP news lists), but I can't seem to find my way back
to that report right now. But that isn't what this post is about.

This post is about Nicky's oft asked question on showing that
medicine or anything else can obtain a benefit from "the ToE"
us "darwinists" are said to "believe in". I'm afraid Nicky that you
should join Ray M. at the bar and drown your sorrows a bit.
Evolution does stuff, and it can be used to do stuff, too. The
dinosaur article before had a couple of points that were interesting.
One was to do with how rare fossils *can* be, like in Norway where
glaciers from a couple of ice ages removed a lot of the fossils, and
the other was about the desert that used to be between Norway and
Greenland, and how sparse life there was, yet a bone was brought
up in a core sample. That's one type of evidence for evolution.

Another type of evidence is the article below from the NY Times
web page (subscription is free, so I haven't trimmed the article
down this time), where Malaria might be reduced (eliminated?) by
using the gene mosquitos evolved to protect themselves from the
malaria parasite, and by shifting the gene pool for mosquitos in the
wild to make use of this gene. Fancy that. We can use evolution
to adjust a gene pool to benefit from a feature evolution provided to
the mosquito. (The gene pool adjustment is via Beauveria bassiana,
a fungus, and is explained below and, no doubt, in the Science mag.
article this report is about. I'd be happy to get you a copy of the
technical article if you like, Nic.)

Evolution is a lot of fun if you believe in it. It got us here, and it
can get us out! (I hope.) We should at least understand it and
put it to use.

(signed) marc

"Siding with evolution does not really pose a serious problem
for many deeply religious people, because one can easily
accept evolution without doubting the existence of a non-material
being. On the other hand, the truly radical and still maturing view
in the neuroscience community that the mind is entirely the product
of the brain presents the ultimate challenge to nearly all religions."

Kenneth S. Kosik in Nature (vol 439, p138; 12 Jan 2006)
Neuroscience gears up for duel on the issue of brain versus deity
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v439/n7073/full/439138a.html



****************************************************************************
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/28/science/28malaria.html

Mosquito Isn't a Happy Host for Malaria, Tests Indicate

By DONALD G. McNEIL Jr.
Published: April 28, 2006

Many mosquitoes seem to kill naturally the malaria parasites they
ingest, and it may be possible to exploit that genetic trait to fight
malaria, according to a study being published today.

Researchers have long dreamed of inserting an antimalaria gene into
mosquitoes, but this study suggests for the first time that this may be
unnecessary because "most mosquitoes are malaria-resistant and the
susceptible ones are the oddballs," said Dr. Kenneth D. Vernick,
a microbiologist at the University of Minnesota and the lead author.

The study, appearing in the journal Science, is a "major step forward"
in understanding mosquito genetics, said Dr. Allan Schapira, a
coordinator of the World Health Organization's malaria program.
Dr. Dyann F. Wirth, chief of the malaria program at the Harvard
School of Public Health, called it "a nice piece of work."

The discovery changes the terrain in the war on malaria, which kills
more than a million people a year, most of them children and pregnant
women. On this shifting battlefield, mutating parasites and mosquitoes
eventually outwit each ingenious new drug or pesticide created to
destroy them.

Natural resistance in mosquitoes to the malaria parasite, plasmodium
falciparum, is good news for researchers because it is theoretically
easier to bolster an existing gene than to implant one from another
species. Also, the study found that the resistance centers on a small
section of one chromosome, rather than on many diverse sites, making
gene manipulation easier.

However, even if a better mosquito could be created in a lab, the idea
of releasing manipulated bugs into the wild to hunt human blood would
be fraught with political perils. After lobbying by environmental
groups, some African countries now refuse food aid containing
genetically modified corn and are skeptical of genetically modified
seeds that may confer drought resistance.

As an alternative, Dr. Vernick suggested that a soil fungus that
devoured insects, whose mosquito-killing powers were described
by British scientists last year, could be used to hunt down the most
malaria-susceptible bugs in any swarm and knock them out of the
gene pool.

Dr. Schapira called the idea "interesting," but he cautioned that years
of testing would be needed to see if it was practical and safe.

The fungus, Beauveria bassiana, is harmless to humans and approved
for use on aphids. It grows in insects that land on surfaces where it
has been sprayed.

It has long been known that fewer than 10 percent of any swarm of
mosquitoes in the wild will transmit malaria. The conventional wisdom
has been that this is just chance: a female must first bite a human
unlucky enough to be infected already, then it takes about 14 days
for the parasites to develop in her gut and migrate to her salivary
glands, from which they exit into her next victim. Mosquitoes have
short lives, and a female is usually infectious for only her last few
days.

This study makes it clear that genetics play a part, too, and that
mosquitoes are not just passive squirt guns for malaria parasites.

Plasmodium parasites do hurt mosquitoes, Dr. Vernick and Dr. Wirth
said. They damage salivary tissue, make the mosquitoes fly less
vigorously and lay fewer eggs and, to gain a toehold in the insect,
may depress its immune system.

"The mosquito doesn't want to be infected, so it has responded
with this very powerful mechanism," Dr. Vernick said, referring to
what he called the "resistance island" on the mosquito genome.

By a very different route, the fungus also weakens mosquitoes; they
fly badly and bite less, and many die within 14 days. For unknown
reasons, it weakens plasmodium-carrying mosquitoes more than it
does others, Dr. Vernick said, so if a strain of the fungus just strong
enough to kill off old, weak, malarial mosquitoes could be developed,
it could "tip the balance," he said. It would suppress the malaria-
susceptible mosquitoes without creating mutation pressure on all
mosquitoes to evolve a fungus-resistant form, as DDT created pressure
to evolve pesticide-resistant forms.

For the study, scientists from the University of Minnesota, the
University
of Bamako in Mali, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in
Seattle
and Princeton University collected wild anopheles gambiae mosquitoes,
the species most likely to spread malaria in Africa, in villages in
Mali.

They let each produce a generation of offspring, then let them suck
malaria-infected blood (drawn from a villager, but fed through a
plastic
membrane). A week later, they dissected them to see where the
parasites grew. They were surprised to find that 22 percent had no
parasites at all, and that many others had low numbers. Then they
compared mosquito genomes and narrowed the search with a gene
they named APL1. When they disabled it, they found that parasites
grew well.


(From the New York Times).

***********************


1.NY times is the most leftist, liberal-pinko rag in the US.
2.What does your screed have anything to do with increased complexity
and macroevolution?



--
Nicolas

"The reason the theory of evolution is so controversial is that it is
the main scientific prop for scientific naturalism. Students first learn
that "evolution is a fact," and then they gradually learn more and more
about what that "fact" means. It means that all living things are the
product of mindless material forces such as chemical laws, natural
selection, and random variation. So God is totally out of the picture,
and humans (like everything else) are the accidental product of a
purposeless universe. Do you wonder why a lot of people suspect that
these claims go far beyond the available evidence?" Phillip E.Johnson,
The Church Of Darwin

.

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