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The Scientist reports on a study of a villages in Argentina, where the people have been drinking poison—arsenic, to be specific—for thousands of years. The levels in the principal water source is up to 80 times the level considered to be safe by the World Health Organization (WHO). Even the best wells exhibit over 20 times the arsenic allowed in the WHO limit.
And it doesn't seem to bother them at all. There is every indication that these Andean communities may have evolved the ability to metabolize arsenic.
Swedish biologist Karin Broberg, of Stockholm’s Karolinska Institute, and colleagues at Uppsala and Lund Universities have been trying to figure out how generations of villagers in the Andean village of San Antonio de los Cobres (SAC), an area of nearly 6,000 residents, have been able to survive this chronic exposure to toxic levels of arsenic.
The researchers knew that a particular allele, AS3MT, located on chromosome 10, was suspected as the main gene involved in arsenic metabolism in humans. But the metabolism rate in these Andean villagers was sky high compared to people elsewhere.
Broberg and her colleagues hypothesized that the remarkable arsenic tolerance of SAC residents might be due to particular variants of AS3MT that confer better arsenic metabolism. They wondered, further, if thousands of years of arsenic exposure had given a survival advantage to individuals with these metabolism-driving alleles and had increased the frequencies of these genetic variants.
By comparing genetic samples and urine from a wide selection of South American populations in Peru, Argentina, and Columbia, they hoped to determine if the arsenic tolerance was simply due to genetic accident, (population drift) or if it was a byproduct of natural selection. Natural selection tends to exhibit itself via higher levels of homozygosity, where particular alleles come from one lineage. (See here for a primer on Drift vs Selection.
In the area around AS3MT, the SAC population differed dramatically from the comparison populations. Not only did the SAC women have higher levels of protective AS3MT alleles, but these alleles also had longer stretches of homozygosity—a telltale sign of selection.
The extremely strong difference in allele frequency is considered a clear result of selective pressure on a population.
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2015, @01:10AM
You're darn tootin' it is.
And there it is! The strawman in full. This is completely irrelevant to anything.
Attribution is irrelevant to the truth of the matter unless the question of attribution is the centre of the matter. Here it is not.
All of them? Or some, as is most convenient for you now?
My ex- is a creationist. She's convinced that her fictional deity created the universe, the Earth, the animals, and the people, and her position is that nothing has changed since her big invisible skydaddy did so.
You argue like a politician, shifting the argument to a position you feel you can win: nobody mentioned Darwin until you did. The first strawman was constructed by you. You just continually use that particular term in an effort to reinforce your own somewhat hilarious position.
Correct. Stop it. Stop it now.
Here's your same old strawman again. Can't you dispense with that? Who came up with it is completely irrelevant to your stated position - that it is flawed:
Unfortunately for him? I thought he didn't come up with it? Your position is that it was an idea from creationists, therefore it is unfortunate for them that the evidence doesn't support it.
That is, if it actually doesn't. You've cited no information to support your conclusion nor have you have provided evidence besides a repeated statement that Darwinism was not created by Darwin therefore it is all false, without any explanation as to the relevance of the statement.
You have not even constructed an argument.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 05 2015, @06:20AM
According to the bible, God made exactly two humans, Adam and Eve, and all other humans are their descendents. However there are clearly very different humans (black skinned, white skinned, red skinned, etc.) and those traits are obviously inherited (children of black people are black again, etc.). Therefore it is impossible that nothing changed since God created the world. Well, unless the bible doesn't tell us the truth. ;-)
(Score: 2) by TK on Friday June 05 2015, @01:47PM
See the Curse of Ham [wikipedia.org] and the Mark of Cain. [wikipedia.org] Bonus: Towel of Babel [wikipedia.org] for the origin of world languages.
The Mormons claimed that Native Americans were red-skinned because God cursed them too. I don't know the name of that story though.
The fleas have smaller fleas, upon their backs to bite them, and those fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum