[Discussion] Is everything bad a religion?

salamander uchiha

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I don't think you are a bit worried about evolution. Then why post in a thread where we are speaking only about God his marvelous deeds?
Salamander has only been trying to help. And yet all you can do is call him names.
Calling God dumb doesn't help either.

NOTE: Salamander don't waste anymore time with him. We both have better things to do than discuss with someone in denial about his own existence.
Thanks for the advice, I won't waste more time with him. I did say he could have the last word after all.
 
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Yeah right

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I just finished a haematology rotation and saw enough of God’s work that makes you really question his capacity for intelligent design.

Some of the most common hereditary causes of anaemia are the result of mutations that protect against other diseases.
The most well-known example is Sickle-cell trait and disease. This is an autosomal recessive mutation in the beta-globulin of haemoglobin (the oxygen carrier molecule in red-blood cells) – particularly it’s a mutation that replaces a single amino-acid glutamic acid which is hydrophilic with valine (hydrophobic).

What information does this mutation add? Well, to make a complex story short red-blood cells with haemoglobin-S (the mutated form) are much more efficiently removed by the reticuloendothelial-system than haemoglobin-A1 (the variant found in the absolute majority of the human population). And this turns out to be highly protective against malaria, especially the plasmodium-falciparum the most deadly form of malaria.

Now there are two genes for the beta-globin chain and so there are two permutations of the sickle-cell mutation – you can get a single or double mutation. When you get a single mutation you end up with sickle-cell trait whereas a double mutation gives you full-blown sickle cell disease.

Sickle cell disease is a rather nasty condition to be afflicted with – in addition to anaemia you get all sorts of problems as a result of the sickle shaped red blood cells occluding the blood supply to various tissue, e.g. patients often lose their spleen as a result of splenic infarct (which then makes them prone to various nasty infections because the spleen is an important part of the immune system), they get regular episodes of very severe pain when the blood supply to their bones are occluded and every now and then they get occlusion of the blood supply to their lungs which can be fatal.

What’s more interesting is sickle-cell trait where, because there is only a single mutation, patients have just less than half of their A1 haemoglobin being the mutated variant. It turns out that this is below the threshold for sickling of the red-blood cells and most of these patients, those with the sickle cell trait because of a single mutation, do not develop any of those aforementioned problems. You get protected against malaria and none of the nasty health-problems that come with sickling of the red blood cells.

Clearly God designed the sickle-cell trait (the single mutation) but what the sickle-cell disease (double mutation), perhaps that was the work of Satan?

Well actually evolution isn’t that efficient of a system except in very long times of selection.

You see – even the sickle cell trait has its downsides. The renal medulla is a part of the kidneys where there is hypoxia and altered tonicity so extreme that the threshold for sickling is lowered so that even people with that single mutation get sickle-cells in the medulla of their kidneys. If there is even more precipitative stress (hypoxia, dehydration, acidosis) on the sickle cell trait patient’s body they can eventually develop microinfarcts in their kidneys, leading to permanent and irreversible impairment of their kidney function (which, of course, leads to all sorts of morbidity).

The sickle-cell mutation is found in as much as 10% of certain African population, it is the most common hereditary disease associated with protection from malaria but hardly from the only one. Thalassemia is another mutation-based disease that in mild forms can protect against malaria – unfortunately it’s severe forms are even worse than sickle cell disease. There are a number of other mutations that protect against malaria but they don’t do so as efficiently and all are pathological.

Clearly God needed to put some more thought into malarial protection.
So natural selection is now God?

Or is God natural selection?

Because a mutation that leads to people to have offspring has no effect. It’s just God?
 

UCHIHAKUNOICHI

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So natural selection is now God?

Or is God natural selection?

Because a mutation that leads to people to have offspring has no effect. It’s just God?
Jehovah isn't someone up to your pitiful attempts to do poems.

It's a disrespect to those who read and understood the book, believe them in the Bible or not.

It's nauseous. Stop it.
 

Narushima

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So natural selection is now God?

Or is God natural selection?

Because a mutation that leads to people to have offspring has no effect. It’s just God?
Natural-selection does not have any teleological directionality (vitalism) which is why it produces such inefficient solutions to biological problems like malaria in the short-term (at least when there isn’t overwhelming selection pressure but that discussion is far too complex for NB).

It will, in the long-run, find a solution to malaria that isn’t pathological because eventually a series of mutations or a very good one will generate a non-pathological path to malarial protection – and then malaria will evolve resistance to that solution (it’s a constant arms race between organisms and the entities that infect them). But because natural-selection is a blind process it will in short time-periods simply select for whatever mutations that provide any protection even if they are essentially diseases – sickle cell, thalassemia, glucose-6 phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, haemoglobin-C and so on.

Those anti-malarial diseases exist as what we call evolutionarily stable strategies and their existence can be explained mathematically (evolutionary game-theory) but again that’s a discussion for a lecture not a forum. And they will continue to exist in populations affected by malaria until, by pure chance, one day a true biological solution appears whether in the form of a singe mutation or a series of them.

A well-documented case of this process of evolution in humans is high-altitude adaptation. Several human populations in South-America, East-Africa and Asia have lived at high-altitudes where there is a lower partial pressure of oxygen in the air for long periods of time, thousands of years. This is remarkable because to most normal people like you and I, living that high up in that hypoxic environment is well… impossible, or at least living long anyway.

These various groups have all evolved different biological solutions to the problem of low-oxygen at high-altitude. The ones that have lived there for the shortest period generally tend to have adapted to their environments by simple polycythaemia, i.e. they have an elevated number of red-blood cells in their bodies, which causes hyper-viscosity of the blood, a condition that puts you at elevated risk of various cardiovascular diseases and indeed – many of these people suffer much higher-rates of cardiovascular disease than would be expected given their lifestyle.

In this case, however, evolution has found a true solution to the problem of living at high-altitude for humans in the Tibetans. The Tibetan people do not have simple polycythaemia – instead they have about half a dozen mutations that relate to hypoxic physiology (in erythropoietin production, metabolic mutations in glycolysis and fatty acid oxidation and even DNA repair mechanisms). The Tibetan natives have a completely unique physiological response to hypoxia unseen in any other human population including the other human groups living at high-altitudes. As it turns out, the Tibetans are also the group that have lived at high-altitude the longest.

Or to put it more simply for some of the members on this thread – the Tibetans have unique and superior adaptation to high-altitude compared to other groups such as the Ethiopians and Andeans (who also have adapted to high-altitude living, in their own way).

Of course the reason why the differential exists is because the Tibetans and other high-landers are genetically isolated groups that do not inter-breed. If they were a inter-breeding population – the Tibetan genes for high-altitude adaptation would very quickly replace the less efficient genes of the other high-landers. And that is natural selection.

None of this seems like the work of a conscious entity, of course. Probably because it isn’t.
 
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UCHIHAKUNOICHI

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Natural-selection does not have any teleological directionality (vitalism) which is why it produces such inefficient solutions to biological problems like malaria in the short-term (at least when there isn’t overwhelming selection pressure but that discussion is far too complex for NB).

It will, in the long-run, find a solution to malaria that isn’t pathological because eventually a series of mutations or a very good one will generate a non-pathological path to malarial protection – and then malaria will evolve resistance to that solution (it’s a constant arms race between organisms and the entities that infect them). But because natural-selection is a blind process it will in short time-periods simply select for whatever mutations that provide any protection even if they are essentially diseases – sickle cell, thalassemia, glucose-6 phosphate dehydrogenase deficiency, haemoglobin-C and so on.

Those anti-malarial diseases exist as what we call evolutionarily stable strategies and their existence can be explained mathematically (evolutionary game-theory) but again that’s a discussion for a lecture not a forum. And they will continue to exist in populations affected by malaria until, by pure chance, one day a true biological solution appears whether in the form of a singe mutation or a series of them.

A well-documented case of this process of evolution in humans is high-altitude adaptation. Several human populations in South-America, East-Africa and Asia have lived at high-altitudes where there is a lower partial pressure of oxygen in the air for long periods of time, thousands of years. This is remarkable because to most normal people like you and I, living that high up in that hypoxic environment is well… impossible, or at least living long anyway.

These various groups have all evolved different biological solutions to the problem of low-oxygen at high-altitude. The ones that have lived there for the shortest period generally tend to have adapted to their environments by simple polycythaemia, i.e. they have an elevated number of red-blood cells in their bodies, which causes hyper-viscosity of the blood, a condition that puts you at elevated risk of various cardiovascular diseases and indeed – many of these people suffer much higher-rates of cardiovascular disease than would be expected given their lifestyle.

In this case, however, evolution has found a true solution to the problem of living at high-altitude for humans in the Tibetans. The Tibetan people do not have simple polycythaemia – instead they have about half a dozen mutations that relate to hypoxic physiology (in erythropoietin production, metabolic mutations in glycolysis and fatty acid oxidation and even DNA repair mechanisms). The Tibetan natives have a completely unique physiological response to hypoxia unseen in any other human population including the other human groups living at high-altitudes. As it turns out, the Tibetans are also the group that have lived at high-altitude the longest.

Or to put it more simply for some of the members on this thread – the Tibetans have unique and superior adaptation to high-altitude compared to other groups such as the Ethiopians and Andeans (who also have adapted to high-altitude living, in their own way).

Of course the reason why the differential exists is because the Tibetans and other high-landers are genetically isolated groups that do not inter-breed. If they were a inter-breeding population – the Tibetan genes for high-altitude adaptation would very quickly replace the less efficient genes of the other high-landers. And that is natural selection.

None of this seems like the work of a conscious entity, of course. Probably because it isn’t.
So now you and your medical peers are just too intelligent to discuss things with what you call laymen that a century ago could seem impossible to know?

Vitalism is nothing but a pitiful analysis originally done by scientists just like you back in the Ancient Egypt and Greece. So stop trying to blame it in people who believe in God.

Biological Adaptation in individuals are marvelous. It's God's way of showing how much he cares and how great He is.

You are clearly an ignorant in whatever the Ancient Scriptures say. And can only gloat about discovering - that's not at all, you are only studying- bodily functions that were already there in the first place.

Not only that, all the things that you are studying in a century or two will become completly obsolete. It's how the world turns.

Here goes some advice from Descartes. You would think that a scientist wouldn't be as conceited as you to don't doubt anything, but oh well.

" Some of the things I clearly and distinctly perceive are obvious to everyone, while others are discovered only by those who look more closely and investigate more carefully; but once they have been discovered, the latter are judged to be just as certain as the former. In the case of a right-angled triangle, for example, the fact that the square on the hypotenuse is equal to the square on the other two sides is not so readily apparent as the fact that the hypotenuse subtends the largest angle; but once one has seen it, one believes it just as strongly. But as regards God, if I were not overwhelmed by philosophical prejudices, and if the images of things perceived by the senses did not besiege my thought on every side, I would certainly acknowledge him sooner and more easily than anything else. For what is more manifest than the fact that the supreme being exists, or that God, to whose essence alone existence belongs, exists?"
 
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