Let's get serious!

Human 2.0 Olympics

Oscar Pistorius is a double-amputee South African athlete. I admire anyone that rises above life's challenges. I admire anyone that becomes a model for others. I admire anyone that decides they can do anything they want to. I really do! Oscar Pistorius is one of these humans that decides an obstacle is just that...an obstacle! I admire that! So much, you have no idea.

Despite this admiration I could only agree with The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) decision to not allow him to compete in the Olympics. I really think his prosthetics give him an unfair advantage over the other athletes. Although I agree with that decision, I find it quite ironic that he has an "unfair" advantage....interesting when you think many of these athletes are using performance-enhancing drugs....so much for fairness!

This decision was overturned by the The Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). I think this is a mistake and lack of courage from the CAS. How far will that go? The door is now open to Human 2.0 Olympics where genetically-modified cyborgs will compete. The Olympics will now become an ideal that is even farther than it ever was before for kids.

To get a spot on the start line in Beijing, Pistorius has to qualify but many doubt he will make it, apparently he is not in the shape he should be for that ultimate racing exerience. This does not matter wheter he makes it or not....the damage is done!

Also published on my other blog: Biological Obsessions

Blurred Lines

A British Columbian monument is on the brink of extinction and it appears humans may be the catalyst for the acceleration of the evolutionary process yet again. According to researches from the University of Alberta, Dalhousie University and the Salmon Coast Field Station in Echo Bay, BC, infestations of the parasitic sea lice are contaminating salmon fish farms and proving fatal to wild stocks. It’s predicted wild pink salmon will be reduced to 99% of their present population in just four salmon generations or approx 8 years! The crustaceans attach themselves to the exterior of the salmon feeding on tissues, blood, and muscle; eventually resulting in death. Not surprisingly, juvenile populations are at most risk.

This bleak picture is a staggering realization of humans ever growing foot print. The bottle neck effect that these salmon farms could create will have devastating effects on the genetic diversity of local populations. And the most shocking angle of this study is it’s noted as an avoidable catastrophe.
Implementing legislation that will move farms from migration routes and replacing net pens with closed containment compounds will clean up the surrounding aquatic environment and ensure any parasitic threats are isolated from wild stocks. This, of course, comes at a price and owners are not keen on watching profits diminish and operating costs increase. It appears the moral line between profit, government and the environment continues to blur.

Reference: http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/12/13/tech-salmonfarm-lice.html

The need for medical professionals to study evolution

Evolution has a significant rule in human lives which makes it an important fact for medical professionals to understand evolution. The entire basis of evolution started “millions of years a go when life began spontaneously in a pond, and became more complex and it came to the point of the survival of the fittest”. Those who were less fit, injured or unable to adapt did not accompany evolution. Humans are the result of this process. Humans too adapt to certain environment and these days medical professionals are not really taught evolutionary explanations for “why our bodies are vulnerable to certain kinds of failures.” Existence of wisdom teeth, having genes that cause bipolar disease, and not knowing why appendix is still there?

There are lots of reasons where there is a need for understanding evolution in terms of medical field. Cancer is a good example of natural selection among cells in human body. Antibiotic resistance in today’s world also has brought up a lot of issues and concerns in medicine and showing evolution of microorganisms. Understanding spread of antibiotic resistance and its origin is another question of evolution. The more medical doctors and personals are aware of this issue there is a better chance to stop the abuse of antibiotics.

There are many reasons why it is hard to convince medical practitioners to embrace evolution in the nature of science. “Evolutionary hypotheses about human physiology are notoriously hard to investigate, given humans’ long generation times” thus giving a hard time to medial professionals.

I believe that every body especially doctors need to understand evolution to be able to help humans to stop antibiotic abuse, know the evolution process of other animals and how close we are related to other animals to find cures for diseases, evolution of our immune system is part of population genetics and natural selection.

This is a very broad topic with lots of other reasons that all needs to be reviewed and learned by our fellow medical precisionist for the hope of better care, cure and understanding human evolution.

http://www-personal.umich.edu/~nesse/EMN/editorial.pdf

http://www.pandasthumb.org/archives/2007/01/why_do_so_many.html

http://www.evolutionandmedicine.org/

Frogs and Amphibians getting closer to extinction

Scientists at the Zoological Society of San Diego have taken special note of the serious decline in the population of frogs and other amphibians in the last 30 or so years. Amphibians are often studied by scientists in order to gage environmental wellness because they are so sensitive to environmental changes. Amphibians can exist on both land and in the water and therefore they experience changes in both of these environments. However, scientists are becoming increasingly concerned because over 120 species of amphibians have now become extinct. We can guess at the main reasons for this decline in amphibian population. Scientists believe that changes in climate, pollution and diminishing habitats are the main threats to these creatures. The scientists at San Diego also point out that chytrid infections, caused by fungus can have a fatal affect on frogs. Frogs need the ability to respire through their skin and this disease affects this ability. One way to help the frog and amphibian populations is to create conservation programs for various species. This is being done by many concerned groups including the scientists at the San Diego Zoo. San Diego provided information about all of these topics in an article published by the Zoological Society of San Diego on their website. This article is entitled "A World without Frogs?". I personally believe that if we don't do everything we can to preserve the amphibian population we will be loosing a very valuable scientific resource. Not to mention, the devastating effects this could have on the "circle of life" as a whole. As previously stated, frogs provide us with very valuable information when it comes to the current health of the environment. Maybe if we can continue to study frogs and other creatures like them we can gain a better understanding of how to help the entire planet, not just one area, group, or species.

Sources: http://www.sandiegozoo.org/help_wildlife/story_frogs.html

Image source: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=frogs

Komodo Dragon Spit-It's Aliiiiive!!!

Komodo island monitors are famous for being the world's largest lizard, they can reach three meters in length.  This may seem like reason enough not to mess with them, but you shouldn't be afraid of the dragons, just their thousands of tiny little friends...

Komodo dragons are scavengers and carnivores.  They'll eat most recently dead animals, and will hunt goats, wild boars, water buffalo and even horses and eat them.  But their hunting technique is quite unusual, they will stalk their large prey, then ambush it, not to kill it, but to bite it.  The lizard then simply follows the unfortunate prey around until it dies, either from blood loss or infection.  But what if the animal heals?  Well, this just doesn't happen.

Komodo dragon saliva contains over 50 different kinds of bacteria, once an animal is bitten it is almost guaranteed to develop a bad bacterial infection, a septic wound that will become so toxic it will end their life.

A study of the saliva of both captive and wild komodo dragons was published in the Journal of Wildlife Diseases in 2002.  In part of the study komodo dragon saliva was injected into mice.  One strain of bacteria was present in the blood of mice who died following injection, Pasturella multicoda.  The study stated that many strains of bacteria were isolated in the saliva, "54 of which were known pathogens" and "at least one species of which was highly lethal in mice".  

These findings certainly explain the hunting style of the komodo dragon, but why isn't the deadly bacteria in their saliva a problem for these animals?  Wouldn't a mere scratch to the gum be enough to introduce infection and kill them?  The really interesting finding of the study was that the plasma of komodo dragons contains an anti-Pasturella enzyme, so if the bacteria were to enter the bloodstream, it would be killed.

This fact shows that the giant lizards have evolved with their little friends, so that they can coexist without any danger of infection.  A sinister but fascinating kind of symbiosis!

sources:

Aerobic Salivary Bacteria in Wild and Captive Komodo Dragons

http://www.jwildlifedis.org/cgi/reprint/38/3/545.pdf

Animal Diversity Web

http://animaldiversity.ummz.umich.edu/site/accounts/information/Varanus_komodoensis.html

*This too was actually a post by Liz, sorry again*

Sleepy?

If you catch yourself nodding off in classes, on the bus, or anywhere else, you can probably think of a reason for your condition.  Perhaps you stayed up late studying for an important test, or to watch a movie with your roommate, or spent the night drinking.  But do you really know why your body is telling you to sleep?  What is the true purpose of that irresistible urge to close your eyes and drift away?  Why do we and almost all animals need to sleep?

The truth is, scientists still don't have a clear answer to this question.  They know that sleep plays an important role in memory and that cells function better in a rested person than in an exhausted one, but scientists say that so far as they can tell, animals could have evolved mechanisms to accomplish these things in a waking state, so why sleep?

 

I became interested in this topic after listening to a one of WNYC's Radiolab podcasts, called simply Sleep.  The podcast discussed different scientific ideas about why we sleep and what happens when we do and included some really interesting information on research currently being done to try to solve this puzzle.  One researcher they spoke to, Stephen Lima, is looking at sleep from an evolutionary standpoint to try to understand why animals evolved the need to sleep.  It may seem obvious that animals would evolve to sleep, rest must be good right?  Well, not really.  Sleep makes an animal incredibly vulnerable, it could be eaten while resting, its offspring could be threatened, anything could happen.  There is something about sleep that almost all animals need, and we still don't understand what that is.  According to Dr. Lima, "The fact that sleep is so dangerous is the best evidence that it is necessary, because if it weren't necessary, we wouldn't be doing it.".

 

The evolutionary approach to sleep research is a new one, Dr. Lima states that, "One of the reasons we don't understand sleep is that we haven't taken this evolutionary perspective on it".  The idea is that if we can understand why sleep evolved, we can understand why it is necessary and what it really does.  He and his team of researchers have been watching animals like iguanas, ducks and, yes, fruit flies sleep.  An article published in the New York Times also focuses on Dr. Lima's sleep research, as well as other researchers'.  One discovery they have made that is particularly interesting involves the sleeping habits of ducks.  When ducks sleep in a row, on a log or wherever, the ducks on the ends of the line will sleep with one eye, the one facing away from the other ducks, open.  Every so often they will stand up, turn around and sleep with the other eye open.  Dr. Lima discovered that the reason for this is that the ducks on the ends are only allowing half of their brain, the half controlling the closed eye, to sleep at a time.  The team is now doing research on iguanas to see if they share this strange behavior.  If they do, it will tell scientists that this half-brained sleep probably evolved early in animal evolution, and that early mammals may have been able to do it also, but then lost this ability later in their evolution.  

 

Another model for sleep research is the fruit fly.  A study published in the journal Science in 2006 focused on the sleeping habits of Drosophila (click here for abstract).  It found that the flies needed more sleep after social interaction and couldn't remember tasks taught to them if they were deprived of sleep for a certain period of time after they learned them.

 

This article from the Public Library of Science details a study done in 2006 on zebrafish sleep that found "both striking similarities to mammalian sleep and its regulation and intriguing differences.

This new evolutionary approach to understanding human behavior shows that there's more to phylogeny and systematics than endless debate over the seemingly trivial classification of obscure creatures most people have never heard of.  Hopefully through more research scientists like Dr. Lima will be able to solve more intriguing mysteries about our past, and help us to understand what has made us what we are.  

   

Sources:

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2007/05/25

(podcast)

 

Jones R (2007) Let Sleeping Zebrafish Lie: A New Model for Sleep Studies. PLoS Biol 5(10): e281doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.0050281

Waking Experience Affects Sleep Need in Drosophila

Indrani Ganguly-Fitzgerald, Jeff Donlea, Paul J. Shaw  http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/abstract/313/5794/1775?maxtoshow=&HITS=10&hits=10&RESULTFORMAT=&andorexacttitleabs=and&fulltext=drosophila+sleep&andorexactfulltext=and&searchid=1&FIRSTINDEX=0&resourcetype=HWCIT

 

Zimmer, Carl (2005) Down For the Count.  New York Times 

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/08/science/08slee.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

*This blog says it's by Chicken but it's actually by Liz, who had to sign in as Chicken because she couldn't post as herself... sorry*