Defending the Truth

“There are several thousand nearly complete viral genomes integrated into the human genome, most of them now inert or missing a crucial gene. These ‘human endogenous retroviruses’ or Hervs, account for 1.3% of the entire genome. That may not sound like much, but ‘proper’ genes account for only 3%. If you think being descended from apes is bad for your self-esteem, then get used to the idea that you are also descended from viruses.”


“Genome”
Matt Ridley

I'm reading this post at a good time but this totally fucking blew my mind man!

Cool quote.

If you like that quote, then perhaps you will like this quote too:


"An average human is normally host to billions of symbiotic organisms belonging to perhaps a thousand different species . . . His phenotype is not determined by his human genes alone but also by the genes of all the symbionts he happens to be infected with. The symbiont species an individual carries usually have a very varied provenance, with only a few being likely to have come from his parents."


Juan Delius
"The Nature of Culture"



(This quote may certainly give someone a new perspective to the saying, "We are not alone." )

What if you dip yourself in alcohol - will that get rid of the parasites?

Perhaps one *could* kill off some organisms that are on (or in) one's skin that way.

But, symbiotic organisms aren't necessarily harmful anyway.

In fact, many of them help us to live...as we help them to live, too, in exchange.

And it could be argued that humans have co-evolved with them.

He never mentioned parasites, he mentioned symbiotes, there is an important difference. Parasites live solely off the host, symbiotes give something back. For example, our intestines would not function if it were not for all the bacteria that live in there, which we occasionally replenish by consuming live cultures like Yogurt...

I just recently started using Dan Active drink because I don't like yogurt and it has done wonders for my digestive system!

Let's just say I fart a helluva lot less and my girlfriend approves!

I'd add that science is a process rather than a goal.

“The DNA sequence that codes for beta-globin is roughly fifty thousand nucleotides long; that is, along a given strand of the DNA molecules, fifty thousand As, Cs, Gs, and Ts in a particular sequence describe precisely how to manufacture the beta-globin of the species in question. If the sequences of humans and chimpanzees are compared nucleotide by nucleotide, they differ by only 1.7%. Humans and gorillas differ by 1.8%, almost as little; humans and orangutans, 3.3%; humans and gibbons, 4.3%; humans and rhesus monkeys, 7%; humans and lemurs, 22.6%. The more the sequences of two animals differ, the more remote (both in relatedness and, usually, in time) is their last common ancestor.

…

When ACGT sequences that are mainly active genes are examined, a 99.6% identity is found between human and chimp. At the level of the working genes, only about 0.4% of the DNA of humans is different from the DNA of chimps.

The closest relative of the chimp is the human. Not orangs, but people. Us. Chimps and humans are nearer kin than are chimps and gorillas or any other kinds of ape not of the same species. Gorillas are the next closest relatives, both to chimps and humans. The more remote the kinship-when we go to monkeys or lemurs or, say, tree shrews-the less the similarity in sequence. By these standards, humans and chimps are about as closely related as horses and donkeys, and are closer relatives than mice and rats, or turkeys and chickens, or camels and Llamas.

…

Still, chimps are nearer relatives to us than any other animal on Earth. A typical difference between your DNA-all of it, including the transcribed nonsense-and that of any other human being is roughly 0.1% or less. By this standard, chimps differ from humans only about 20 times more than we differ from one another. That seems awfully close. We must be very careful that those “mortifying reflections” of which Congreve spoke do not make us exaggerate the differences and blind us to our kinship. If we want to understand ourselves by closely examining other beings, chimps are a good place to start.”


"Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors"
Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan

"Our planet has been shaken by five major extinctions in the four billion year history of life. The first, 450 million years ago, occurred shortly after the evolution of the first land-based plants and 100 million years after the Cambrian Explosion of animal life beneath the seas.

The second extinction spasm came 350 million years ago, causing the formation of coal forests. Then the Earth experienced two mass extinctions during the Triassic period, between 250 and 200 million years ago. The fifth mass extinction, probably caused by a giant meteor collision, occurred 65 million years ago, at the end of the Cretaceous period, and ended the reptilian dominance of the Earth. This led to the current mammalian domination of the Earth.

So what is the Sixth Extinction? When is it coming? And what is its cause? "It's the next annihilation of vast numbers of species. It is happening now, and we, the human race, are its cause," explains Dr. Richard Leakey, the world's most famous paleoanthropologist. Every year, between 17,000 and 100,000 species vanish from our planet, he says. "For the sake of argument, let's assume the number is 50,000 a year. Whatever way you look at it, we're destroying the Earth at a rate comparable with the impact of a giant asteroid slamming into the planet, or even a shower of vast heavenly bodies." The statistics he has assembled are staggering. Fifty per cent of the Earth's species will have vanished inside the next 100 years; mankind is using almost half the energy available to sustain life on the planet, and this figure will only grow as our population leaps from 5.7 billion to ten billion inside the next half-century. Such a dramatic and overwhelming mass extinction threatens the entire complex fabric of life on Earth, including the species responsible for it: Homo sapiens."


The Sixth Extinction
Richard Leakey and Roger Lewin (Doubleday, 1995)