[ExI] bikers again

SR Ballard sen.otaku at gmail.com
Tue Sep 8 20:24:30 UTC 2020


Or, perhaps we are overlooking that the bikers who did go (versus the ones that didn’t) were likely a self-selected younger, fitter crowd from within the larger population of Sturgis goers. Groups with higher risk likely stayed home. 

Maybe.

SR Ballard

> On Sep 5, 2020, at 12:57 PM, Dylan Distasio via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Sat, Sep 5, 2020 at 11:15 AM Keith Henson <hkeithhenson at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> Some time ago (at least a year) I was impressed by an article (in
>> Science I think) which discussed positive selection of genes from
>> Neanderthals.  The article noted that around 6000 genes (of the 20,000
>> active in humans) were associated with virus resistance, about half
>> against DNA and half against RNA viruses.  Wow.  Close to 1/3 of the
>> human genome is associated with virus resistance.
> 
> Very interesting, thanks for sharing this.   I don't know if this is the same article as I didn't read it at the time, but this is as close as I could find https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(18)31095-X#secsectitle0100.  It's certainly in the same ballpark if not the exact paper.  This idea also dovetails nicely with the evolution of sexual reproduction itself under the Red Queen hypothesis.   Parasites are another very interesting related area of study in terms of driving evolution.  I must admit I have been both fascinated and horrified by them for a very long time.  The movie Alien of course didn't help.   Zimmer's 'Parasite Rex' is an easy read for anyone interested in broaching the subject, although it is a little long in the tooth at this point.
> 
> I also recently saw that Candida (a fungus family) is making a comeback.   There is an interesting hypothesis that mammalian (and in particular human) body temperatures are particularly hostile to most fungus because the majority of them don't do well at higher temperatures.  The hypothesis is that warming global temperatures have selected for Candida that is heat resistant which doesn't bode well for us based on our limited abilities to combat fungus pharmaceutically.  Hopefully, we'll see more research dollars thrown at it somewhat proactively:
> 
> "Six years ago, a new infection began popping up in four different hospitals on three different continents, all around the same time. It wasn’t a bacteria, or a virus. It was ... a killer fungus. No one knew where it came from, or why. Today, the story of an ancient showdown between fungus and mammals that started when dinosaurs disappeared from the earth. Back then, the battle swung in our favor (spoiler alert!) and we’ve been hanging onto that win ever since. But one scientist suggests that the rise of this new infectious fungus indicates our edge is slipping, degree by increasing degree."
> 
> https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/radiolab/articles/fungus-amungus  
> 
> 
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