Great news, our species is going extinct and genetic entropy just trumped evolution

Just published by the National Acedemy of Sciences
http://www.pnas.org/content/107/3/961.full.pdf+html

"Unfortunately, it has become increasingly clear that most of the mutation load is associated with mutations with very small effects distributed at unpredictable locations over the entire genome, rendering the prospects for long-term management of the human gene pool by genetic counseling highly unlikely for all but perhaps a few hundred key loci underlying debilitating monogenic genetic disorders (such as those focused on in the present study).

Thus, the preceding observations paint a rather stark picture. At least in highly industrialized societies, the impact of deleterious mutations is accumulating on a time scale that is approximately the same as that for scenarios associated with global warming—perhaps not of great concern over a span of one or two generations, but with very considerable consequences on time scales of tens of generations. Without a reduction in the germline transmission of deleterious mutations, the mean phenotypes of the residents of industrialized nations are likely to be rather different in just two or three centuries, with significant incapacitation at the morphological, physiological, and neurobiological levels."




In short; the accumulative mutations generated by our breeding are too slow to get us past all the genetic deterioration that is occuring on a molecular level due to diseases defects and other things we are transmiting to one another.
We will not be evolving and it's quite likely none of earth's other macrobes will either.

We're all facing doom. (Very slow boring doom, like a glacier coming at your house from ten miles away, but DOOMED!!!!!)


Mendel 2 Darwin 0

Yeah I've been predicting this. We build technology to make life easier and easier so that we simultaneously become less and less able.

And it doesn't prove Darwin wrong at all. Darwin was wrong about the details but his general theory is still solid. The point is that technological reliance leads to genetic plateau and by altering the environment faster then ourselves we've evolved beyond evolution. As such any run of the mill natural problems to our genetics are currently being corrected less and less through natural selection. In other words we're carrying the unfit on the back of their technology and slower breeding rates. There's no survival of the fittest. Our genes are out to pasture and getting sick from their sloth.

My kids generation will be inferior to mine.

Although according to Hesiod and the Bible as well as the Hindu histories our genetics have been getting weaker for millenia.

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Originally Posted by TheBoarzHeadBoy

Yeah I've been predicting this. We build technology to make life easier and easier so that we simultaneously become less and less able.

And it doesn't prove Darwin wrong at all.

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Sure it does. Darwin stated that the human genome was never changing, he believed in a fixed genome, that was incorrect(we already knew that).
Life cannot evolve and genetically adapt if the genome of species is degrading over time, that makes speciation impossible.
You cannot make the genome more complex if it's losing information every generation.
This completely wipes it's ass with that idea.
If the diseases and inbreeding do this to humans, it happens to all animals.

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Darwin was wrong about the details but his general theory is still solid. The point is that technological reliance leads to genetic plateau...

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Your missing the bigger picture, we experience that degradation even outside of industrialized societies, this study simply focused on those societies.
It's SLOWER for people outside of it, but entropy effects them to.
Thus, everything is winding down, there is no building up in complexity.
In a closed in industrial society, we experience these phenomenon and defects more often, that doesn't change the fact unindustrialized peoples experience the same things just at a lesser pace.
Not as big a gene pool, not as much contact with the diseases, but they still have contact.

If you're losing information every generation you're also making new information every generation. The DNA isn't getting shorter its miscopying. That's proof that it changes over time. Darwin was wrong as to how but evolution is still occurring.

DNA is like kit kat bars or twizzlers. You can snap/unravel it differently each time and if you melted them back together it wouldn't be quite the way it was before. Thus its evolving. Darwin assumed that it was getting "better" but it is changing. That's enough to discredit young earther retards. I'm not a geneticist so I don't care about the fine print.

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Originally Posted by TheBoarzHeadBoy

If you're losing information every generation you're also making new information every generation.


The DNA isn't getting shorter its miscopying. That's proof that it changes over time. Darwin was wrong as to how but evolution is still occurring.

DNA is like kit kat bars or twizzlers. You can snap/unravel it differently each time and if you melted them back together it wouldn't be quite the way it was before. Thus its evolving. Darwin assumed that it was getting "better" but it is changing. That's enough to discredit young earther retards. I'm not a geneticist so I don't care about the fine print.

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Unfortunately, as the author pointed out, the mutations that are occuring are in fixed points that are predictable and are not enough to repair the damage.
Also the lack of mutation load implies the amount of genetic material being generated isn't enough to replace or change much of anything.
It's a lame duck.

I feel like I've read that last paragraph of your post somewhere.


If I have a letter code of ABBAABBAACC
And that becomes ABBAABBAABC
You will never see "CC" again and BC will leave you closer to unable to procreate, so while DNA isn't getting shorter in information, it is getting shorter in functionality and the information being reproduced isn't becoming more complicated, it's becoming useless.
Nature seems to be looking to kill us. Why do we address it as a loving mother I wonder...

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Originally Posted by Rollo

Unfortunately, as the author pointed out, the mutations that are occuring are in fixed points that are predictable and are not enough to repair the damage.
Also the lack of mutation load implies the amount of genetic material being generated isn't enough to replace or change much of anything.
It's a lame duck.

I feel like I've read that last paragraph of your post somewhere.


If I have a letter code of ABBAABBAACC
And that becomes ABBAABBAABC
You will never see "CC" again and BC will leave you closer to unable to procreate, so while DNA isn't getting shorter in information, it is getting shorter in functionality and the information being reproduced isn't becoming more complicated, it's becoming useless.
Nature seems to be looking to kill us. Why do we address it as a loving mother I wonder...

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Well what about Biogenetics? I mean, yes, technology has distorted the process of evolution for a while now but that's precisely the point.

Technology has always been about solving the problems it causes. Assume industrialized nations simply stimulate the gene pool artificially? Is this possible?


It just seems to me that we've been off Mother Nature's teet for a while now, and will continue to operate without her milk.

But what caused this? Is this affecting humans only or animals in general? Is this just now or can we trace it back for a long time?

Odds are this is localized to human genetics and localized to the near present. In that case it should be reversible by correcting the causes or treating the damage. Both of which science can do once we target the cause.

You know, presuming it isn't God screwing with us again...

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Originally Posted by TheBoarzHeadBoy

But what caused this? Is this affecting humans only or animals in general? Is this just now or can we trace it back for a long time?

Odds are this is localized to human genetics and localized to the near present. In that case it should be reversible by correcting the causes or treating the damage. Both of which science can do once we target the cause.

You know, presuming it isn't God screwing with us again...

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Well, I'm back to screw with you!

Are you a specie?

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Originally Posted by TheBoarzHeadBoy

But what caused this? Is this affecting humans only or animals in general? Is this just now or can we trace it back for a long time?

Odds are this is localized to human genetics and localized to the near present. In that case it should be reversible by correcting the causes or treating the damage. Both of which science can do once we target the cause.

You know, presuming it isn't God screwing with us again...

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1. The likely answer is like all entropy it has been happening with us every generation. When you breed the information that gets copied is not 100% to either parent and it's not even 50/50. Usually this is benign and no concern, the thing is, when you get something that isn't just redundancy and is actually harmful and defective and it becomes fixed in the population as these defects we see today, we don't really know how to fix it.
More over, we might not be able to, there are limits to what is biologically possible. It's not like Dr. Seus's "If I Ran the Zoo" where anything that's ideal and selectable can happen. If it worked that way in the natural world, a flame breathing giant lizard would be selectable and highly favorable, but you don't see godzilla outside now do we?

2. Genetic entropy has been reported in seperate studies besides this, but mostly in reference to microbes. It takes a lot to bring down larger arrays such as us.
If you were to put one of your cells on beta disc, it's size in circumfrance would be equal to that of the moon. So, it takes a lot of things to go wrong in all that coding to make a dent, much less potentially eliminate the whole species.
My thinking is it started with early humanity and entropy being like drops of acid rain hitting a house started taking out chunks of roof. Nobody there to repair it.
Also raises the question though, how many other extinctions may this be responsible for?

3. Let us not entertain the idea of a God or ghost being responsible because even if it is, it's not like knowing that makes the damage go away. Something tells me though, that's too slow for a God. If I wanted to do something to screw with humanity, it'd be like spontanious explosi... huh... I just realized that actually happens. :(

The thing that bugs me is it usually takes thousands of generations for a mutation to form and thousands more for it to become fixed.
This implies something very different than normal reproduction is happening. Most likely X-factor is speeding up the process and is something we haven't thought to look for or just the collective shit we encounter amounting quicker than we imagined.

It's strange regardless.

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Originally Posted by Clan Destine

Well what about Biogenetics? I mean, yes, technology has distorted the process of evolution for a while now but that's precisely the point.

Technology has always been about solving the problems it causes. Assume industrialized nations simply stimulate the gene pool artificially? Is this possible?


It just seems to me that we've been off Mother Nature's teet for a while now, and will continue to operate without her milk.

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Well, the problem this raises for me is whether the technology is responsible or if it's just this many people living this close together and being exposed to this quick changing of diseases.
And also, this is nature's response to you as a species, it's been distorted, but entropy may be nature's true... nature(lol) and common ancestory may be something either miraculous or mythical.

Wouldn't it be a bitch if it ended up, "The whale was in the water because that was the only place it could thrive" as opposed "The whale was in the water because it adapted to thrive in that place"

But then that leaves us with conflict.

As for your question, to repair the information lost in these codons, you'd have to see the original homosapien genome(good luck with that shit) and you'd have to figure out some way through what I can only assume would be nucleo synthesis or taking a gene gun and putting in the undamaged genetic information that was lost, into a host genome containing the remaining information.

And even then, that's not going to repair the damage inside of those already living.
Unless you plan to stop this generation from breeding and kill off all the children from industrialized societies while you clone humans with no said defects, there's really no hope.

I'm afraid at this moment, there really are no practical solutions.

Just science fiction novels. Nucleotides are not easily changed and even what was thought to be junk DNA just this year was found to actually have a high functioning encoding that we never knew existed that may be just as essential as the whole whopping 5% of the genome we already understood.

We're fucked, basically.

Darwin is god. humans were ignorant superstitious fags before he came along

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Originally Posted by theheavens

Darwin is god. humans were ignorant superstitious fags before he came along

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Darwin is God? Why do we not use God's theory of Pangenesis and follow Mendelian genetics then?
And further, might I ask what any of this has to do with the article published by the national acedemy of science?
Surely you aren't suggesting modern molecular biology in 2010 is incorrect because Darwin, a 19th century naturalist said so, are you?..

! yo change is UP TO SELF, talkin about making life easier by tecnology, yo meditation all day !! even when doin my movez with da power of a divine diamond mind hard to the core, i light up the room when entering a doorway!

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Originally Posted by Rollo

Well, the problem this raises for me is whether the technology is responsible or if it's just this many people living this close together and being exposed to this quick changing of diseases.
And also, this is nature's response to you as a species, it's been distorted, but entropy may be nature's true... nature(lol) and common ancestory may be something either miraculous or mythical.

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Well, people living close together and disease are a result of dense populations, and dense populations are possible because of technologies.

I think this is happening precisely because humans have been able to successfully reproduce despite having deleterious genetics traits, that otherwise would have been bred out in a state of nature.

Technology eliminates environmental pressures that weed out the weak or destructive genes.

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Originally Posted by Rollo

Wouldn't it be a bitch if it ended up, "The whale was in the water because that was the only place it could thrive" as opposed "The whale was in the water because it adapted to thrive in that place"

But then that leaves us with conflict.

As for your question, to repair the information lost in these codons, you'd have to see the original homosapien genome(good luck with that shit) and you'd have to figure out some way through what I can only assume would be nucleo synthesis or taking a gene gun and putting in the undamaged genetic information that was lost, into a host genome containing the remaining information.


And even then, that's not going to repair the damage inside of those already living.
Unless you plan to stop this generation from breeding and kill off all the children from industrialized societies while you clone humans with no said defects, there's really no hope.

I'm afraid at this moment, there really are no practical solutions.

Just science fiction novels. Nucleotides are not easily changed and even what was thought to be junk DNA just this year was found to actually have a high functioning encoding that we never knew existed that may be just as essential as the whole whopping 5% of the genome we already understood.

We're fucked, basically.

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I don't see why you need the 'original' homo sapien genome. It seems to me it just a matter of losing useful information. I guess I'm just transposing the processes of genetically modified foods into humans. Splicing in information from other organisms to stimulate the gene pool.

Of course, I have no idea if this is possible, but this 'problem' isn't exactly an imminent threat.

For that matter, is not even a real problem to me at all.

Who cares' really? As long as I have healthy genes (which it looks like I do), I don't really give a shit about the long term genetic destiny of humanity. That is just an abstraction, so is 'humanity' for that matter. I'll be long dead before it happens, and likely the ecology that sustains our large population will collapse before this happens.

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Originally Posted by Clan Destine

Well, people living close together and disease are a result of dense populations, and dense populations are possible because of technologies.

I think this is happening precisely because humans have been able to successfully reproduce despite having deleterious genetics traits, that otherwise would have been bred out in a state of nature.

Technology eliminates environmental pressures that weed out the weak or destructive genes.




I don't see why you need the 'original' homo sapien genome. It seems to me it just a matter of losing useful information. I guess I'm just transposing the processes of genetically modified foods into humans. Splicing in information from other organisms to stimulate the gene pool.

Of course, I have no idea if this is possible, but this 'problem' isn't exactly an imminent threat.

For that matter, is not even a real problem to me at all.

Who cares' really? As long as I have healthy genes (which it looks like I do), I don't really give a shit about the long term genetic destiny of humanity. That is just an abstraction, so is 'humanity' for that matter. I'll be long dead before it happens, and likely the ecology that sustains our large population will collapse before this happens.

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1. You should care because with these defects, a new trial facing our species in the way of disease or environmental change could exploit an unknown weakness or engage a chain reaction within the cellular factories in our bodies we may have been otherwise immune to.
We've mapped the human genome, we've decoded a little over 5% of it.
And since every gene handles multiple functions and all are interdependent, ANY flaw is bad news.

2. We aren't fine, we're damaged.
To not fix it would be retarded because even if it doesn't end me or my kids or my grandkids, saving the species I think should be chief concern.
What other species would be so dumb as to not save it's own ass? lol

3. You would want the original whole and in tact, because no one knows exactly how our cellular array should look. There may be giant pieces of the puzzle missing this study and modern science is simply oblivious to and hasn't seen before.

At any rate, I still don't see how we can fix this.
That is short of artificial selection, breeding non defect humans and not allowing ourselves to reproduce.
Which is a bummer :(

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Originally Posted by Rollo

1. You should care because with these defects, a new trial facing our species in the way of disease or environmental change could exploit an unknown weakness or engage a chain reaction within the cellular factories in our bodies we may have been otherwise immune to.
We've mapped the human genome, we've decoded a little over 5% of it.
And since every gene handles multiple functions and all are interdependent, ANY flaw is bad news.

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You haven't convinced me that at this moment some colossal genetic domino effect is somehow going to strike my body. Likely, one's own family history of congenital disease is the best indicator, and my family's health is generally pretty good.

Environmental change is a different topic. If a global epidemic breaks and I'm not immune, or there is simply no food to eat, there's very little I can do about it. Not genetically at least.

Again, 'species' is just a semantic fiction. There's no inherent reason for the individual to care about the 'species', its just ideology. Explain to me why the survival of 'humanity' is inherently a desirable thing. I'm not saying it categorically isn't, but I'm not convinced enough yet to give a shit.

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Originally Posted by Rollo

2. We aren't fine, we're damaged.
To not fix it would be retarded because even if it doesn't end me or my kids or my grandkids, saving the species I think should be chief concern.
What other species would be so dumb as to not save it's own ass? lol

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Every organism has some deleterious trait, every organism can be considered 'damaged' depending on the environment it finds itself in. We're not perfect, we're never going to be but I do agree that human technological and social development has likely increased the frequency of useless or deleterious genes.

To answer your last question. Every single species that has ever existed. But again, 'species' is just a semantic concept. No organism ever considers itself as part of a species and 99.999999% of 'species' that have ever existed have gone extinct.

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Originally Posted by Rollo

3. You would want the original whole and in tact, because no one knows exactly how our cellular array should look. There may be giant pieces of the puzzle missing this study and modern science is simply oblivious to and hasn't seen before.

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But what is the original? There are populations of many human individuals AND there populations and configurations throughout time. There is no fine line between what was human and what was not, nor is there a 'cellular array' of how we 'should' look based on a perfect individual. We look exactly how we should look based upon our natural history. Again, there is no such thing as perfection (except in an extinct species).

What is healthy for a population is genetic diversity.

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Originally Posted by Rollo

At any rate, I still don't see how we can fix this.
That is short of artificial selection, breeding non defect humans and not allowing ourselves to reproduce.
Which is a bummer :(

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I still think with all the advances of biogenetics the solution would be artificially stimulated genetic diversity. There would be alot of failures, but the point is if the gene pool is diverse the species can withstand a variety of threats.

But yeah, the ride had to come to end some time. One way or another, or for whichever reason, human beings are going to force themselves, or be forced, to drastically reduce their population.

Disease, war, famine, selective breeding, genetic entropy, take your pick.

Personally, I find in an exciting time in history to live. Since humanity called itself 'humanity' , there has been a steady growth in population, and a fairly steady increase in knowledge and technology. We now live at a time where this has peaked and there is a likelihood that it will crash.

It is the first test of human consciousness.