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and-then-there-were-n0ne · 5 years ago

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If scientific discoveries and technological developments split humankind into a mass of useless humans and a small elite of upgraded superhumans, or if authority shifts altogether away from human beings into the hands of highly intelligent algorithms, then liberalism will collapse. What new religions or ideologies might fill the resulting vacuum and guide the subsequent evolution of our godlike descendants?

The new religions are unlikely to emerge from the caves of Afghanistan or from the madrasas of the Middle East. Rather, they will emerge from research laboratories. Just as socialism took over the world by promising salvation through steam and electricity, so in the coming decades new techno-religions may conquer the world by promising salvation through algorithms and genes.

Despite all the talk of radical Islam and Christian fundamentalism, the most interesting place in the world from a religious perspective is not the Islamic State or the Bible Belt, but Silicon Valley. That’s where hi-tech gurus are brewing for us brave new religions that have little to do with God, and everything to do with technology. They promise all the old prizes – happiness, peace, prosperity and even eternal life – but here on earth with the help of technology, rather than after death with the help of celestial beings.

These new techno-religions can be divided into two main types: techno-humanism and data religion. Techno-humanism agrees that Homo sapiens as we know it has run its historical course and will no longer be relevant in the future, but concludes that we should therefore use technology in order to create Homo deus – a much superior human model. Homo deus will retain some essential human features, but will also enjoy upgraded physical and mental abilities that will enable it to hold its own even against the most sophisticated non-conscious algorithms. Since intelligence is decoupling from consciousness, and since non-conscious intelligence is developing at breakneck speed, humans must actively upgrade their minds if they want to stay in the game.

Dataism says that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing. This may strike you as some eccentric fringe notion, but in fact it has already conquered most of the scientific establishment. Dataism was born from the explosive confluence of two scientific tidal waves. In the 150 years since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species, the life sciences have come to see organisms as biochemical algorithms. Simultaneously, in the eight decades since Alan Turing formulated the idea of a Turing Machine, computer scientists have learned to engineer increasingly sophisticated electronic algorithms. Dataism puts the two together, pointing out that exactly the same mathematical laws apply to both biochemical and electronic algorithms. Dataism thereby collapses the barrier between animals and machines, and expects electronic algorithms to eventually decipher and outperform biochemical algorithms.

For politicians, business people and ordinary consumers, Dataism offers groundbreaking technologies and immense new powers. For scholars and intellectuals it also promises to provide the scientific holy grail that has eluded us for centuries: a single overarching theory that unifies all the scientific disciplines from literature and musicology to economics and biology. According to Dataism, King Lear and the flu virus are just two patterns of data flow that can be analysed using the same basic concepts and tools. This idea is extremely attractive. It gives all scientists a common language, builds bridges over academic rifts and easily exports insights across disciplinary borders. Musicologists, political scientists and cell biologists can finally understand each other.

In the process, Dataism inverts the traditional pyramid of learning. Hitherto, data was seen as only the first step in a long chain of intellectual activity. Humans were supposed to distil data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom. However, Dataists believe that humans can no longer cope with the immense flows of data, hence they cannot distil data into information, let alone into knowledge or wisdom. The work of processing data should therefore be entrusted to electronic algorithms, whose capacity far exceeds that of the human brain. In practice, this means that Dataists are sceptical about human knowledge and wisdom, and prefer to put their trust in Big Data and computer algorithms.

Dataism is most firmly entrenched in its two mother disciplines: computer science and biology. Of the two, biology is the more important. It was the biological embracement of Dataism that turned a limited breakthrough in computer science into a world-shattering cataclysm that may completely transform the very nature of life. You may not agree with the idea that organisms are algorithms, and that giraffes, tomatoes and human beings are just different methods for processing data. But you should know that this is current scientific dogma, and that it is changing our world beyond recognition.

Not only individual organisms are seen today as data-processing systems, but also entire societies such as beehives, bacteria colonies, forests and human cities. Economists increasingly interpret the economy, too, as a data-processing system. Laypeople believe that the economy consists of peasants growing wheat, workers manufacturing clothes, and customers buying bread and underpants. Yet experts see the economy as a mechanism for gathering data about desires and abilities, and turning this data into decisions.

According to this view, free-market capitalism and state-controlled communism aren’t competing ideologies, ethical creeds or political institutions. At bottom, they are competing data-processing systems. Capitalism uses distributed processing, whereas communism relies on centralised processing.

Capitalism did not defeat communism because capitalism was more ethical, because individual liberties are sacred or because God was angry with the heathen communists. Rather, capitalism won the Cold War because distributed data processing works better than centralised data processing, at least in periods of accelerating technological changes. The central committee of the Communist Party just could not deal with the rapidly changing world of the late twentieth century. When all data is accumulated in one secret bunker, and all important decisions are taken by a group of elderly apparatchiks, you can produce nuclear bombs by the cartload, but you won’t get an Apple or a Wikipedia.

There is a story (probably apocryphal, like most good stories) that when Mikhail Gorbachev tried to resuscitate the moribund Soviet economy, he sent one of his chief aids to London to find out what Thatcherism was all about, and how a capitalist system actually functioned. The hosts took their Soviet visitor on a tour of the City, of the London stock exchange and of the London School of Economics, where he had lengthy talks with bank managers, entrepreneurs and professors. After a few hours, the Soviet expert burst out: ‘Just one moment, please. Forget about all these complicated economic theories. We have been going back and forth across London for a whole day now, and there’s one thing I cannot understand. Back in Moscow, our finest minds are working on the bread supply system, and yet there are such long queues in every bakery and grocery store. Here in London live millions of people, and we have passed today in front of many shops and supermarkets, yet I haven’t seen a single bread queue. Please take me to meet the person in charge of supplying bread to London. I must learn his secret.’ The hosts scratched their heads, thought for a moment, and said: ‘Nobody is in charge of supplying bread to London.’

That’s the capitalist secret of success. No central processing unit monopolises all the data on the London bread supply. The information flows freely between millions of consumers and producers, bakers and tycoons, farmers and scientists. Market forces determine the price of bread, the number of loaves baked each day and the research-and-development priorities. If market forces make the wrong decision, they soon correct themselves, or so capitalists believe. For our current purposes, it doesn’t matter whether the theory is correct. The crucial thing is that the theory understands economics in terms of data processing.

[…] Dataism naturally has its critics and heretics. As we saw in Chapter 3, it’s doubtful whether life can really be reduced to data flows. In particular, at present we have no idea how or why data flows could produce consciousness and subjective experiences. Maybe we’ll have a good explanation in twenty years. But maybe we’ll discover that organisms aren’t algorithms after all.

It is equally doubtful whether life boils down to decision-making. Under Dataist influence, both the life sciences and the social sciences have become obsessed with decision-making processes, as if that’s all there is to life. But is it so? Sensations, emotions and thoughts certainly play an important part in making decisions, but is that their sole meaning? Dataism gains a better and better understanding of decision-making processes, but it might be adopting an increasingly skewed view of life.

[…] Of course, even if Dataism is wrong and organisms aren’t just algorithms, it won’t necessarily prevent Dataism from taking over the world. Many previous religions gained enormous popularity and power despite their factual mistakes. If Christianity and communism could do it, why not Dataism? Dataism has especially good prospects, because it is currently spreading across all scientific disciplines. A unified scientific paradigm may easily become an unassailable dogma. It is very difficult to contest a scientific paradigm, but up till now, no single paradigm was adopted by the entire scientific establishment. Hence scholars in one field could always import heretical views from outside. But if everyone from musicologists to biologists uses the same Dataist paradigm, interdisciplinary excursions will serve only to strengthen the paradigm further. Consequently even if the paradigm is flawed, it would be extremely difficult to resist it.

- Yuval Noah Harari, The Data Religion in Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

#yuval noah harari #homo deus: a brief history of tomorrow #homo deus

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tanadrin · 5 years ago

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Reordberend

(part 25 of 30; first; previous; next)

The rest of the journey passed with little conversation, but now the silence was more comfortable. Katherine mulled over the conundrum of how to get the elders to listen to her. She watched Leofe, as they walked, and tried to imagine what it must have been like to have been born in the Valleys, to have grown up here amid the ice and stones. It was difficult, to say the least.

They spent the night at the mouth of the valleys, and in the morning they switched to snowshoes, to gently descend the long glacial tongue to the surface of the ice shelf below; from there, it was a straight shot across McMurdo Sound to Mount Erebus, which loomed now in the darkness only as an absence of stars. The open ice was the most treacherous part of the journey: cracks could open up here, as the ice shelf was squeezed through the narrow passage of the Sound, big enough to swallow you whole, and they had to go carefully. They spent two nights camping on the open ice, crammed into one tiny tent, huddled together for warmth. On the morning of the third day, though, they found their path forward blocked by an enormous crevasse, which forced them to go south, to try to circle around it. Eventually, they realized, it ran all the way to the coast of the island; the quickest thing to do was to head straight for McMurdo Station, and go overland up the mountain.

At first, Katherine was kind of excited to see the ruins. Once upon a time, McMurdo Station had been a major scientific and transport hub for a huge part of Antarctica, a waystation on the way to the South Pole. But it had been abandoned a long time ago, and it was one of the few old scientific sites that hadn’t been reclaimed by the Antarctic Authority. On closer inspection, though, Katherine could safely say it was the creepiest place on the continent. It didn’t help that the aurorae australis were glowing a sickly green hue as they approached. Skeletal buildings, ravaged as much by the People’s salvage as by the weather, stood out the slopes, and old radar domes cracked and open to the sky. They spent the night in a mostly-intact building on the edge of the base, and Katherine could have sworn she heard what sounded like animals scurrying around in the ruins.

The actual mountain ascent was not so difficult, although it took another two days. The People had cut a path on the western side of the mountain, so they approached from that side. The ground was icy, but the weather was good. “We would have to wait for it to clear if it was not,” Leofe said. “You cannot climb the mountain in fog.”

On the second day of climbing, by midafternoon--right when Katherine’s legs were threatening to give up for good--Leofe held out her hand to stop Katherine. “We’re here,” she said. The last hundred meters or so were up wide stone steps, which ended at a great tunnel mouth, bored straight into the mountainside. “We go carefully from here,” Leofe said. “If the wind is bad, dangerous fumes can rise from the crater.”

“This is where you build your temple?”

“If the wind is favorable--well, you’ll see.”

The tunnel ran straight for fifty meters; it opened out onto a wide porch that had been cut back into the side of the crater, with a protective stone overhang. Rough pillars supported it, and pairs of steps off to either side led up to narrow paths around the inside of the crater rim.

“Jesus Christ,” Katherine said. “How was this place built?”

The view was clear, for the moment; clumps of steam or vapor clung to the stony slope here and there, gases leaking from vents that led to Mount Erebus’s fiery interior. Far, far below, and almost at the other side of the crater, there was a sullen red glow visible from within a cloud of smoke.

“Is that--”

“Molten stone, yes. The fire rises to the surface here; it is often restless.”

“Is this safe?” Katherine asked.

Leofe rolled her eyes. “It’s a volcano.”

Katherine walked to the edge of the stone balcony. Here and there--possibly at regular intervals, although it was hard to tell because of the clouds--great pillars with tops shaped like animal or human heads gazed out over the scene. There were steps that led further down into the crater, although Katherine couldn’t see how far. It was an austere and threatening landscape; Katherine could also appreciate its beauty. A bright aurora glowed in the sky overhead, illuminating the whole thing in pale light. Katherine could see why they called it the Fane of Awe.

How long had it taken to build this place? Even with handheld laser cutters, the stone pillars had had to be hauled up here, had to be raised in the smoking crater, when the fires were low and the wind was strong enough to dissipate the volcanic fumes. The climb up the mountain had been exhausting enough unencumbered. Katherine couldn’t imagine hauling enormous blocks of shaped stone up the slope as well. How would you even begin to do that? Or maybe they had quarried it close by, but that was still heavy work. It would have been many, many years of labor. Seasonal, probably. Done in summer. The tunnel itself and the porch of stone would have taken even longer to cut through, but the evidence of her experience so far was that the People were patient, and were not afraid of difficult labor.

She found Leofe back near the entrance, kneeling down and taking some small objects out of her pack.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I have some… things I must do.”

“Sure. The rites. Wulf said. I’ll, uh, come back later.” Katherine thought about exploring the crater, but she didn’t know much about volcanoes, and she didn’t like the look of the clouds coming up from the ground. Instead, she went back out, and decided to go for a walk up near the crater rim. The ground here was steep, although not terribly treacherous. She tested each step carefully, bracing herself with her staff in case her footing failed. After another thirty minutes or so, she was at the crater edge.

The lava lake was still visible, far below, although partly shrouded in clouds. McMurdo Sound was a pale swathe of ice, ten or fifteen kilometers off. The mountains along the coast were just barely visible. The wind here was fierce, bitterly cold, colder than anything she’d felt in her life. But God in Heaven, it was a beautiful view. In some ways, perhaps, she had shared the experiences of the People, clutching as a child after something sacred in a world in which the sacrosanct seemed to hold little meaning. But in other ways, their perspective was completely different. Katherine’s experience of church was the plain, low meeting house, whose only adornment might be a picture of Jesus on the wall. Simple wooden benches, a hard concrete floor, a plain white exterior. Some of the meeting houses in Sand Mountain didn’t even have running water. God--awe, if you like--was an internal experience in those places. A thing you contemplated, which rose up within your mind and your heart, which grew out of your faith and your desire to feel it. Here, though, the sacred was an immutable and implacable fact of the world. It would be here, whether you cared to experience it or not. And if you did, it would shout itself forth from every hill and every stone and every patch of ice, and it would overwhelm you. Even the great cathedrals of old Europe could not match this. They were in comparison the feeble attempts of human hands to imitate what nature had been doing for millions of years. Or billions. To imitate a thing which shot through every atom of the universe, every star and every planet, the fractal majesty of existence that you only really appreciated when you stood in a place where survival was almost, almost--but not quite--impossible.

Katherine had read once, in her high school science textbook, that there was a rock they had once found in Australia that was four and a half billion years old. It was so old that it had formed when the surface of the Earth was half-molten, when the air was still toxic, when the oceans had just begun to form. There was a picture. And something about that picture suddenly made everything the book was talking about feel real, in a way that dry numbers like “four and a half billion” never could on their own. A sense of the enormous weight of time had staggered her, and she had stared at the photograph, trying to understand. For millions of years afterward, the Earth had no continents, only craggy islands of rock that had not yet accreted into the ancient cratons. Even once life emerged, for three and a half billion years--for three quarters of the span of life of the entire planet--it had been single-celled organisms confined to the seas. If you had been an observer on the ancient Earth, fixed in place at the dawn of time and forced to observe the slow march of geologic time across the surface, then for the overwhelming majority of the world’s history, for a span of time longer than the human mind was capable of understanding on any level, the world had been empty. Barren. Bereft of voices. Bereft of names. Silent provinces, whole nameless countries, continents, cataclysms had come and gone, with no one to see them, no one to name them, no one to record their passage. And only late--in the last five hundred million years or so--had a riot of life burst forth. And only in the last eyeblink, since the retreat of the glaciers, had humans swept across the world to give all these things names and meaning and histories, but of all these places, Antarctica had been empty the longest. And even then, for a long time, we had come and gone as phantoms, she thought; not until the People came did they begin to let their names and their stories sink into the Earth. Not until the People came did anyone call Antarctica home.

She stood there as long as she could stand it--ten minutes, maybe, no more--before making her way back down the slope to the entrance of the fane.

By the time she returned, Leofe was apparently done with her business. She had set up their tent in a sheltered alcove in the passageway, and Katherine was terribly grateful they would at least be out of the wind tonight. They built a small fire on the stone floor, and warmed their hands for a little while, before making dinner, and settling down to bed.

Katherine lay awake that night, listening to the wind howl against the tunnel entrance. It felt wrong, somehow, to try to sleep at the summit of an active volcano. The kind of act of hubris the Greek gods would punish you for.

“Leofe?” she said quietly. “Leofe. Are you asleep?”

“Grnk.”

Katherine rolled over, doing her best not to jostle her bunkmate. She lay there a little longer.

“Hey Leofe. Do you want to come with me in the spring? We can leave together. If you want.”

The wind howled louder.

“Leofe?”

“Hbble.”

Katherine closed her eyes, and did her best to sleep. Her dreams that night were jumbled, and the next morning all that she could remember was that they were filled with fire.

#tanadrin's fiction

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edge-lorde · 5 years ago

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original vampire bullshit

part...... 1? EDIT: PART 2 HERE part 3 here part 4 here

idk i wrote like 5 pages of rambling about vampire biology with a bit of disjointed theory at the beginning. i didnt even get into anything orcs related or any of the history or how the world works, but its very long.

if anyone seems interested to know the other stuff, ill write more.

until then:

Vampires. What are they? = sentient viruses.

In this world we are assuming that all viruses are living things, but are descended from NOT the same common ancestor as all other forms of life on earth, which is why they are so weird and don't match up with what we describe life and living things to be.

Here is a list of what makes a living thing in current science:

are made of one or more cells.

need energy to stay alive.

respond to stimuli in their environment.

grow and reproduce.

maintain a stable internal environment.

I don't actually know how many of those things do apply to viruses, but the point is that we defined what a living thing is, and if evolution had gone a little differently, perhaps we would have made a different definition.

In this world, let's say that all normal viruses like the flu and stuff exist, but there are also ones that don’t. There’s a lot of bullshit science things people smarter than me have figured out about viruses that i don’t have the patience to read. Suffice it to say that for now, vampirism is a form of virus that does not just take over single cells or particular tissues in order to reproduce, but entire organisms.

In this case, it only effects humans but there could be many similar viruses in this world that work the same way. Basically it's like a mutual thing where, the vampire virus infects a host, and as a result the hosts own reproduction ability is completely shut down, and now they are only able to reproduce via the virus. The host benefits because in human evolution, the body starts to degrade after the age of reproduction. This makes sense because all evolution is is what causes an organism to have more of its DNA survive in the past = what will be alive in the future.

It benefits the virus for the infected host to be mobile as long as possible because the vampirism virus needs blood exchange from host to host in order to infect. In this way, the infected host being able to travel and make this happen for as long as possible benefits the virus the most, and results in a human that appears to never age and stay in good health long after a human of the same age would have died.

The human host’s DNA also benefits because even though the original reproduction system is shut down, the virus copies a little bit of the original hosts DNA and transfers it to the next hosts that that person infects. Independent of that, it benefits human populations to have vampires included in society because they live so much longer and can relay information/give extra support from a longer period back in time and for a longer period of time.

However, nowadays the relationship between vampires and uninfected humans is different and i’ll get to it eventually.

FIRST: physiology.

Vampirism is a bone disease. It is passed along through blood contact only. When someone is infected the main thing that changes is that bone marrow stops being able to make new red blood cells, why this would be I'll figure out eventually. To remedy this, they must get their blood through other means. Once infection has taken place, the future vampire will grow new “teeth” otherwise known as “fangs” that connect to their circulatory system. The time period before these new teeth come in is known as the fledgling stage, when a person is considered halfway between human and vampire. More on this later. The end of this stage is signaled when the old human teeth fall out and the new blood-teeth fully emerge. This also usually signals the time when the vampires’ bones will stop making new blood cells. Every vampire has until all their current red blood cells begin to die off to feed and replenish themselves. If they don’t do this, they will die. If a vampire is unlucky enough to stop making new blood before their teeth are ready they must receive blood in some way or they will super die.

Vampires are not dead or undead. Magic does not exist in this world, so while getting new blood is a physiological problem that their bodies need to address, they still need to eat regular food to fuel themselves as well. I thought about making a garlic allergy more common for them just because it would be funny but it actually doesn’t make sense, unfortunately. Vampires can and do eat everything that humans can eat. Raw blood is more palatable for them in taste than it was, and probably do use it more in cuisine as a result, but they can’t gain red blood cells by eating/swallowing blood as food, it must go through their blood fangs or possibly be injected into the bloodstream.

It also can’t be bad blood-- it must still have living red blood cells and blood types still apply in some sense. When the blood goes through the blood fangs, the body doctors it to a form that won’t get attacked by the body’s immune system, = vampires all have their own, new blood types that are universal receivers to all/most human blood types. For this reason, I feel most animal blood would make a vampire very sick, or perhaps only non-mammal blood? This also makes direct blood transfusion into a vampire via a needle very risky and even likely to make them sick as well. In modern times I imagine that either they have developed a technique of making harvested blood vampire-immune system- friendly before injection, or have a way of injecting the blood directly into their blood-doctoring organ. In any case, blood transfusion is only done on vampires in life or death circumstances.

I mentioned before that vampires old reproductive systems shut down, that's true. That takes up energy so it's gone. Sex hormones are replaced by vampire hormones that keep organs working. I don’t know enough about biochemistry to say more about how that might work. The more time that goes on, the less clearly masculine or feminine a vampire will look and also the less interested in sex they will be on average. They can still have sex if they want, but the more time that goes on the more medical intervention they may need in order to do it.

There’s a small window of time just after a person has been infected where they are still fertile, for those with sperm that’s until their last batch of them dies off. For those with eggs, it’s usually up until their last ovulation cycle, but in some cases they may still have viable eggs for years afterward that could be harvested and used in IVF, but the longer someone waits the less likely that is to work and the person would need a surrogate, both because the persons uterus may or may not be able to still work and because there's the potential that the unborn baby could be infected by the vampirism virus. That’s a bad thing and I'll explain why in a minute. The kids of new vampires are either infected with vampirism or not, no matter if they have one or two vampire parents. There is no half-vampires in this setting, only full ones and unaffected humans.

Vampires also age weird. Immediately after being turned, it's like getting a dose of extra youth. As long as one has enough blood, organs that had begun to deteriorate will suddenly get better, reach a state of equilibrium, and then slowly begin to deteriorate at a much slower pace. If they routinely are forced into states of having low amounts of viable blood, they will deteriorate much faster.

The prime age to be turned is 25 - before someone begins to lose their strength, whenever that is. The aforementioned dose of youth can only do so much, chronic conditions can still affect vampires, though to a lesser degree.

If a child were to become infected with vampirism, they would skip puberty all together. No matter what age they are, after they are done with their fledgling period, their bones will begin to fuse at the stage they are at and the person will begin to age at the vampire rate as if they were adults. This results in old vampires bitten as kids looking like kids with wrinkles and arthritis. This is why vampire babies are very bad, and super illegal to make.

In modern times, both adult and child vampires can take hormone treatments to either replace the sex hormones they lost when bitten, or supply the human growth hormones that would allow them to grow up as a human would. In order to get the best result, the latter treatment should be started before the person's bones fuse-- before or just after the end of the fledgling stage. For individuals whose bones have already fused, the treatment may still be recommended for some-- they can still have a puberty but won’t get any taller.

There is also the issue of the brain. The reason why it's considered optimal for vampires not to be turned until at least 25 is because that is when the brain finishes maturing. Once turned, the vampires brain may also stop maturing. I don't actually know that much about the brain, so this section relies on info that someone knows, but not me. If it's the case that the brain’s maturation is caused by growth hormones, then taking them will let the underage vampire’s brain finish growing. Hooray! If it's just caused by being alive and figuring things out via life experience, hooray! They don’t need any kind of treatment. If it's not caused by either of these concepts, then their brains stop maturing at whatever age they were bitten at and will never go far beyond that.

For the aging brain, vampirism will initially improve general brain function and temporarily halt dementia. This is because during the fledgling stage, the infected person's brain will begin to detach emotion to their old memories as a human and begin to create new neurons. As a person's memories become less and less personal, they will bond to the vampire who turned them. The exploitation of a fledgling by their vampire parent is again, super illegal.

The new vampire will essentially lose the person they once were and gain new formative memories during this period. This is a very real physiological process that is difficult to protect against. They will retain all of their old memories, but all emotion attached to them will be lost. Even if a vampire manages to remember their past fondly, if they were to be presented with the people, places, and things that they once loved, they might not even recognize them. If they do, they won’t have an emotional response. It will be as if they know that this person or thing was once important to someone, but was it really to them?

The undead may not exist in this world but that doesn't mean becoming a vampire isn’t a serious loss to a person's humanity. This loss primes the new vampire to find a new place in life with their vampire community......

#vampire #vampirism #original #ocs #murder orcs #rambling #Thoughts

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theonyxpath · 6 years ago

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Cavaliers of Mars is out! Here’s a sample of some of the kinds of characters you can create and encounter on the sands and cities of Mars, in the form of two Careers and one of the Peoples.

Adept

Adepts are those skilled in the psychic arts. A few are prodigies, whose abilities develop naturally during their youths. Others are “gifted” after being struck with terrible illnesses or tragedies. Most, however, learn the arts through long and arduous study. Potential adepts are brought up as ascetics, earning the right to speak or to eat only by performing feats of right to speak or to eat only by performing feats of the mind.

While numerous orders attempt this training, true adepts are few and far between. Some orders, such as the Roundheads, combine psychic training with the mastery of mathematics or other sciences. Certainly, the results of these methods speak for themselves, as most Roundheads demonstrate uncanny mental powers. Others combine the arts with ecstatic religious experiences, believing that the alternation of deprivation and excess can stretch the boundaries of the mind.

Adepts are feared by common Martians, but not unduly so. The average Martian cannot guess at the powers of a psychic opponent, while he knows the adept’s estimation of him will be flawless. Adepts find employment as priests, advisors, and, in some unusual cases, courtesans.

Trappings: A faint crackle in the air, as if before a storm.

Assassin

Hired killers take many forms on Mars. Some are elite warriors, able to best even the most dangerous of opponents in single combat. Others are more subtle, as adept at intrigue as poison. And many are simple butchers, blunt instruments moved into the right place at the right time.

Career assassins work for hire, and are usually found in the employ of one wealthy interest or another. In Vance, assassination is a common ploy in the politics of the merchant houses. There, political murder is considered primarily the crime of the patron, rather than the hand that wields the knife. In Ziggur, assassins pursue prey more vulnerable here than elsewhere, or find employment with the small, but dedicated, cells of revolutionaries.

A few assassins wander the desert paths, spending years tracking a single quarry, and striking them down at the most poetic possible moment.

Trappings: Poison, small blades, a disguise.

Other careers include: Astrologer, Cavalier, Courtesan, Entertainer, Fixer, Laborer, Merchant, Noble, Physician, Pilot, Priest, Scavenger, Scholar, Servant, Soldier, Thief

The Red Martians

Of all the Martians, the Reds are small, slow, and frail. It is amazing they have survived as well as they have considering all these weaknesses. Their strengths, though: Perseverance, intelligence, and wit clearly make up for all other lacks. – Excerpts from Tiendle’s Anatomy of a Martian

An ambitious people full of passionate desires and reckless abandon, the Red Martians are the most numerous of the remaining people on Mars. They live along the canals in expansive city-states, and cling to life in dust-towns where the wells have all but dried up. Others travel well-worn caravan routes across the endless deserts. Their society is fractious, with many different governing bodies controlling one city or another, and those who travel between or live on the edges seek to find a niche to maintain a livelihood.

Red Martians claim to be the direct descendants of the First Martians, making them superior to both their distant relatives, the Roundheads, and the Pale Martians. They have long since abandoned the ruined cities of the First Martians, and leave those strange wonders to the Pale Martians. Both groups look upon the Red Martians with disdain for abandoning the wealth of knowledge and heritage remaining in the ruins of the First Martians.

Red Martians are not actually red, but instead range from tan to dark brown with a coppery undertone to their skin, and have hair that ranges from coppery to deep black, thin and wavy to thick and curly and sometimes even kinky. They have deep-set, expressive eyes and hard-edged, yet rounded, facial features.

Red Martians follow a multitude of different religions, tending to fall into whatever faith the prevailing city or culture they live near follows. The Reds have a strange phenomenon of developing mystery cults to one unknown technology or element or another. Some entire city-states are ruled by these cults. The most popular Red Martian religion is the Church of the Damsel Messiah.

Red Martian cities include Vance, Zodiac, Illium, and Chiaro, and they live alongside the Pale Martians in Surtur.

The People of the Labyrinth

The rumors are many and varied. Cannibal tribes run by a magical woman, people who can create water out of nothing, glowing plants and animals that give any who eat them mystical powers. I’m going to find out for myself what lies in the Labyrinth of Night once and for all. – The last entry in the diary of Diokel, explorer

Soon after the First Martians disappeared, as the Red Martians made their way across the planet to settle cities, a group of voyagers made their way into the Wyeth Valley. They did not make contact with the Wyeth, but instead traveled far to the northernmost tip of the canyon, a place where the sun cannot reach, and found a wondrous landscape of luminous ?ora and fauna. They built a city there and lived in a perpetual twilight within the glowing cavern. As the years passed and the city became prosperous, trade between the Red Martians and the Wyeth ?ourished, despite the Wyeth’s misgivings about the Reds living so close to their homeland.

One night a bright light fell from the sky and all communication between the Red Martians in the Labyrinth of Night and those outside was shut off. Some claim the Reds in the Labyrinth all died that night and the city they built is a vast abandoned wasteland. Others claim the light was the landing of an alien creature from the amber star, Venus. Those who have traveled to the Labyrinth since then come back with wild stories. One described an indoctrinated people who devoutly worship alien gods under the sway of a Venusian witch-queen, who attempted to control her through magic before she made a daring escape. Another told a tale in which he discovered a nearly-abandoned city with a giant monolith in the center, one whose construction he could not determine and that was vastly different from even First Martian artifacts. Yet another told of barely surviving a strange tempest within the canyon and being nursed back to health by a Red female in a dark city lit to dazzling beauty with brightly glowing flowers and lichen. While not all stories and rumors about the area can be believed, most Martians are certain the Reds living in the city are still there in some form or another.

The Qans and Ozaks

They kill us, we kill them. It is a war older than any of us, and I’m not even sure why it’s going on. All I know, is that if I don’t do something first, it will be my body that’s burning in the field to keep the fungus at bay. – Serenai, Clan Chieftain of the South Plains Ozaks

Long ago, on the plains of Cimmeria, reigned the great Qan Empire. At the height of the Qans’ power, they ruled over the Ozaks. The Ozaks were farmers and sometimes sellswords, but all their efforts went unwillingly towards the service of the Qans. The Qans did not even bother to grow their own food, instead taking what they needed from the Ozaks. The Ozaks sought ways to free themselves, and had even begun to organize a resistance when the presence of the purple fungus was frst noticed. No one really knows where the fungus came from, or how it first spread along the Cimmeria plains, but its presence gave the Ozaks the leverage they needed to rise up against the Qans.

The first reports of dead bodies rising from their graves sent cities all across the Cimmeria plains into a fearful frenzy. The Ozaks took advantage of the heightened state of paranoia and turned on their masters. Of course, those dead bodies also rose from the grave to eventually infect more people with the fungus. Soon the Qan blamed the Ozaks for the phenomenon and they declared war.

With most of the Qans’ infrastructure lost to the Ozaks, including food and grain stores, the Qans took to raiding Ozak camps to steal necessary supplies. And where the bloodshed went, the fungus followed. Within a single generation, the Cimmerian plains were covered in the fungus, and the Qan and Ozak survivors learned to compensate for the fungus. Still, to this day, when any of the remaining Qan or Ozak people meet one another, it ends in bloodshed, which only serves to feed the fungus.

The Ozak people have always been very practical, with roots in hard work and suffering for their people. All Ozaks train as warriors, as well as any other duty they may perform for their clan. When an Ozak is too old or injured to continue fighting, she retires to a monastery and devotes her life to religious callings.

Other Peoples of Mars include: The Roundheads, the Pale Martians, the Skarruts, the Wyeth, the Zaius

#Onyx Path Publishing

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lodelss · 4 years ago

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An Indigenous Woman Made it to Safety in the US. DHS Won’t Let it Go.

When Flor got word that she was going to be able to make her way into the U.S. and reunite with her family last May, she was ecstatic. For more than nine months, Flor and her five-year-old daughter had been stuck in Matamoros, Mexico, living inside a two-person tent in a squalid refugee camp near the U.S. border while they waited for an immigration judge to hear their asylum claim. Flor — whose full name is being omitted for her safety — and her daughter were among the roughly 60,000 asylum seekers who’d been trapped in Mexico under the Trump administration’s “Migrant Protection Protocols” (MPP). The months she spent in Matamoros were a nightmare.Temperatures oscillated between blazing heat during the day and frigid cold at night. One of those nights, she and her daughter huddled in their tent as the sound of a gun battle between police and a local drug cartel echoed through the streets. Another time, Flor says men cornered her and demanded extortion payments. When she failed to pay, she was violently assaulted. So when Flor heard that she and her daughter were going to be allowed to enter the U.S., the where they could continue the asylum process under the care of relatives in Massachusetts, she felt like she was being given a new lease on life. “I don’t know how to express the happiness I felt,” she said. “Knowing that we would be happy, at ease, and safe…I don’t know if you could understand it.” By May 2020, being allowed to enter the U.S. as an asylum seeker was akin to a miracle. The Coronavirus pandemic was raging in the U.S., and hearings for cases like hers had been indefinitely postponed, stranding thousands of asylum seekers in cities across Mexico with no idea when immigration courts would start hearing their claims again. In March, the Centers for Disease Control had caved under pressure from the Trump administration and issued a dubious public health order that allowed border officials to eject asylum seekers from the country almost instantaneously. By late Spring, America’s asylum system had essentially ceased to exist.

A Guatemalan asylum seeker and her two daughters are expelled from the U.S. into Ciudad Juarez under the CDC’s Title 42 order, April 2, 2020.

Paul Ratje

But in Massachusetts, Flor’s family’s plea for help had reached the ACLU of Massachusetts. They were desperate – the stories she told them about the situation in the camp were increasingly dire, and they feared for her life and that of her young daughter. ACLU attorneys in the state and nationally had already brought litigation against the MPP, and they decided to take her case along with a coalition of other advocates. Flor joined two other women — one of whom also had a five-year-old child — as plaintiffs in the case, which argued that putting them in the MPP was illegal and inhumane. In the following weeks, attorneys for the ACLU in Massachusetts interviewed Flor and the other two women via cell phone. Flor would charge hers ahead of time in a communal charging station at the camp. “It was only after talking to them on the phone for a really long time, sometimes ten hours, that they felt comfortable enough to share some of the things that they had been through,” said Adriana Lafaille, a staff attorney with the ACLU of Massachusetts. Flor is from Guatemala and is Maya K’iche’ — a member of an Indigenous group from the country’s remote highlands. Throughout Guatemalan history, Maya K’iche’ and other Indigenous groups have been the target of discrimination and violence at the hands of politically dominant Spanish-descended Guatemalans, sometimes called “Ladinos.” In recent years, that violence has surged, with conflicts erupting between Mayan communities and prospectors with their eye on valuable mineral deposits beneath Indigenous land. Flor’s father was a vocal advocate for Indigenous rights, and she says she suffered as a result. After he was attacked and incapacitated, she began working as a maid in a Ladino household at the age of 10. She suffered repeated abuse at the hands of her employers, and, at 19, was violently attacked by a group of men who demanded information about her uncles. By mid-2019, she knew it was time to leave. “I realized that my daughter and I would never be able to escape persecution in Guatemala, and we fled,” she recounted in an affidavit. But by the time the COVID-19 crisis erupted, Flor had been in the Matamoros refugee camp for nearly eight months. Her daughter was losing weight, saying she was too sad to eat, and Flor feared the men who’d assaulted her might return.

Refugee camp for migrants and asylum seekers in Matamoros, Mexico, October 2019.

Guillermo Arias for the ACLU.

In May, Flor received a phone call from her attorneys. A federal judge had ruled in her favor, granting the ACLU’s request for her to be taken out of the MPP. She and her daughter would be joining a small handful of people who’d escaped the policy. Flor’s attorneys feared she might be sent to an immigration detention facility instead of being released to her family in Massachusetts. But after only a single night in detention, she and the others were released. For Lafaille, it was a hard-fought win in an era where the courts have often thwarted efforts to block the Trump administration’s harsh immigration policies. “We were all just so relieved,” she said. “For our clients, it was an end to this incredibly difficult ordeal and a long period of such hardship and uncertainty.” Flor and her daughter settled into life in Massachusetts. The pandemic was still raging, so mostly they stayed inside, but occasionally she accompanied her aunt to the park or grocery store. “It’s so peaceful here,” she said. “I feel a tranquility that I have never experienced in my life. I’m treated nicely by people.” But it quickly became apparent that lawyers from the Department of Homeland Security were not going to accept the loss and move on. Not long after Flor and the others arrived in Massachusetts, Lafaille received notice that the government planned to appeal the decision. By mid-summer, COVID-19 had arrived in shelters across the U.S.-Mexico border, as well as in the refugee camp where Flor spent nearly a year. Despite the rise in cases in Mexico, DHS refused to relent — the agency pressed on with the appeal, seeking the power to send Flor, her daughter, and the others back to Mexico immediately. Lafaille says that the appeal is a symbol of just how hostile the federal government has become towards asylum seekers under the Trump administration. “Not only has the government claimed that our clients weren’t facing urgent harms in Mexico,” she said. “But after our clients were here in Massachusetts, DHS also asserted that the appeal had to be expedited because it was the government that was being harmed by having to allow these three women and two children — who they never contended were dangerous in any way — to live in safety with their families.” Because of DHS’s appeal, Flor isn’t just facing the daunting task of presenting an asylum claim in immigration court — she’s fighting to prevent her and her daughter from being forced to do so from a tent inside a refugee camp during a pandemic. Flor says she has to find ways to distract herself from the prospect. “I tell myself that I shouldn’t think about that,” she said. “When I do, I try to think about other things instead.” The ACLU of Massachusetts argued against DHS’s appeal in front of the First Circuit Court of Appeals on Oct. 6. Even in an era where the federal government is using every avenue it can to prevent asylum seekers from entering the country, she says the appeal stands out. “It just shows a government that is totally devoid of humanity,” said Lafaille. “In the government’s eyes, the MPP is working because it is so devastating to asylum seekers that many simply cannot make it to their hearings, and their claims are deemed abandoned. They want the process to be so hard and dangerous in Mexico that people just give up.” Until the First Circuit rules on the appeal, Flor and the other new arrivals are stuck in limbo, hoping they’ll be allowed to remain safe and out of harm’s way. “The thing I wish for the most, what I ask God for, is to not be sent back to Mexico,” she said. The ACLU of Massachusetts is co-counseling this case with the firm Fish & Richardson. Flor has been represented in her immigration case by the Law Office of Jodi Goodwin in Harlingen, Texas, and is now represented by Greater Boston Legal Services and the Harvard Immigration and Refugee Clinic. In the First Circuit, the plaintiffs’ position was supported by National Citizenship and Immigration Services Council 119, represented by Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP; former government officials including Janet Napolitano, Roberta Jacobson and James Clapper, represented by WilmerHale; and a coalition of legal service providers and organizations, represented by the Law Office of Joshua M. Daniels.

Published October 12, 2020 at 08:30PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/3iTOXF3

#IFTTT #Blogger

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madisonacampbell · 4 years ago

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Via the ACLU: An Indigenous Woman Made it to Safety in the US. DHS Won’t Let it Go.

An Indigenous Woman Made it to Safety in the US. DHS Won’t Let it Go.

A Guatemalan asylum seeker and her two daughters are expelled from the U.S. into Ciudad Juarez under the CDC’s Title 42 order, April 2, 2020.

Paul Ratje

Refugee camp for migrants and asylum seekers in Matamoros, Mexico, October 2019.

Guillermo Arias for the ACLU.

Published October 12, 2020 at 11:00AM via ACLU (https://ift.tt/3iTOXF3) via ACLU

#IFTTT #ACLU

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nancydhooper · 4 years ago

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An Indigenous Woman Made it to Safety in the US. DHS Won’t Let it Go.

A Guatemalan asylum seeker and her two daughters are expelled from the U.S. into Ciudad Juarez under the CDC’s Title 42 order, April 2, 2020.

Paul Ratje

Refugee camp for migrants and asylum seekers in Matamoros, Mexico, October 2019.

Guillermo Arias for the ACLU.

from RSSMix.com Mix ID 8247012 https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/this-indigenous-woman-reached-safety-in-the-us-and-dhs-is-furious via http://www.rssmix.com/

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dfroza · 5 years ago

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the Body.

all parts interconnected, to function as a whole. different parts, different functions. all significant.

we are children of Light who form the Temple of our Creator here on beautiful earth carrying within the sacred treasure of the Spirit and the Word of God (who is the True illumination of the Son)

and this significance is seen in Today’s reading of the Scriptures from Paul’s Letter of First Corinthians with chapter 12:

What I want to talk about now is the various ways God’s Spirit gets worked into our lives. This is complex and often misunderstood, but I want you to be informed and knowledgeable. Remember how you were when you didn’t know God, led from one phony god to another, never knowing what you were doing, just doing it because everybody else did it? It’s different in this life. God wants us to use our intelligence, to seek to understand as well as we can. For instance, by using your heads, you know perfectly well that the Spirit of God would never prompt anyone to say “Jesus be damned!” Nor would anyone be inclined to say “Jesus is Master!” without the insight of the Holy Spirit.

God’s various gifts are handed out everywhere; but they all originate in God’s Spirit. God’s various ministries are carried out everywhere; but they all originate in God’s Spirit. God’s various expressions of power are in action everywhere; but God himself is behind it all. Each person is given something to do that shows who God is: Everyone gets in on it, everyone benefits. All kinds of things are handed out by the Spirit, and to all kinds of people! The variety is wonderful:

wise counsel

clear understanding

simple trust

healing the sick

miraculous acts

proclamation

distinguishing between spirits

tongues

interpretation of tongues.

All these gifts have a common origin, but are handed out one by one by the one Spirit of God. He decides who gets what, and when.

You can easily enough see how this kind of thing works by looking no further than your own body. Your body has many parts—limbs, organs, cells—but no matter how many parts you can name, you’re still one body. It’s exactly the same with Christ. By means of his one Spirit, we all said good-bye to our partial and piecemeal lives. We each used to independently call our own shots, but then we entered into a large and integrated life in which he has the final say in everything. (This is what we proclaimed in word and action when we were baptized.) Each of us is now a part of his resurrection body, refreshed and sustained at one fountain—his Spirit—where we all come to drink. The old labels we once used to identify ourselves—labels like Jew or Greek, slave or free—are no longer useful. We need something larger, more comprehensive.

I want you to think about how all this makes you more significant, not less. A body isn’t just a single part blown up into something huge. It’s all the different-but-similar parts arranged and functioning together. If Foot said, “I’m not elegant like Hand, embellished with rings; I guess I don’t belong to this body,” would that make it so? If Ear said, “I’m not beautiful like Eye, limpid and expressive; I don’t deserve a place on the head,” would you want to remove it from the body? If the body was all eye, how could it hear? If all ear, how could it smell? As it is, we see that God has carefully placed each part of the body right where he wanted it.

But I also want you to think about how this keeps your significance from getting blown up into self-importance. For no matter how significant you are, it is only because of what you are a part of. An enormous eye or a gigantic hand wouldn’t be a body, but a monster. What we have is one body with many parts, each its proper size and in its proper place. No part is important on its own. Can you imagine Eye telling Hand, “Get lost; I don’t need you”? Or, Head telling Foot, “You’re fired; your job has been phased out”? As a matter of fact, in practice it works the other way—the “lower” the part, the more basic, and therefore necessary. You can live without an eye, for instance, but not without a stomach. When it’s a part of your own body you are concerned with, it makes no difference whether the part is visible or clothed, higher or lower. You give it dignity and honor just as it is, without comparisons. If anything, you have more concern for the lower parts than the higher. If you had to choose, wouldn’t you prefer good digestion to full-bodied hair?

The way God designed our bodies is a model for understanding our lives together as a church: every part dependent on every other part, the parts we mention and the parts we don’t, the parts we see and the parts we don’t. If one part hurts, every other part is involved in the hurt, and in the healing. If one part flourishes, every other part enters into the exuberance.

You are Christ’s body—that’s who you are! You must never forget this. Only as you accept your part of that body does your “part” mean anything. You’re familiar with some of the parts that God has formed in his church, which is his “body”:

apostles

prophets

teachers

miracle workers

healers

helpers

organizers

those who pray in tongues.

But it’s obvious by now, isn’t it, that Christ’s church is a complete Body and not a gigantic, unidimensional Part? It’s not all Apostle, not all Prophet, not all Miracle Worker, not all Healer, not all Prayer in Tongues, not all Interpreter of Tongues. And yet some of you keep competing for so-called “important” parts.

But now I want to lay out a far better way for you.

The Letter of First Corinthians, Chapter 12 (The Message)

and in Today’s paired chapter of Genesis 25 we see the point when Abraham married for the 2nd time, along with the children of Isaac and Rebekah of whom Jacob was born, whose name was eventually changed to Israel:

Abraham married a second time; his new wife was named Keturah. She gave birth to Zimran, Jokshan, Medan, Midian, Ishbak, and Shuah.

Jokshan had Sheba and Dedan.

Dedan’s descendants were the Asshurim, the Letushim, and the Leummim.

Midian had Ephah, Epher, Hanoch, Abida, and Eldaah—all from the line of Keturah.

But Abraham gave everything he possessed to Isaac. While he was still living, he gave gifts to the sons he had by his concubines, but then sent them away to the country of the east, putting a good distance between them and his son Isaac.

Abraham lived 175 years. Then he took his final breath. He died happy at a ripe old age, full of years, and was buried with his family. His sons Isaac and Ishmael buried him in the cave of Machpelah in the field of Ephron son of Zohar the Hittite, next to Mamre. It was the field that Abraham had bought from the Hittites. Abraham was buried next to his wife Sarah. After Abraham’s death, God blessed his son Isaac. Isaac lived at Beer Lahai Roi.

[The Family Tree of Ishmael]

This is the family tree of Ishmael son of Abraham, the son that Hagar the Egyptian, Sarah’s maid, bore to Abraham.

These are the names of Ishmael’s sons in the order of their births: Nebaioth, Ishmael’s firstborn, Kedar, Adbeel, Mibsam, Mishma, Dumah, Massa, Hadad, Tema, Jetur, Naphish, and Kedemah—all the sons of Ishmael. Their settlements and encampments were named after them. Twelve princes with their twelve tribes.

Ishmael lived 137 years. When he breathed his last and died he was buried with his family. His children settled down all the way from Havilah near Egypt eastward to Shur in the direction of Assyria. The Ishmaelites didn’t get along with any of their kin.

[Jacob and Esau]

This is the family tree of Isaac son of Abraham: Abraham had Isaac. Isaac was forty years old when he married Rebekah daughter of Bethuel the Aramean of Paddan Aram. She was the sister of Laban the Aramean.

Isaac prayed hard to God for his wife because she was barren. God answered his prayer and Rebekah became pregnant. But the children tumbled and kicked inside her so much that she said, “If this is the way it’s going to be, why go on living?” She went to God to find out what was going on. God told her,

Two nations are in your womb,

two peoples butting heads while still in your body.

One people will overpower the other,

and the older will serve the younger.

When her time to give birth came, sure enough, there were twins in her womb. The first came out reddish, as if snugly wrapped in a hairy blanket; they named him Esau (Hairy). His brother followed, his fist clutched tight to Esau’s heel; they named him Jacob (Heel). Isaac was sixty years old when they were born.

The boys grew up. Esau became an expert hunter, an outdoorsman. Jacob was a quiet man preferring life indoors among the tents. Isaac loved Esau because he loved his game, but Rebekah loved Jacob.

One day Jacob was cooking a stew. Esau came in from the field, starved. Esau said to Jacob, “Give me some of that red stew—I’m starved!” That’s how he came to be called Edom (Red).

Jacob said, “Make me a trade: my stew for your rights as the firstborn.”

Esau said, “I’m starving! What good is a birthright if I’m dead?”

Jacob said, “First, swear to me.” And he did it. On oath Esau traded away his rights as the firstborn. Jacob gave him bread and the stew of lentils. He ate and drank, got up and left. That’s how Esau shrugged off his rights as the firstborn.

The Book of Genesis, Chapter 25 (The Message)

my personal reading of the Scriptures for friday, february 21 of 2020 with a paired chapter from each Testament along with Today’s Psalms and Proverbs

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path-to-the-salaf-2 · 8 years ago

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The Myth of Darwinian Evolution (Part 2) – Natural Selection

Bismillahi Wal Hamdullillah Was Salātu Was Salāmu ‘alā rasoolillahi

Ammā Ba’d

The Myth of Darwinian Evolution (Part 2) – Natural Selection

We begin this section by mentioning that the issue of Natural Selection is perhaps the most fundamental, key issue Darwin’s theory of Evolution is based upon. Darwin first proposed his theory of evolution, then sought evidence to substantiate the theory, this is important to note. It explains why Darwin and scientist believers in his theory, have struggled desperately to establish the evidence to confirm it.

In his book The origin of species Darwin presented three main arguments:

That species are not immutable (lit: Fixed, unchangeable), that is to say, new species of living beings have appeared during earths long history, through a process he named decent through modification (Random, undirected, mutations in the organisms DNA, leading to the development of an advanced version of the same creature, and this process continued until we have a completely new ‘species’ of animal that is unable to breed with its pre-species)

That this process accounts for all diversity of life

That this process was guided by Natural selection (survival of the fittest, the weaker inferior creature was surpassed by the new ‘mutant’ creature and thus it survived and the previous lifeform didn’t)

This third issue of natural selection is the topic at hand here,

As mentioned previously, Darwins theory of natural selection is based upon decent through modification. Darwin claimed that all species of animal after the first lifeform, are descended with modification from some other species. Therefore, everything in Darwin’s theory revolves around his argument that, the origin of all and any new species of animal, stem from existing species, what evolutionary biologist call speciation (spee-see-ay-shun). Proving changes within existing species are beside the point. Darwin called his book ‘on the origin of species’ since he was fully conscious of the fact that the change from one species to another was the most fundamental problem of his evolution theory. Thus the issue at hand is not change ‘within’ a species, but one species becoming another.

So speciation is Darwinism’s most fundamental problem, the starting point for everything else in evolutionary theory. It is not an issue for believers in intelligent design though, those who believe in an ever-living most-knowledgeable, Most-wise creator, do not have any issues here.

Speciation is not an issue for them, since every organism that exists, points clearly and categorically towards design. The creator of those organisms has also informed, in his revelation, of how he created. Revelation tallies with everything observed, just as we concluded in our previous house parable, the observed house could only be the work of an architect.

‘Observed’ speciation

As a purely scientific matter however, it is reasonable to ask, has speciation, the most fundamental process in Darwinism, ever been observed.

This on-going process, that has accounted for the development of all species, of fish, reptile, amphibian and mammal should, in order to be a consistent theory, still be observed!

The argument is: that through speciation, all kinds of animal have developed. Due to decent with modification, gradual changes through mutations, all species have developed. Due to fitness, some have survived and others have just not developed or have died out.

Mutation

Mutations are randomly occurring genetic changes, which are nearly always harmful when they produce effects within the organism large enough to be visible. The theory of evolution depends heavily upon mutations. Of course, mutations are genetic ‘errors’ that may occur within the DNA of a cell on rare occasions. While Darwin evolutionists agree that mutations are errors, they argue that those errors may occasionally improve the organisms ability to survive and reproduce. Organisms generally produce more offspring than can survive to maturity. In addition, offspring that have an advantage of this kind, can be expected to go on to produce more descendants themselves, than less advantaged members of the species.

The theory supposes that given enough time, and sufficient mutations of the right sort, enormously complex organs and patterns of adaptive behaviour, can eventually be produced in tiny cumulative steps, without the need for the existence of some pre-existing intelligence.

This is natural selection in a nutshell

Important note:

Before the selection process can begin, there has to be something to “select.” And that something is genes. If evolution can be thought of as manufacturing process whose product is increasingly complex organisms, then genes are its raw materials.

Genes are regions of DNA that consist of thousands to hundreds of thousands of base molecules arranged in a precise sequence. Needless to say, producing such a highly organized structure from a random, undirected process is a tall order. In fact, the chance of getting the correct sequence of molecules by happenstance is about one in ten to the thousandth power 101000 (that is ten with 1000 zeros!), even for the smallest gene!

Macro mutation Vs Micro mutation

Mutations are of two main types:

Macro mutations (Also known as saltation): A macro mutation is a major mutation that occurs within the gene structure of a cell, having a profound effect upon changing the nature of the cell and thus the organism itself.

Micro mutations: A micro mutation, is a minor, small-scale or highly localized mutation, one involving alteration at a single gene locus (the position of a gene within a chromosome)

Darwin argued, in essence, that evolution was based in macro evolution. That there would be major mutations that bring about major changes in an organism that would lead, in time, to the mutated organism surviving and changing. Over time it would be unable to breed with its like, but would breed with another similarly mutated organism, and they would go on to become a species.

It must also be born in mind, that DNA has amazing ‘proof reading, self repairing abilities. Chemical damage to DNA occurs naturally as well, and cells use DNA repair mechanisms to repair mismatches and breaks in DNA—nevertheless, the repair sometimes fails to return the DNA to its original sequence. So the theory therefore, is dependant upon waiting for mutations within a cell that would ordinarily repair itself, to fail to repair itself, and for resultant mutation to be ‘beneficial’!

Saltations (or systemic macromutations, as they are often called today) are believed to be theoretically impossible by most scientists, and for good reason. Living creatures are extremely intricate assemblies of interrelated parts, and the parts themselves are also complex. It is impossible to imagine how the parts could change in unison as a result of chance mutation. In a word (Darwin’s word), a saltation is equivalent to a miracle. Though he still maintained it ‘could’ happen.

Many organs require an intricate combination of complex parts to perform their functions. The eye and the wing are the most common illustrations, but it would be misleading to give the impression that either is a special case; human and animal bodies are literally packed with similar marvels.

Darwin wrote in The origin of Species:

“Natural selection can act only by the preservation and accumulation of infinitesimally small inherited variations, each profitable to the preserved being”

How can such things be built up by “infinitesimally small inherited variations, each profitable to the preserved being?” The first step towards a new function- such as vision or ability to fly- would not necessarily provide any advantage unless the other parts required for the function appeared at the same time. As an analogy, imagine a medieval ironsmith producing by chance a silicon microchip; in the absence of supporting computer technology the prodigious invention would be useless and he would throw it away.

The animal that developed the first mutated wing for example would probably have an awkward time climbing or grasping long before they became useful for gliding, thus placing the hypothetical creature at a serious disadvantage. Which, by the standard set in the theory based in ’survival of the fittest’, should cause this mutant creature to die out.

The number of vertebrae has to be changed in whole units, and to accomplish this you need to do more than just ‘shove in’ an extra bone, because each vertebra has associated with it a set of nerves, blood vessels, muscles, and so on. These complicated parts would all have to appear together for the extra vertebrae to make any biological sense

Stephen Jay Gould asked himself “the excellent question, What good is 5 per cent of an eye?,” and speculated that the first eye parts might have been useful for something other than sight. Richard Dawkins responded that – “An ancient animal with 5 per cent of an eye might indeed have used it for something other than sight, but it seems to me as likely that it used it for 5 per cent vision. And actually I don’t think it is an excellent question. Vision that is 5 per cent as good as yours or mine is very much worth having in comparison with no vision at all. So is 1 per cent vision better than total blindness. And 6 per cent is better than 5, 7 per cent better than 6, and so on up the gradual, continuous series.”

The fallacy in that argument is that “5 per cent of an eye” is not the same thing as “5 per cent of normal vision.” For an animal to have any useful vision at all, many complex parts must be working together. Even a complete eye is useless unless it belongs to a creature with the mental and neural capacity to make use of the information by doing something that furthers survival or reproduction. What we have to imagine is a chance mutation that provides this complex capacity all at once, at a level of utility sufficient to give the creature an advantage in producing offspring.

(It is also worth noting that is it well known among biolologists, that animals with gene related deformities have generally been found to be sterile)

Bird and bat wings appear in the fossil records already developed, and no one has ever confirmed by experiment that the gradual evolution of wings and eyes is possible.

Thus the issue remains a conundrum for evolutionist. They will continue to defend their position by saying “examples of macro mutation and gradual change in organisms, just haven’t yet been discovered in the fossil records”

Since that is the case it is safe to say it is a theory Darwin thought up and then attempted to seek evidence for. A theory that is thus far, baseless.

Darwin could not point to impressive examples of natural selection in action, so he relied heavily upon an argument by analogy.

Douglas J Futuyma stated:

“When Darwin wrote the origin of species he could offer no good cases for natural selection because no one had looked for them. He drew instead an analogy with the artificial selection that animal and plant breeders use to improve domesticated varieties of animals and plants. By breeding only from the woolliest sheep, the most fertile chickens, and so on. Breeders have been spectacularly successful at altering almost every imaginable characteristic of our domesticated animals and plants, to the point where most of them differ from their wild ancestors, far more than related species differ from them“.

The analogy to artificial selection is misleading. Plant and animal breeders employ intelligence, and specialised knowledge to select breeding stock and to protect them from natural dangers.

The point of Darwin’s theory was to establish that senseless, purposeless, natural processes can substitute for intelligent design.

The fact that he defended his point using examples and accomplishments of intelligent designers, only proves that his audience was highly uncritical of him!

Artificial selection is not basically the same sort of thing as natural selection, but fundamentally different.

Human breeders produce variations in pigeons or chickens or sheep for purposes absent in nature. When domesticated animals return to the wild, they revert quickly to their wild state, the most highly specialised breeds quickly perish.

Additionally breeders have created no new ‘species’. For example all dogs are of a single species because they are chemically capable of interbreeding. They are dogs. Differences in size may make mating with some breeds impractical. But they remain dogs!

The late French zoologist and evolutionist Pierre-P. Grassé concluded: “The results of artificial breeding provides powerful testimony against darwins theory, in spite of the intense pressure generated by artificial selection, eliminating any parent not answering the criteria of choice, over a whole millennia, no new species are born”

The fact is that selection gives tangible form to, and gathers together, all the varieties a genome (the genetic material of an organism consisting of DNA) is capable of producing but does not constitute and innovative evolutionary process.

In other words the reason dogs don’t become as big as elephants much less change into elephants, is not that we just haven’t been breeding them long enough, dogs do not have the genetic capacity for that degree of change. They stop getting bigger when their genetic limit is reached.

Darwinists disagree with this and they have points to make. They point with pride to laboratory experiments with fruit flies, which has not produced anything but fruit flies! though it may have changed some of their characteristics.

As far as animals are concerned darwinists return the inability to produce new species to a lack of sufficient time. The time available has to be taken into account in evaluating breeding experiments but it is also possible that the greater time available to nature is more than counterbalanced by the power of intelligent purpose, which is brought to bear in artificial selection. With respect to the fruit fly experiment for example Pierre-P. Grassé noted that the fruit fly, seems not to have changed since the remotest times. Nature has had plenty of time but it just hadn’t been doing what the experimenters have been doing.

Whether selection has ever accomplished speciation, that is, the production of a new species, is not the point. A biological species is simply a group capable of interbreeding. Success in dividing fruit flies into two or more populations that cannot inter breed, does not constitute evidence that a similar process could in time produce a fruit fly from a bacterium.

Thus if breeders where able to produce dogs that could only breed with itself and not other dogs they would have only made the tinest step towards proving darwins claims. Since only a part of his theory and definition of new species revolved around the new species being unable to breed with the pre-species.

Thus more evidence is needed.

Natural selection is a tautology (a way of saying the same thing twice)

The sum total of the concept is that the species that is strong enough to produce the most offspring…will produce the most offspring!

The famous philosopher of science karl popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) wrote:

“Darwinism is not really a scientific theory, because natural selection is an all-purpose explanation which can account for anything, and which therefore explains nothing!”

A tautology does not explain anything. When I want to know how a fish can become a man I am not enlightened by being told that the organisms that leave the most offspring…leave the most offspring.

The reality of the theory of natural selection is that we are told that the fittest beings remained in a given environment. Characteristics that give offspring an advantage differ from time and place and circumstance. That which may be an advantage in one place may not be so in another. The development of wings on a beetle may be an advantage in one place but if they are close to the sea, for example it could cause them to be light and easy to be blown away to sea, in which case it is a disadvantage. Therefore the characteristic that is considered advantageous to a creature, is that which helps him to survive. When he survives, he leaves the most offspring as a result of his survival. Therefore natural selection in actuality only states the obvious, that the organism that leaves the most offspring…will leave the most offspring!

Natural selection as a deductive argument

Natural selection may be presented in the form of a deductive argument.

For example:

All organisms must reproduce

All organisms exhibit hereditary variations

Hereditary variations differ in their effects on reproduction

Therefore variations with favourable effects on reproduction will succeed, those with unfavourable effects will fail, and organisms will change

From this stand point we see the only thing it establishes, is that some natural selection will occur and not that it is an explanation for evolution. Actually it does not even establish that organisms will change. In any population some animals will leave more offspring than others even if the population is headed for extinction.

Natural selection as a scientific hypothesis

Scientists will insist that Darwinist natural selection is a hypothesis (a supposition or proposed explanation made on the basis of limited evidence as a starting point for further investigation), that has been so thoroughly and rigorously tested and confirmed by evidence that is should be accepted by reasonable persons as a presumptively adequate explanation for the evolution of complex life forms.

Therefore natural selection in combination with mutation is an innovative revolutionary process with is capable of producing new kinds of organs and organisms.

So the critical question is: What evidence confirms that the hypothesis is true?

Where are the ‘in-between’ species?

The development of species required very ‘gradual’ steps over many, many years. So surely we must have some evidence of at least some of these many gradual developmental changes…but not one!?

In response we will inevitably hear natural selection (survival of the fittest) necessitated, that they died out!

The general hypothesis is that man (and all other creatures for that matter) began as a single cell amoeba and developed into more complex cells which then went on to become a fish, then an amphibian, then a reptilian lizard, then a tree dwelling mammal, then apes, then several stages of ape-man type creatures and then mankind. Of course this is a very general version of the proposed theory.

This presents a number of questions:

If man evolved from apes, why are the apes still here?

If lizards evolved into birds, why are lizards and birds both still here?

Evolutionists will answer this is because we have had evolution ‘cycles’ due to more than one ice age or because all species have common ancestries.

That still does not explain what we only have the presence of huge jumps from one species to another and no sign of the ‘in-between’ species. Bear in mind evolution is proposed to have taken millions of years (another issue that requires discussion). In utter desperation the evolutionist resorts to saying that the ‘missing link’ just has not yet been discovered in the fossil records. Some claim they have already found proof of the missing link, but upon investigation they have all found to be hoaxes. We will look at that under the issue of the fossil records. The reality is though that the missing link is not just one, but thousands of missing links indicative of our gradual development. That is if were looking at the missing link between monkey and man. What of the thousands of missing links between amoeba and fish? Similarly fish to amphibian, then amphibian to reptile.

All species between fish and reptiles died out? Why then did the original species for instance fish survive?

If there were many gradual steps between monkey and man, then why do we have hundreds of species of monkey, the original type, still living but none of the in-between?

The claim is that modern man has been around for 1 million years (yet another ‘claim’)which would necessitate that it would have taken some 100 million years of more for man to develop from Monkey to man. If we said (for the sake of argument) that it took only 10 million years for modern man to develop. That would mean at the rate of significant change there would be perhaps some 200 stages (probably far far more) from ape to man. The original monkey survived, in fact various breeds of monkey and ape, but not one of the 200 variations in between?…not one!?

The question is where are all these varying developmental stages we should see on the planet, since both ends of the spectrum still exist, but not one of the many stages in between, not even a legitimate fossil!

Where are the 10% man 90% ape? Or the 20% man 80% ape etc. Likewise among the other species. Why do so many pre-species, with their varying types, exist alongside their advanced species, and none of the species in-between. Could it possibly be because we actually don’t have perpetual evolution taking place?

Another issue is, why did the evolutionary process of ape to man, stop at man? And if the argument is, it hasn’t stopped with man (i.e. man is still mutating) then why is he the only one evolving.

The point is, evolution is not the ‘easy to accept, highly logical explanation for the origin of all things it is proposed to be, except when we leave these questions out and smooth the theory over.

The language of the evolutionist

Another important issue to note is the language of the evolutionist. It is commonplace to hear (or read) an evolutionist describing how evolution ‘selected’ a species, or caused a certain species to adapt. Or perhaps that evolution ‘fixed’ a particular problem or ‘left’ something since it didn’t need fixing etc. This language points to something that has the powers of reason and design, though they will not refer to it in these terms. It is as though they perceive evolution as some sort of ‘impersonal intelligent force’ that exists, making decisions on how the species needs to evolve.

This is clearly acknowledgement of the need for intelligent design while trying to flee from it as it will be tantamount to acknowledging a ‘creator’ but of course that cannot be done since we have an inability to establish a creator through scientific process.

Not only do we have the magnificent creatures that exist on earth but the ideal food chain to support them. An ecology that is perfect to support life with the ideal gasses, such as oxygen and CO2 etc

Perfection in the seasons and temperatures and the universe. There is beauty and fragrance in the flowers, birds, butterflies etc that for practical purposes should not be here.

Wouldn’t it be fair to say that to postulate that this has come about by chance is a tad far-fetched?

In light of all of this, even atheists like Sir Fred Hoyle have admitted,

“The idea that life originated by the random shuffling of molecules is as ridiculous and improbable as proposing that a tornado blowing through a junkyard would cause the assembly of a 747!”

Hoyle is among many who now concede that the universe is neither old enough nor large enough to produce even the most elemental gene. And without genes, evolution is like a factory assembly line without anything on the conveyor belt.

Conclusion

We are able to say in summary:

That the concept of natural selection is nothing but a statement of the obvious, that is in any given circumstance, the strongest organism that has best ability to leave more offspring…will leave more offspring! and thus survive.

That Darwins intent was that random unguided mutations, were all that were needed to bring about new species of animal.

That through this process, man developed from a single cell organism to where he is today

That natural selection conjectures about survival of the fittest but does not discuss the ‘arrival’ of the fittest

That decent with modification is until now unproven, thus ironically, believers in natural selection (when we really understands the far-fetched nature of what they assert) require far more ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ in it than to have faith in an Intelligent Creator.

If this is the strongest of the evidence presented by the evolutionist and we can see its fragility, the evolutionist retorts ‘but there is clear evidence in fossil records!’ therefore will look at that next.

Wa Sallallahu ‘alā Nabiyinā Muhammad

@abuhakeembilal

#Islaam #Darwinisim #Atheism #Refutation #Muslim #Non-Muslim

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scootoaster · 5 years ago

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A healthy wasp microbiome can fend off pesticides

When wasps were exposed to low doses of a common pesticide, the makeup of their microbiomes changed and the insects became more resistant to the chemical.

It’s easy to forget about the teaming community of bacteria and other microscopic life forms that live in the guts of every animal. But without these tiny organisms, us larger life forms wouldn’t survive. They do everything from helping us digest food to regulating our mood. Now, scientists have identified another bacterial boon in insects. When wasps were exposed to low doses of a common pesticide, the makeup of their crucial gut microbiomes changed as certain bacteria became more abundant. After several generations, these changes made the insects more resistant to the chemical.

The researchers hope to better understand how gut bacteria protect their insect hosts. This could eventually lead to developing probiotics for wild honeybees, other animals, and even people who are at high risk of coming into contact with dangerous pesticides.

Researchers narrowed in on a specific pesticide, a chemical called atrazine, which is the second most commonly sold pesticide globally. It’s often used in the Midwest to clear plants from areas where corn will grow and is less toxic to animals and people than other chemicals.

“Part of why it’s considered safe is that bacteria in soil and water can eat it and make it into smaller and smaller less harmful compounds,” says Robert Brucker, a microbiome scientist at Harvard University, who published the findings February 4 in the journal Cell Host & Microbe. “I wanted to know if gut bacteria could do the same thing.”

He and his colleagues investigated how atrazine altered the gut microbiomes of a species of parasitoid wasp named Nasonia vitripennis. They fed wasps sugar water laced with a dose of atrazine similar to the concentration that wild pollinators would encounter in atrazine-sprayed fields. After this single dose of pesticide, the bacteria in the insects’ guts became more diverse and abundant. Two very rare strains of bacteria that possess the ability to break down atrazine became more plentiful as well. Mother wasps ensured that their offspring had this altered microbiome by laying eggs covered in the bacteria. After six generations, their descendants still possessed the altered bacterial community—despite never having been exposed to atrazine.

The team then fed wasps a slightly lower dose of atrazine and followed the insects and their progeny over 36 generations, giving each fresh generation a single hit of atrazine. Over time, the wasps became “nearly completely resistant” to the poison, Brucker says. By the final generation, the amount of atrazine needed to kill the wasps was 10 times more potent than the lethal dose for regular wasps. The insects also became less vulnerable to another pesticide—glyphosate, a key ingredient in Roundup—that they had never encountered before.

It’s not unusual for insects to develop resistance to a pesticide after being regularly exposed to it for several seasons. However, the researchers were surprised to discover how significant a role gut bacteria played in this survival mechanism. When they deprived the wasps of this altered microbiome by removing bacteria from newly laid eggs and raised the insects in a sterile environment, this resistance completely vanished. Germ-free wasps whose mothers had been exposed to atrazine were just as vulnerable to the pesticide as wasps whose mothers had never encountered the chemical. However, when the researchers fed these deprived wasps gut bacteria from insects that had been exposed to atrazine, the insects became resistant to the chemical. This indicates that it wasn’t any physiological adaptation the wasps themselves had that allowed them to withstand atrazine, but rather it was their gut bacteria providing the protection.

The wasps Brucker and his team examined don’t pollinate crops. However, he suspected that wild honeybees might harbor atrazine-busting bacteria as well, since they’ve been exposed to the chemical since the 1950s. When he sampled bacteria from bees on his family’s farm in Ohio as well as several organic farms, he identified genes in the bacteria themselves linked to the ability to degrade atrazine in a majority of the insects.

“Regardless of where I sampled, I would find honeybees with [bacterial] genes that could metabolize atrazine; whether they’re the same exact bacteria or if it’s different bacteria doing the same thing I don’t know for sure,” he says. “It was a nice confirmation that what we did in the lab is not too far removed from what might be happening in the wild.”

Humans might also harbor bacteria that break down atrazine; when Brucker and his colleagues checked previous reports on the human gut microbiome, they identified genes that were linked to atrazine degradation.

Next, they want to learn more about what kinds of bacteria convey resistance to pesticides, and whether the changes to the microbiome observed have any drawbacks to the host. Then they plan to concentrate the bacteria into a more potent form to use as probiotics.

“The ability for a microbial community to allow its host to adapt in very short generation times is a remarkable aspect of survival and evolution that we need to continue to experimentally test and verify,” Brucker says.

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mrwilliamcharley · 6 years ago

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Bamboo Bass Festival 2019 was an Indelible Year of Growth & Discovery

Living in the Pacific Northwest often means not having to travel far for bass music events. After making the pilgrimage in 2018, however, I determined that Bamboo Bass Festival is well-worth the journey. Bamboo Bass essentially takes the best in Western Canadian vibes and West Coast Bass music and drops them square in the Costa Rican wilderness, in turn creating an oasis of open-hearted individuals, amazing energy, and expertly curated music in a breathtaking tropical setting.

Photo Credit: Banana Cam

This was a pivotal year for Bamboo as they took major strides toward investing in the future and creating more permanent infrastructure. As a result, many notable changes were made, making this event felt more like an established festival rather than a flashy jungle renegade. There were significant improvements made to production, sound, festival layout, and most notably a brand new location.

With a new venue, the usual two-stage setup allowed for so much more space at either stage. La Brisa had the same beautiful setup as 2018, a geometric sunburst of abutting double arches, with illuminated fin-like wings on either side. Though the projector was a bit unfortunately positioned, beaming on people dancing at center stage, the beautiful mapped visuals added more color, depth and vibrance.

This year, La Selva was redesigned by the talented Reliquarium and had a completely new, jaw-droppingly awesome look. Giant beams of criss-crossed bamboo stems supported a 3-dimensional design comprised of multi-segmented woodcuttings that together looked like a psychedelic mecha-cicada. The stage was also endowed with insanely intricate visuals that breathed life into the insectoid facade. Bamboo’s multi-year deal with The Reliquarium is intended to bring to a new ever-morphing design each successive year. These changes I personally cannot wait to witness.

Photo Credit: Banana Cam

Bamboo changed up its sound game from the usual all-PK setup. Instead, it was a PK / Funktion One hybrid situation where La Brisa was all Funktions, and La Selva had Funktion One speakers and PK subs. The setup delivered an all-around remarkably powerful sound with PK’s seismic lows, and crisp, punchy mids and highs from the Funktion Ones.

Bamboo Bass’s musical platform is deeply rooted in bass music, and bringing the best in West Coast bass is something at which they particularly exceed. But Bamboo’s curators are also aware that talent exists beyond the bass. As such, the artist lineup featured a healthy variety of styles. There was a little bit of something for everyone on the spectrum of dub, house, drum and bass, downtempo, and breaks.

I did miss the filling of funk and glitch hop we got last year, when more Fractal Forest artists had been booked (bring Featurecast to Bamboo 2020!). However, I was most excited for the return of my Bamboo must-see Funka, a local artist from Costa Rica’s capital who I didn’t know before Bamboo 2018, and whose set that year completely blew my mind. And he really stepped it up, singing his own vocals and shredding the electric guitar to a set that started off old school funky fresh, before descending deep into the rabbit hole of heady psybass.

Photo Credit: BEEDEE

Among my most notable artist discoveries this year were Beat Kitty, during whose set I wanted to leave to get food, but from which I legitimately could not pull myself away, and Distinct who filled my soul with my favorite brand of fast, heavy fast drum and bass. Ahee was the very first artist we caught upon entering the venue, and his is upbeat style of deep and dark, to uptempo alien bass breaks was a most awesome way to kick off the festival.

I personally can’t do overly uplifting music, but Pineo & Loeb‘s set was just the right amount of glee I can take in a single sitting without feeling queasy. It was an all-around jubilant time, with both artists up on stage having the time of their lives, and us down below moving without a care in the world.

I can’t go without mentioning JVMPKICKS, who absolutely threw down for two full hours, as well as the obligatory Sleeveless Records showcase on Sunday night which involved six-plus hours of dark, heavy West Coast Bass. Zeke Beats was a new addition this year, who opened the gates to the netherworld. JLEON is a must-see at any festival, who changed it up from the usual deep dub to a hefty, and most welcome, dose of DnB. Finally, as we were rounding up the crew for the last time, I was entrapped by SuDs at La Brisa, the last artist I caught.

Photo Credit: BEEDEE

The most profound change Bamboo experienced this year was its location, which alone created all new excitements and challenges. There were certain aspects I liked about the new venue, and some I missed from the old. One thing I distinctly missed about Jaco Ropes was the dense tropical foliage. Massive leaves hanging from every direction gave it a much more jungly feel, while the flora of the new venue consisted more of an open, dry forest. The Park at Ocean Range, however, is a significantly larger venue which allows for endless possibilities. Most importantly, it gives more room for the festival to grow, with more areas to rest, frolic, move, and explore. That said, the larger space is still a very manageable size from an attendee perspective.

The wider space was utilized for installments at either stage, including art panels, installations, and platforms built around towering trees at both stages, with ample space to sit back or perch high for better views.The walk between stages was about three minutes through a dirt trail graciously illuminated with string lights. A relatively short distance, but enough to minimize sound bleed and a distinctly longer walk than last year’s. Between either stage was frolic zone of interactive art installations that included a tattered pirate ship, waterfall of projected visuals, and countless panels of street art. It was a solid place to hang out, wander around, or get lost in the sauce.

Perched on a hill overlooking La Brisa was an eating area with a covered patio, where guests could purchase food and drinks, or sit and check out the view. The sound coming from La Brisa was surprisingly crisp from up there, and it was a cozy spot to look out at the stage, whilst sitting in a chair swing with an ice cold drink. There were complaints, however, that having only one food vendor led to long wait times for food, which was definitely the case at certain points in the night. Overall, though, it was a really nice space, and hopefully they can put in more food vendors alleviate overcrowding.

Photo Credit: BEEDEE

One significant challenge the new venue presented was transportation, since The Park at Ocean Ranch is much further out of town. Jaco Ropes was just off the main highway at the edge of town, easily accessible by taxi and even walkable to certain locations. The Park at Ocean Ranch, however, was about a 20 minute drive out of Jaco, at the end of a treacherous dirt road. Not a place where taxis would organically appear, and not at all easy to walk back to civilization. What’s more, only one member of our nine-person crew had cell service in the venue, so calling an Uber wasn’t an easy option. Ultimately, getting back home took more strategizing than expected.

The festival provided shuttle services for a small fee, but the shuttles were relatively few and far between, and fairly small for the necessary capacity. The reason our crew easily made it home each night was by way of the cab driver who brought us on the first night. We obtained his phone number and negotiated a rate to take us to and from the festival each day thereafter. Unless the festival hires more shuttles in future years, I figure the most reliable way to get to and from the venue might be to rent your own vehicle or hire your own driver.

Photo Credit: BEEDEE

Moving to a new venue presented new growing pains that any young festival might face. Being set in a foreign country exacerbated some of these challenges. Among these complications was the festival gates being delayed on the first two days. It was never quite clear to me exactly what was going on, and a lot of misinformation and rumors began to spread.Though much of it was beyond the festival’s control, I believe more specificity and transparency could have been offered on the festival’s part.

I don’t want to continue spreading misinformation, and want to be clear that I still don’t know precisely what went down. But I do know that a permit issue, which was later resolved, caused doors to open late on the second day. In addition, I was told that the local police had set up a checkpoint for a brief period of time just outside of Jaco, a common occurrence in Costa Rica, but which left some festival-goers a bit shaken up.

There was also some tension between the harm reduction team, Karmik, and administrators of Bamboo, which resulted in Karmik’s absence for the final two days of the event. I cannot reasonably say more about this since I do not know the details.However, many indignant comments arose in response to these circumstances, which I found extremely arrogant and out of line. Ultimately, Bamboo Bass is set in a foreign country. Being a Canadian run event, many in attendance are naturally accustomed to the luxuries of Canadian festivals. But it’s downright foolish to assume the same expectations of a large-scale event hosted in Central America. Costa Rica isn’t Canada. This must be respected. Be smart, be safe, be flexible, watch out for your crew, act appropriately, and enjoy the setting.

Photo Credit: Banana Cam

The growing pains of Bamboo 2019 surely resulted in trying experiences for some festival staff and attendees. But in the end, my crew and I had an absolute blast. Some food for thought, even if you’re not having the best time at the festival, you’re still in Costa Rica!

Bamboo Bass Festival is a colorful multicultural landscape of art, music, and good vibes. It’s among the most inclusive festivals I’ve attended, where everyone from around the globe has a home. It feels, in some ways, like a microcosm of the country in which it’s set: an exotic escape from the norm in which everyone is welcome. I personally intend to keep coming back, and I am quite excited to keep watching this festival continue to evolve.

Bamboo Bass Festival

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thetruthseekerway · 6 years ago

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The Color of Blood: Red Blood Cells

New Post has been published on http://www.truth-seeker.info/refuting-darwinism/the-color-of-blood-red-blood-cells/

The Color of Blood: Red Blood Cells

By Harun Yahya

Red blood cells are produced by the stem cells in the bone marrow, that rubbery tissue in the largest bones in the body.

Red blood cells, or erythrocytes, are the most numerous cells in the blood. Their job is to transport oxygen, the most essential material for the survival of all the body’s cells. They go further than this, however, and in order to purify the body, also carry away the carbon dioxide that accumulates in the cells as a byproduct of metabolism.

Approximately 99% of the blood cells in a drop of blood is made up of red blood cells. There are around 25 trillion of these erythrocytes in our bodies. This figure is hundreds of times the number of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. To realize that the red blood cells in your body could easily cover half of a football pitch will help you grasp the magnitude of this number. Stretched end to end, these cells would form a tower 50,000 kilometers (or 31,070 miles) high. If we were able to spread the erythrocytes in the body out like a carpet, then these cells would cover an area of 3,800 square kilometers (or 1,467 square miles). There are so very many red blood cells in the body that every second up to 3 million new red blood cells enter the bloodstream just to replace those that have died.

Red blood cells are produced by the stem cells in the bone marrow, that rubbery tissue in the largest bones in the body. During its four-month lifespan, a single red blood cell travels between the lungs and the other tissues of the body 75,000 times before returning to the bone marrow. By the time you turn this page, you will have lost some 3 million red blood cells throughout your body. At the same time, a similar number will also have been produced in your bone marrow.

Maintaining this equilibrium is most important. Blood cells that have completed their life spans are always replaced by new ones because the bone marrow is in a constant state of production. Its cells begin this intensive process with the receipt of a chemical signal, and this production then comes to an end once the need has been met.

The chemical communication that brings this about is truly staggering to contemplate. Cells communicate by means of hundreds of different kinds of molecules. The message that needs to be transmitted to the stem cell is attached to a protein and sent on its way. The target cell extends a protein receptor that will let the incoming signal be recognized. When this receptor binds to the protein carrying the chemical message, the information reaches the target cell.

This process, briefly described here in just a few sentences, is actually far more complex. Today’s scientists are still trying to unravel the secrets of this communication system. The “decision” by which stem cells send the daughter cells they have produced to the place in the body that requires them is one of the most important fields of present-day research. The fact that this system in the body is of a complexity whose secret human beings have been unable to unravel is just one clear indication that it was created by Almighty God, Who possesses infinite wisdom.

How is it possible to produce the right amount of red blood cells in the body every second and then direct them confidently to the points where these new cells are needed? It is impossible for a lone independent cell in the bone marrow to know what is happening at the other parts of the body. The signaling system employed by those cells is also the most perfect communication network possible. This perfect structure is, of course, the work of God, Who knows all the processes taking place in the body, right down to the finest detail, and Who creates and constructs them in the first place.

Red blood cells are exceedingly small because before entering the bloodstream, they expel most of their contents—their nucleus, mitochondria, ribosome and other organelles. They do this in a literally conscious manner because they “know” they must absorb a miraculous molecule known as hemoglobin (about which, you’ll find more details in the following pages). By expelling most of their organelles and picking up hemoglobin, red blood cells enable this molecule to perform its tasks in a reliable manner, during its lifespan of approximately four months.

The red blood cell membrane serves an important sheath for hemoglobin, which lacks a cell membrane of its own and is therefore exceedingly vulnerable. Thanks to various enzymes contained in this protective layer, hemoglobin is also protected against degeneration.

Red blood cells have to open up a rather wide space inside themselves to make room for the nearly 300 million hemoglobin molecules that get packed into any single red blood cell. These 300 million hemoglobin molecules will take up 90% of the space in a single erythrocyte.

Red blood cells are the only cells in the blood which have lost their nuclei. The organelles which they expel are immediately destroyed by the white blood cells, the body’s disposal operatives. What is surprising is that despite being deprived of the nucleus, which carries all their data, red blood cells still preserve the enzymes and proteins necessary for them to survive without difficulty during their 120-day lifespan. Thanks to these special precautions taken for them throughout those four months, they are able to remain alive. However, they are now merely transporters that are unable to divide and hence, unable to reproduce themselves as ordinary cells do.

As this one example will show, there is an enormous complexity in the systems in the human body. Before you finish this book, you will see many astonishing details regarding the blood and the systems that it controls. The way that a red blood cell expels the organelles inside it, sacrificing its own nucleus—which contains all the essential data for its long-term survival; keeping only those elements necessary for it to live for a fairly brief length of time—is just one of those details. In order to be able to do all this, the red blood cell has to distinguish between necessary and unnecessary organelles during its short lifespan, know that it must absorb hemoglobin—and, even more crucially, be aware of the importance of hemoglobin for human life. If just one of these tiny details is neglected, if the red blood cell does not take hemoglobin into itself for example, then oxygen would not be distributed in the body.

We need to point out that this behavior—the red blood cell’s essentially agreeing to its own demise—deals a severe blow to Darwin’s theory of evolution. Charles Darwin assumed that all organisms wage war to ensure the survival of their descendants. Richard Dawkins, today’s proponent of Darwinism, suggests that this struggle for survival can be reduced even to the genetic level and that the genes of every living thing fight to ensure their existence. In fact, however, the erythrocyte, a living cell, behaves in a manner that is the exact antithesis of that hypothesis: It sacrifices itself by abandoning its nucleus and its genes. That is because it did not come into being by chance during any “struggle for survival” as Darwinists would have us believe, but was created with a specific function.

This function is never corrupted for as long as we live. God, Who has created everything totally flawlessly, has also created this special cell, which constitutes one of the countless proofs of His creation. In the Qur’an, it is revealed that God is the Lord of all:

“I have put my trust in God, my Lord, and your Lord. There is no creature He does not hold by the forelock. My Lord is on a Straight Path.” (Hud: 56)

Note by the Editor:

Allah the Almighty says in His Ever-Glorious Qur’an what means,

“He [Allah] hath created the heavens without supports that ye can see, and hath cast into the earth firm hills so that it quake not with you, and He hath dispersed therein all kinds of beasts. And We send down water from the sky and We cause (plants) of every goodly kind to grow therein. This is the Creation of Allah. Now show me that which those (ye worship) beside Him have created. Nay, but the wrongdoers are in error manifest!” (Luqman 31: 10-11)

And,

“We shall show them Our portents on the horizons and within themselves until it will be manifest unto them that it is the Truth. Doth not thy Lord suffice since He is Witness over all things? How! Are they still in doubt about the meeting with their Lord? Lo! Is not He surrounding all things?” (Fussilat 41: 53-54)

——–

Harun Yahya was born in Ankara in 1956. He studied arts at Istanbul’s Mimar Sinan University and philosophy at Istanbul University. Since the 1980s, the author has published many books on political, faith-related and scientific issues. Harun Yahya is well known as an author who has written very important works disclosing the imposture of evolutionists, the invalidity of their claims and the dark liaisons between Darwinism and bloody ideologies. Some of the books of the author have been translated into English, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Albanian, Arabic, Polish, Russian, Bosnian, Indonesian, Turkish, Tatar, Urdu and Malay and published in the countries concerned. Harun Yahya’s books appeal to all people, Muslims, and non-Muslims alike, regardless of their age, race, and nationality, as they center around one goal: to open the readers’ mind by presenting the signs of Gods eternal existence to them.

#Allah #blood #Creation #darwin #Darwinism #evolution #Featured #God #human body #The Color of Blood: Red Blood Cells #the Creator

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emmagreen1220-blog · 7 years ago

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New Post has been published on Biology Dictionary

New Post has been published on https://biologydictionary.net/nucleic-acid/

Nucleic Acid

Nucleic Acid Definition

Nucleic acid is the chemical name for the molecules RNA and DNA. The name comes from the fact that these molecules are acids – that is, they are good at donating protons and accepting electron pairs in chemical reactions – and the fact that they were first discovered in the nuclei of our cells.

Nucleic acids are large molecules made up of strings, or “polymers,” of units called “nucleotides.” All life on Earth uses nucleic acids as their medium for recording hereditary information – that is nucleic acids are the hard drives containing the essential blueprint or “source code” for making cells.

For many years, scientists wondered how living things “knew” how to produce all the complex materials they need to grow and survive, and how they passed their traits down to their offspring.

Scientists eventually found the answer in the form of DNA – deoxyribonucleic acid – a molecule located in the nucleus of cells, which was passed down from parent cells to “daughter” cells.

When DNA was damaged, or passed on incorrectly, the scientists found that cells did not work properly. Damage to DNA would cause cells and organisms to develop incorrectly, or be so badly damaged that they simply died.

Later experiments revealed that another type of nucleic acid – RNA, or ribonucleic acid – acted as a “messenger” that could carry copies of the instructions found in DNA. Ribonucleic acid was also used to pass down instructions from generation to generation by some viruses.

Today, scientists know that the source code for cells is quite literally written in nucleic acids. Genetic engineering changes organisms’ traits by adding, removing, or rewriting parts of their DNA – and subsequently changing what “parts” the cells produce.

A sufficiently skilled genetic “programmer” can create the instructions for a living cell from scratch using the nucleic acid code. Scientists did exactly that in 2010, using an artificial DNA synthesizer to “write” a genome from scratch using bits of source code taken from other cells.

All living cells on Earth “read” and “write” their source codes in almost exactly the same “language” using nucleic acids. Sets of three nucleotides, called triplets, can code for any given amino acid, or for the stop or start of protein production.

Other properties of nucleic acids may influence DNA expression in more subtle ways, such as by sticking together and making it harder for transcription enzymes to access the code they store.

The fact that all living cells on Earth “speak” almost the same genetic “language” supports the idea of a universal common ancestor – that is, the idea that all life on Earth today started with a single primordial cell whose descendants evolved to give rise to all modern living species.

From a chemical perspective, the nucleotides that are strung together to create nucleic acids consists of a five-carbon sugar, a phosphate group, and a nitrogen-containing base. The image below shows structural drawings of the four DNA and the four RNA nitrogenous bases used by living things on Earth in their nucleic acids.

It also shows how the sugar-phosphate “backbones” bond at an angle that creates a helix – or a double helix in the case of DNA – when multiple nucleic acids are strung together into a single molecule:

Difference of DNA and RNA

DNA and RNA are both polymers of nucleotides. The term “polymer” comes from “poly” for “many” and “mer” for parts, referring to the fact that each nucleic acid is made of many nucleotides.

Because nucleic acids can be made naturally by reacting inorganic ingredients together, and because they are arguably the most essential ingredient for life on Earth, some scientists believe that the very first “life” on Earth may have been a self-replicating sequence of amino acids that was created by natural chemical reactions.

Nucleic acids have been found in meteorites from space, proving that these complex molecules can be formed by natural causes even in environments where there is no life.

Some scientists have even suggested that such meteorites may have helped create the first self-replicating nucleic acid “life” on Earth. This seems possible, but there is no firm evidence to say whether it is true.

Function of Nucleic Acids

By far the most important function of nucleic acids for living things is their role as carriers of information.

Because nucleic acids can be created with four “bases,” and because “base pairing rules” allow information to be “copied” by using one strand of nucleic acids as a template to create another, these molecules are able to both contain and copy information.

To understand this process, it may be useful to compare the DNA code to the binary code used by computers. The two codes are very different in their specifics, but the principle is the same. Just as your computer can create entire virtual realities simply by reading strings of 1s and 0s, cells can create entire living organisms by reading strings of the four DNA base pairs – A, T, C, and G.

As you might imagine, without binary code, you’d have no computer and no computer programs. In just the same way, living organisms need intact copies of their DNA “source code” to function.

The parallels between the genetic code and binary code has even led some scientists to propose the creation of “genetic computers,” which might be able to store information much more efficiently than silicon-based hard drives. However as our ability to record information on silicon has advanced, little attention has been given to research into “genetic computers.”

Because the DNA source code is just as vital to a cell as your operating system is to your computer, DNA must be protected from potential damage. To transport DNA’s instructions to other parts of the cell, then copies its information are made using another type of nucleic acid – RNA.

It’s these RNA copies of genetic information which are sent out of the nucleus and around the cell to be used as instructions by cellular machinery.

Nucleic acids and similar molecules can also be used by cells for other purposes. Ribosomes – the cellular machines that make protein – and some enzymes are made out of RNA.

The fact that RNA can act both as hereditary material and an enzyme strengthens the case for the idea that the very first life might have been a self-replicating, self-catalyzing RNA molecule.

Nucleic Acid Structure

Because nucleic acids can form huge polymers which can take on many shapes, there are several ways to discuss the “structure of nucleic acid”. It can mean something as simple as the sequence of nucleotides in a piece of DNA, or something as complex as the way that DNA molecule folds and how it interacts with other molecules.

Please refer to our Nucleic Acid Structure article for more information.

Polymer of Nucleic Acids

As mentioned above, a “polymer” is a molecule that is made up of smaller parts. “Poly” means “many,” while “mer” means “part.”

When you hear doctors or scientists talking about “nucleic acids,” they almost always mean polymers. RNA and DNA are both typically strands of many nucleotides strung together.

Single nucleotides are usually referred to as just that – nucleotides. The term “nucleic acid” as well as the terms “RNA” and “DNA” are usually reserved for polymers of many nucleic acid monomers strung together.

Monomer of Nucleic Acids

The monomers of nucleic acids are molecules called nucleotides. These molecules are fairly complex, consisting of a nitrogenous base plus a sugar-phosphate “backbone.”

When our cells join nucleotides together to form the polymers called nucleic acids, it bonds them by replacing the oxygen molecule of the 3′ sugar of one nucleotide’s backbone with the oxygen molecule of another nucleotide’s 5′ sugar.

This is possible because the chemical properties of nucleotides allow 5′ carbons to bond to multiple phosphates. These phosphates are attractive bonding partners for the 3′ oxygen molecule of the other nucleotide’s 3′ oxygen, so that oxygen molecule pops right off to bond with the phosphates, and is replaced by the oxygen of the 5′ sugar. The two nucleotide monomers are then fully linked with a covalent bond through that oxygen molecule, turning them into a single molecule.

Nucleotides are the monomers of nucleic acids, but just as nucleic acids can serve purposes other than carrying information, nucleotides can too.

The vital energy-carrying molecules ATP and GTP are both made from nucleotides – the nucleotides “A” and “G,” as you might have guessed.

In addition to carrying energy, GTP also plays a vital role in G-protein cell signaling pathways. The term “G-protein” actually comes from the “G” in “GTP” – the same G that’s found in the genetic code.

G-proteins are a special type of protein that can cause signaling cascades with important and complex consequences within a cell. G-proteins are turned “on” or “off” by the phosphorylation of GTP.

Quiz

1. Which of the following is NOT a reason why some scientists think the first life might have been made of RNA? A. RNA nucleotides can be created spontaneously by natural processes. B. RNA can carry hereditary information, just like DNA. C. RNA can form enzymes that can catalyze chemical reactions, just like proteins. D. None of the above.

Answer to Question #1

D is correct. All of the above are reasons why some scientists think RNA may have been the first life form!

2. If there are only four base pairs of RNA and DNA, then why do we list five? (A, G, C, T, and U?) A. Uracil is not a true nucleotide. B. Uracil is the RNA equivalent of Thymine. C. Uracil and Thymine are interchangeable. D. None of the above.

Answer to Question #2

B is correct. Uracil is the RNA equivalent of Thymine. Although there are tiny chemical differences between the two, U and T can play the same role in base pair hydrogen bonding. The four DNA base pairs are A, T, C, and G, while the four RNA base pairs are A, U, C, and G.

3. Why might the “handedness” of our nucleic acids be important? A. Left-handed nucleic acids might take up more room in our cells than right-handed ones. B. The handedness of one’s nucleic acids determines whether you’re left-handed or right-handed. C. Some enzymes can only interact with molecules that have the correct “handedness” for their active sites. D. None of the above.

Answer to Question #3

C is correct. While “handedness” in molecules has nothing to do with whether your right or left hand is dominant, it can determine whether your enzymes can interact with the molecule. Enzymes might interact very differently with the right-handed vs. left-handed version of a molecule.

References

Lodish, H. F. (2016). Molecular cell biology. New York, NY: Freeman.

Mansfield, M. L., & Ballanco, J. (2011). A Model for the Evolution of Nucleotide Polymerase Directionality. PLOS. Retrieved from http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0018881

Qin, K., Dong, C., Wu, G., & Lambert, N. A. (2011). Inactive-state preassembly of Gq-coupled receptors and Gq heterotrimers. Nature Chemical Biology, 7(10), 740-747. doi:10.1038/nchembio.642

#2k #term

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nancygduarteus · 8 years ago

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A Tiny Tweak to Gut Bacteria Can Extend an Animal’s Life

Most of the worms in Meng Wang’s lab die on schedule. They live their brief lives on Petri dishes, and after two to three weeks, they die of old age. But some individuals beat the odds, surviving for several days longer than usual.These wormy Methuselahs were all genetically identical, so it wasn’t their genes that explained their decelerated aging. Instead, the secret to their longevity lay in the microbes within their gut.

Wang had loaded all the worms with the same bacterium—a single strain of the common gut microbe E. coli. But in some of these strains, she had deleted a single gene. That tiny change made all the difference, extending the worm’s lives.

This is part of a growing number of studies showing that an animal’s microbiome—the community of microbes that shares its body—can influence its lifespan. And while such research is a long way from developing life-extending probiotics for humans, it points to new leads for ensuring that people stay healthy for as long as possible. “I’ve always studied the molecular genetics of aging,” says Wang, who is based at the Baylor College of Medicine. “But before, we always looked at the host. This is my first attempt to understand the bacteria’s side.”

The connection between microbes and lifespan dates back to Elie Metchnikoff—an eccentric Russian Nobel laureate who the microbiologist Paul de Kruif once described as a “hysterical character out of one of Dostoevsky’s novels.” He believed that intestinal microbes produced toxins that caused illness, senility, and aging, and were “the principal cause of the short duration of human life”. (His claim, though baseless, apparently started a fashion for colostomy in the early 20th century.) On the other hand, he also thought that some microbes could prolong life by producing lactic acid, which killed their harmful cousins. That was why, Metchnikoff believed, Bulgarian peasants who regularly drank sour milk would often become centenarians.

In 1908, Metchnikoff wrote about his ideas in a book called The Prolongation of Life: Optimistic Studies—an ironic title given that the man was a profound pessimist who had twice tried to kill himself. Still, he also quite literally put his money where his mouth was by regularly drinking sour milk, and created a fad that would culminate in the modern probiotics industry. Metchnikoff died at the age of 71, and his claims haven’t quite stood the test of time. But more recently, several groups of scientists have shown that animal microbiomes can indeed influence the lifespans of their hosts.

In 2013, Filipe Cabreiro showed that metformin—a drug that’s used to treat type 2 diabetes, and that’s being investigated for anti-aging properties—lengthens the lives of nematode worms, but only if the worms have microbes in their guts. More recently, Dario Valenzano showed that the killifish—an extremely short-lived fish that’s being increasingly used in studies of aging—lives longer if old individuals consume the poop of younger ones, suggesting either that old microbiomes quicken the deaths of these fish, or that young microbiomes can prolong their lives.

Despite these promising hints, it’s hard to work out exactly why and how the microbiome influences the pace of aging, because these communities can be bewilderingly complex. When you have a huge range of microbe species exchanging an even wider range of chemicals, it’s hard to tell which particular bug or molecule is important.

So Wang decided to sweep that complexity aside and focus on a very simple partnership. Her team member Bing Han started with a library of E. coli strains that were each missing a single gene, but were otherwise identical. He then fed these strains to the nematode C. elegans—a small transparent worm that features heavily in aging research, and whose body and genes have been thoroughly characterized.

Of the 4,000 or so E. coli strains, Han found that 29 extended the worms’ lives by at least 10 percent. And 19 of these “also protected the worms from age-associated diseases” like cancer and neurodegenerative conditions, says Wang. “They lived longer and better.”

Several of these life-extending bacterial strains behaved predictably—they influenced networks of worm genes that are already known to influence the aging process. But two strains did something unexpected. Their missing genes are involved in making colanic acid—a type of sugar found on the surface of many gut microbes. And these particular microbes, because of their deleted genes, were producing unusually large amounts of colanic acid. And when Han stopped them from doing so, they no longer extended the worms’ lives. Colanic acid was the key.

“I think it’s a brilliant story,” says Dario Valenzano, the geneticist behind the killifish study. He was initially concerned that colanic acid was only coincidentally making the worms live longer—perhaps it just stops E. coli from becoming infectious and killing the worms early. But Wang’s team allayed his concerns by showing that the molecule alone could increase the worms’ lifespans, even in the absence of any microbes. “I’m really convinced,” Valenzano adds.

The team also found some hints about how colanic acid works. Very few people have studied this molecule, but it seems to affect the worm’s mitochondria—bean-shaped structures that live inside animal cells and provide them with energy. Colanic acid stimulates these tiny power plants to split apart, making extra copies of themselves. It also switches on a group of genes that help mitochondria deal with stressful conditions, and that have been previously linked to longer life in worms. For reasons that are still unclear, these actions seem to put more sand in the worms’ hourglasses.

Mitochondria are former microbes themselves. They descend from a free-living bacterium that found its way into another microbe and stayed there, becoming a permanent source of energy for the host. That event happened billions of years ago, but mitochondria still retain traces of their former lives as bacteria. And it’s clear that modern bacteria can influence them. “It’s just amazing to me that after so many years of separation, they can still talk to each other,” Wang says.

“It’s a beautiful study, and a fantastic example of how doing basic research in a simple organism can reveal a lot of important findings,” says Siu Sylvia Lee from Cornell University. “It provides one clear mechanism for researchers studying the much more complex relationship between human microbiomes and longevity to investigate.”

For Wang, the ultimate goal is to develop genetically engineered strains of bacteria that can improve human health—a souped-up, life-extending probiotic for modern-day Metchnikoffs to quaff. But that won’t be easy. Despite a lot of research and development, existing probiotics are largely underwhelming, because it is very hard to get these bacteria to stably colonize the gut. “That’s a challenge for the entire field, and we’re collaborating with others to find different ways around it,” says Wang.

A different option would be to find microbe-made chemicals like colanic acid that could have anti-aging effects on their own. “Making people live longer and healthier is very different from treating diseases,” explains Wang. “If I talk to a patient and say I have a magic drug that can cure their disease but has side effects, I think they’d take it. But if you tell a healthy person that you have a compound that would extend their life by five years, but has side effects we don’t know about… I would be hesitant. That’s why I’m looking to the microbiome. Maybe we can find natural compounds that come from the microbes that we can use to boost our health. They’d be safe because they’re already there.”

Obviously, it’s still unclear if her discoveries apply to people, but there’s a reasonable chance that they would. The C. elegans worm—a millimeter long, transparent, and comprising just a thousand or so cells—is obviously very different from us, but its biology is also surprisingly similar. Many of the things that are known to slow aging in animals like primates or mice also work in the worm, from cutting down on calories to taking drugs like metformin and rapamycin. “It’s relevant to us all,” says Jennifer Tullet, who studies aging at the University of Kent, “particularly since it seems that only small changes in bacterial genomes within the microbiome have these effects.”

Indeed, the team has already shown that colanic acid can also extend the life of fruit flies, and can affect the mitochondria of mammalian cells in the same way that it did those of the worms. “I don’t want to speculate too much, but that makes us positive,” Wang says. “We’re now starting experiments with mice.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2017/06/a-tiny-tweak-to-gut-bacteria-can-extend-an-animals-life/530364/?utm_source=feed

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lodelss · 4 years ago

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An Indigenous Woman Made it to Safety in the US. DHS Won’t Let it Go.

A Guatemalan asylum seeker and her two daughters are expelled from the U.S. into Ciudad Juarez under the CDC’s Title 42 order, April 2, 2020.

Paul Ratje

Refugee camp for migrants and asylum seekers in Matamoros, Mexico, October 2019.

Guillermo Arias for the ACLU.

Published October 12, 2020 at 04:00PM via ACLU https://ift.tt/3iTOXF3

#IFTTT #Blogger

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