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Author Topic:   Should we teach both evolution and religion in school?
Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 618 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 1925 of 2073 (879758)
07-21-2020 4:00 PM
Reply to: Message 1924 by AdminPhat
07-21-2020 3:47 PM


Re: TOPIC SYNOPSIS
Oh definitely, we must teach both!
Evolution is both an important pillar of basic science and a subject with many practical implications (just look at how virologists are studying the changes in organisms like . . . SARS-CoV-2).
We must also learn about religion. Why were people in Northern Ireland killing each other so viciously? Which countries of the Middle East and Asia are predominantly Shia and which are Sunni and how does that affect their relations? How did the acceptance of their Emperor as a deity affect Japanese attitudes toward war in the 20th century? Why couldn't India maintain its integrity when it ceased to be a colony, breaking up into two countries (later three)?

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Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 618 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 1949 of 2073 (879843)
07-23-2020 4:10 PM
Reply to: Message 1947 by Kleinman
07-23-2020 1:35 PM


Re: TOE is religion in schools
You write
quote:
They also didn't explain how drug resistance evolves
A great deal is known about how drug resistance evolves. For example, here is an article about why drug resistance evolves much more readily than vaccine resistance:
quote:
Why does drug resistance readily evolve but vaccine resistance does not?
David A. Kennedy and Andrew F. Read
Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics, Departments of Biology and Entomology, The Pennsylvania State
University, University Park, PA, USA
DAK, 0000-0003-0820-115X; AFR, 0000-0001-7604-7903
Why is drug resistance common and vaccine resistance rare? Drugs and vaccines both impose substantial pressure on pathogen populations to evolve resistance and indeed, drug resistance typically emerges soon after the introduction of a drug. But vaccine resistance has only rarely emerged. Using well-established principles of population genetics and evolutionary ecology, we argue that two key differences between vaccines and drugs explain why vaccines have so far proved more robust against evolution than drugs. First, vaccines tend to work prophylactically while drugs tend to work therapeutically. Second, vaccines tend to induce immune responses against multiple targets on a pathogen while drugs tend to target very few. Consequently, pathogen populations generate less variation for vaccine resistance than they do for drug resistance, and selection has fewer opportunities to act on that variation. When vaccine resistance has evolved, these generalities have been violated. With careful forethought, it may be possible to identify vaccines at risk of failure even before they are introduced.
1. Introduction
Pathogen evolution impacts the efficacy of vaccines and antimicrobial drugs (e.g. antibiotics, antivirals, antimalarials) very differently (figure 1). After a new drug is introduced, drug resistance can rapidly evolve, leading to treatment failures [12]. For instance, most Staphylococcus aureus isolates in British hospitals were resistant to penicillin just 6 years after the introduction of the drug [13]. Similar evolutionary trajectories have been observed for the vast majority of drugs [14] and today many drugs are clinically useless against particular pathogens [15]. The problem has become so acute that drug resistance is viewed as one of the great challenges of our age, ranking alongside climate change and surpassing terrorism [16]. By striking contrast, vaccines generally provide sustained disease control. Most human vaccines have continued to provide protection since their introduction decades or even centuries ago (figure 1). For example, smallpox was eradicated because no virus strains capable of transmitting between vaccinated individuals ever emerged [17]. Indeed, the evolution of vaccine resistance is so rare that vaccines are now considered a leading solution to the drug resistance problem [11,18]. Yet drugs and vaccines both profoundly suppress pathogen fitness and so both should generate tremendous evolutionary pressure for resistance (defined here as a phenotype conferring increased pathogen replication or survival in treated hosts). Why then does pathogen evolution regularly undermine drug efficacy but rarely undermine vaccine efficacy (figure 1)? Here we propose that well known principles of resistance management explain why vaccine resistance rarely evolves. Note that we restrict our discussion to evolutionary changes that result either from mutation or from amplification of extremely rare variants (those maintained by mutation-selection balance). This focus excludes cases of ‘common-variant serotype replacement’ in which strains of a pathogen that were previously observed
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/...nly%20rarely%20emerged. ...

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Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 618 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 1956 of 2073 (879892)
07-24-2020 1:21 PM
Reply to: Message 1951 by dad
07-23-2020 4:47 PM


It's quite true that there are various "beliefs" involved in science. For example, we assume that the same physical laws hold true in one place as in another. This is essential because how could we study, say, electrons if they behaved differently in Bob's lab than in Carol's? We also assume that the same physical laws hold true in different times. Otherwise Ted's laboratory would get different results today than it did yesterday.
But these are reasonable assumptions, aren't they?

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Replies to this message:
 Message 1957 by NosyNed, posted 07-24-2020 1:27 PM Sarah Bellum has replied

  
Sarah Bellum
Member (Idle past 618 days)
Posts: 826
Joined: 05-04-2019


Message 1958 of 2073 (879895)
07-24-2020 1:33 PM
Reply to: Message 1957 by NosyNed
07-24-2020 1:27 PM


Re: Assumptions
They are "conclusions" in that what we have observed so far agrees with them.
However, when we study something that we have not (yet) observed quite so thoroughly (a far-off nebula or an ancient fossil) we have to make the "assumption".

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 Message 1957 by NosyNed, posted 07-24-2020 1:27 PM NosyNed has not replied

Replies to this message:
 Message 1959 by ringo, posted 07-25-2020 12:24 PM Sarah Bellum has seen this message but not replied

  
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