Arete

1) Literally all that's in the mRNA vaccines is mRNA, phospholipids and phosphate buffered saline. All of these components have been widely used in other medical applications for a long time, and it's actually a shorter and less risky list of ingredients than many widely used live attenuated and inactivated vaccines. There is actually reason to expect that mRNA vaccines are LESS likely to cause anaphylaxis than other vaccines rather than more. 2) All tests so far have shown that while the antibodies induced by the vaccines can have reduced binding efficiency to mutant variants, the binding rate is not zero, so the vaccines offer some protection to mutant variants. 3) Over 300 million doses of mRNA vaccine have now been administered. Anaphylaxis has occurred at a rate of 11.1 per million doses and zero deaths have been recorded. 4) There is no causative explanation for why CBD would lead to reduced COVID19 infection rates, nor empirical evidence that it does. Ergo, the suggestion that CBD should be taken instead of a vaccine for ANY disease is like saying that keeping your eyes open while driving a car is a healthy alternative to installing the brakes. Edit to add Childrens Health Defence is an anti-vax organization who have demonstrably spread misinformation and false conspiracies about vaccine safety and have no place in any scientific discussion of virtually anything.

In the same vein as CharonY, life on earth is microbes and other minor contaminants.

In times of darkest need I tend to call upon Illumina tech support.

1) How did "coal", which is by definition, fossilized organisms, exist before organisms? 2) How did viruses, which by definition require cellular hosts to replicate, replicate before the existence of cellular hosts? 3) SARS COV 2 is a recombinant derivative of two ancestral coronaviruses, with approximately 20 years of evolution between it and its nearest known relative. Conversely, tailed bacteriophages have been on earth for approximately 4.5 billion years. 4) SARS COV 2 arose through the recombination of disparate coronavirus strains and infected the respiratory system of a human in Wuhan province, China in late 2019. 5) There are 12 approved COVID19 vaccines, and 54 currently in various stages of clinical trial. 6) If there were 20 bacteria in every cell of your body, you'd be dead. It's a long held myth that the human body CONTAINS more bacterial cells than eukaryotic cells, but it turns out that's wrong and there are a similar number of prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells in a human body, the vast majority of those prokaryotes housed in the gut. Not the cytoplasms of cells. Unless there is some very, very misused terminology, the entire "theory" is trivially dismissible as fundamentally flawed.

MMS is a snake oil scam and Chlorine dioxide is an industrial bleach and disinfectant. The people hawking it as medicine are the lowest of the low. It's difficult to convince someone that they are wrong, and in many circumstances, evidence dispelling an incorrect belief can counterintuitively reinforce the belief. Here's some advice that might help you talk to him. https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/07/15/1004950/how-to-talk-to-conspiracy-theorists-and-still-be-kind/

There are a number of genetic causes of intersex individuals, some of which render the physical attributes of the individual to be discordant with their underlying genetics (e.g. AIS resulting in XY individuals with undescended testes and a vagina, or CAH resulting in XX individuals with masculine traits). I imagine that these conditions - typically with frequencies of one in thens of thousands might contribute to discrepancies in the designation of biological sex at birth.

If you look at the proportion of grown adults who will purchase scratcher lottery tickets, or think that the risk of the COVID vaccine outweighs the risk of contracting COVID, etc, etc, etc. You'll realize an astounding proportion of the human population has zero understanding of how odds ratios and statistical probability work.

Apart from the points CharonY made, I don't see a negative control, or if there is one you have a contamination issue. Are you actually asking how to optimise the PCR given the multiple banding? I would say use a touchdown protocol, or optimise your primers, but I would probably cut out my gel bands and call it a day.

A woman carrying a Gadsden flag was trampled to death in the Capitol building riot.

"Black Lives Matter are violent thugs, but also..."

There are countless observations of natural selection in so called "higher organisms". Many feature as model organisms for natural selection - stickleback fish, toads, anoles, killifish, guppies, monkeyflowers, grasshoppers, Drosophila, jellyfish, lycophytes, to name a few. There are dozens of well known manipulative experiments that have comprehensively demonstrated natural selection in populations of relatively long lived, multicellular organisms, and thousands of population genetic studies on natural populations which do the same. Natural selection in modern humans is also directly observed. The best example that immediately comes to mind is the Framingham Heart Study. I think the concept that you're missing is that selection is dependent on population size. In small populations, genetic drift can overwhelm selection, leading to the loss of beneficial alleles and the fixation of deleterious ones. Conversely, the larger the population size, the lower the selection coefficient required to lead to fixation or extinction of a given mutation. https://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/natural-selection-genetic-drift-and-gene-flow-15186648/

No, it isn't. The fact that environmental factors can create epigenetic mutations does not imply that the organism has any ability to control which mutations occur, nor what phenotypic changes they manifest. In fact, many are deleterious. Lamarckian evolution is not epigenetics, nor is Lamarckian evolution supported by epigenetic processes. Mutations are random with respect to fitness. Selection is the force that causes fixation of adaptive mutations. It is well understood.

The full title is "Interaction-based evolution: how natural selection and nonrandom mutation work together" It clearly refers to the interaction of selection and mutation, and does not imply that an organism has some sort of ability to control the novel gametic mutations it inherits or passes on.

The fitness effects of a mutation are a moving target in a variable environment. While a mutation may be deleterious or neutral in one environment, it may be highly beneficial in another. E.g. antibiotic resistance in bacteria. Further, even if the net number of deleterious mutations outnumber the beneficial, the process of selection increases the likelihood of fixation of beneficial mutations. This seems to be a version of the irreducible complexity fallacy - of which this is a good discussion of. As pointed out above, mutations do not need to be of benefit in the current environment to be prevalent or even fixed in an environment, so a trait can exist that has no contemporary function or benefit. Also, intermediate phenotypes are often more prevalent than many expect - as an example there are both air breathing fish and amphibious fish that can't breathe air that are extant today. Epigenetics and gene interactions may well be associated with beneficial mutation, however neither process could be described as effortful or interactive.

"Scientists discovered a human trait that wasn't linked to the microbiome, but they've forgotten what it is" - twitter anon. Research on the gut-brain axis is pretty nascent, but I would expect to see a lot more of the foundational research in the field to start manifesting in clinical applications in the foreseeable future.

Good news! I'm a microbiologist and one of the many projects I work on is the genomics of bacteria commonly found in fermented foods. One of the things we are finding out about many of the strains that are commonly found in fermented foods, is that they are really good at exchanging transposable genetic elements - namely in the form of conjugative plasmids. When you populate a culture from "wild" bacterial strains, they likely come along with a unique accessory genome. That accessory genome can contain things like antibiotic resistance gene cassettes, toxin-antitoxin systems, efflux pump components, etc and so on. The rate at which these are expressed in the food product, or transferred to the microbiome of the individual consuming the product is probably highly variable and hard to quantify. The individual effects of genetic exchange between consumed bacteria and the microbiome are also hard to quantify - but you probably don't want your naturally occurring Clostridium difficile to pick up a beta lactamase gene cassette, especially if you wind up having to take a penicillin derived antibiotic sometime down the line. As a result, I would suggest that if one intends to commercially sell cultured food products, it would be wise to determine the genomic makeup of the bacteria used, and control for unwanted, potentially hazardous plasmid encoded genes in the strains intended for live consumption. Or you could stick a jar of sugar water outside and hope for the best, I guess.

Most mutations are neutral. The lottery analogy fails due to the fact that evolution is a population level process. A diploid human genome experiences 175 mutations per generation on average. There were 3,745,540 human births in 2019 alone. That's 655,469,500 mutations across the human population in one year. Diploid human genome size is 6.4 Gb - so that population level mutational likelihood space is approximately 10% of the whole human genome in a single year. Next, "fitness" in evolutionary terms is discretely defined as genetic contribution to the subsequent generation. By definition, if a mutation is beneficial, it increases in frequency in subsequent generations (complications of neutral genetic drift aside). Therefore, "random" (they aren't actually random - only naïve with respect to fitness) explores significant portions of the human (or other species) total adaptive landscape every generation, and by definition, beneficial mutations, proliferate through the population throughout subsequent generations.

I started wondering how long my neighbors would keep their Trump flags up given he lost the election, then I remembered the Confederate flags...

From a conceptual level, an understanding of basic neutral theory is also a good place to start. If you can wrap your brain around the concepts of how stochastic changes occur at the molecular level in populations, it becomes easier to layer on selective evolution, game theory and other increasingly complex models of evolution. The seminal paper is Kimura 1968. http://dosequis.colorado.edu/Courses/MethodsLogic/papers/Kimura1968.pdf but this review is probably more accessible. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/evo.13650

Can Trump and Biden just wear dressing gowns and slippers, and beat each other with nursing home meal trays instead of any more debates? It would be as informative, but vastly better entertainment.

The President didn't "give" anyone squat. It was taxpayer dollars approved by congress to be given back to taxpayers for the purpose of economic stimulus. Trying to infer that it was somehow a generous gift from the coffers of Santa Trump that we should be grateful for is just... well kind of on brand. Oh and the fact he's holding up further economic stimulus until "he gets re-elected"? Yeah screw that. It's our money. Stimulus is a provision to keep businesses afloat and people in their jobs though economic crises. Holding it hostage is despicable. Does anyone else feel like they're stuck in a really dark rendition of the Emperor's New Clothes?

Err, E. faecalis is a commensal member of a healthy gut microbiome, tetanus has a vaccine can be treated with antibiotics. I would argue that the vast majority of the RNA viruses I listed are harder to treat and more virulent. But my point was that virulence and nucleic acid packaging are not correlated in any sensible way. Saying a pathogen is "puny" because it happens to be an RNA virus rather than a DNA virus, prokaryote, parasite, etc is nonsensical.

I was actually drinking with a cognitive science professor friend of mine tonight who explained it like this: "They can't articulate it but what they mean by "bullshit" is the democratic process - having to explain and argue your position to ideological opponent. The "bullshit" is a lack of authoritarianism. If they can simply dictate a worldview - "shut up snowflake this is how it is" into law and policy the Trump base has achieved its goals. While I think the choice between sexually harassing, mentally declining grandpas is unpalatable, especially given the field of dynamic and inspiring presidential contenders, I do think it is coming down to a choice between authoritarian populism and democracy, and I am genuinely scared at the proportion of US citizens who want an authoritarian leader, and don't understand what the actual implications of that are.

Seems like the accessory to have in our small red rural town is a giant "Trump 2020: No more bullshit" flag. I can't help but think "You know he's the incumbent, right?" I suspect it's too late for this to move the needle, unfortunately.