Maybe one of you could help explain why the overuse of antibiotics is related to the theory of evolution. Rep. Jack Kingston of Georgia is clueless as the why anyone would make such a connection.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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“Every painting had a painter; every car had a designer.”
Orly?
http://boxcar2d.com/
Let it run while you’re sleeping. When you wake up, cars will be zooming over the obstacles.
By that logic:
Every god had an idolator.
I don’t know if you are asking a serious question, but as a Microbiologist, I’m gonna answer it as if you were…lol.
Many pathogenic bacteria have a ommon or predictable pattern of resistance and susceptibility to certain drugs or family of drugs. Due to the way that most bacteria reproduce, exact copies of parent cells are made into daughter cells. Overuse of antibiotics can lead to a bacteria or virus becoming resistant to that antibiotic. In other words, the more a bacteria is exposed to a certain drug that it’s not usually resistant to, it can become “used to” defending itself against that compound. So if just one bacteria cell becomes resistant to a drug that it’s not usually resistant to, it reproduces exponentially to daughter cells. Some people are colonized by bacteria that is not commonly resistant to some drugs, but can become resistant. These people may be asymptomatic since this would be there normal flora (i.e. community acquired MRSA) but if/when the same bacteria is introduced to the system of an individual who is either immunocompromised (i.e. chemo, HIV, premature, wounded, etc) or an who just isn’t colonized by the same bug(bacteria), then that individual may become symptomatic.
It’s the same way that if MD/RN/Patient Care Personnel do not wash hands, and they may be naturally colonized with MRSA, then whoever these people come in contact with before they’ve washed their hands, can possibly become infected by this caregiver’s MRSA.
I thought it was more selection than modification. You don’t mention that. In particular, if the gut flora consist of a large population of different species (Jeff Gordon thinks > 1 million), then the use of anti-biotics will eliminate susceptible species and members of species, leaving more virulent, and less susceptible species. I worked just a teensy bit with Jeff.
I think once she connected the dots for him of how bacteria were able to evolve resistent strains to antibiotics he had a glimmer of understanding.
The interesting moment came as his brain processed that glimmer; he perceived he was about to lose all his religious foundational beliefs if he acknowledged her logic and he ran screaming for the safety of “adaptation”.
I’m always so intrigued that somehow people who shoulder the burden of that belief system are so terrorized by the concept of evolution because somehow if they accept it all their subsequent beliefs will fall like dominoes.
Well I mean, Adam and Eve clearly weren’t real people if evolution is true (which it is). They’re Biblical literalists. Their entire world-view would come crashing down.
Even for those less hopelessly idiotic than the GA gentleman, evolution poses a serious threat to monotheist belief. Namely, where does a soul come into the picture if we are indeed descended from monkeys, or protozoa, or duckweed? If we are the product of an unbroken process of natural selection, how can we be the only ones with a soul? Obviously other animals are also conscious in some form or other, obviously they are, like us, flesh animated by some life process that the believers have always called a soul.
So you’ve got a few levels of resistance: “I ain’t no monkey” from Maher’s pet moron, on up to somewhat more sophisticated and even more threatening conclusions.
What I really want to know, though, is how the voters of Georgia can disrespect themselves and the United States enough to send a brainless bimbo like this to be their representative — in other words, as an avatar of what they are.
Because he IS what they are.
They don’t believe in evolution either.
.nalbar
Before folks here get too far down the road of bashing creationists like this GA congresscritter with terms like “hopelessly idiotic” and “brainless bimbo”, you should know that liberal comedian DL Hughley, at the end of the evolution segment (not shown in the edited clip above) announced that he too didn’t believe in (Darwinian) evolution.
And what’s all this talk about humans from monkeys?
I thought we evolved from apes?
As for creationist Kingston, though I’m far from an expert on this contentious matter, and am not remotely a scientist nor creationist/religionist/fundamentalist of any stripe, I think he’s coming from the perspective of local adaption denoting only modest change which doesn’t quite prove the macroevolution of one species turning into another species over a great period of time that the traditional evolutionists assert.
In any case, this is the problem when a lot of non-scientists begin weighing in. We get humans evolving from monkeys, and some less than confident certitude from usually smart and well-intended evolutionists like Maher who seems to have but a slender scientific grasp of the issue. Underlying all this, as this non-scientist sees it cynically, is the somewhat flexible or “adaptable” definition of evolution which tends to change from argument to argument in order to meet the intellectual demand of the moment.
You are saying that some liberals are morons who don’t believe in evolution? OK, some liberals are morons. I never believed that being a liberal inoculated you from stupidity. Yes, there are complete imbeciles who are liberals.
And, yes, evolution is complicated. Gee, what an idea!! A complicated idea that actually takes some larnin’ to figger out!! Well, we ‘murkans know that if you kain’t unnerstand it from the Bible, it’s communist or worse! It’s from SATAN.
God save us from the stupidity of the right and the left, because there is plenty to go around.
Let’s see: you concede evolution is a complicated theory, but say anyone who doesn’t believe in it is a moron? Doesn’t make sense. And your harshly negative and dogmatic attitude probably isn’t the most positive PR for the evolutionist side.
And what comes next after calling people morons and imbeciles? Forced institutionalization?
I am simply amazed that so many appear to believe that something that is complicated is inherently suspicious. Science is filled with hugely complicated ideas, and this makes it suspicious, even evil, to so many. If you find something complicated, why does that make it evil or wrong?
Your attitude is basically that science is complicated, therefore we should burn the scientist.
Yeah, I am contemptuous of that attitude. It’s an evil mindframe.
Wow. Completely twisted what I said and what you said in your previous post.
You’re the one, recall, who said this was complicated. I merely said if that’s so, maybe we shouldn’t be calling people morons and imbeciles if they don’t grasp it, especially when some on our side don’t seem to grasp it, especially when the actual definition of the theory itself seems rather changing and adaptable to fit the given argument.
Oh well. That’s my 2¢ on this issue, and I’m done with this poster …
Ah, consistency. I’m with Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds”.
What comes of not calling them what they are? They go to Congress and the White House.
As far as I can tell, we didn’t evolve from monkeys or apes according to the theory of evolution. We had a common ancestor. Our evolutionary lines are not the same after splitting off from that common ancestor even though we share a very high percentage of the same DNA. That Kingston argues that he didn’t come from a monkey just shows that he is uneducated. He is also ignorant, because he says he comes from God. How would that be exactly? Out of his forehead? Did God implant him into his mother’s. womb? Oh my god, was it the virgin birth? Of course, Kingston also believes he will be raptured off the planet too. Holy shit, maybe he thinks he’s Jesus or Elijah.
Apparently you didn’t watch the clip, where Kingston brags that he “came from God, not from a monkey”. That was the reference. If you saw what he was saying, it was not some sophisticated trope on some detail of macroevolutionary theory. It was a complete rejection of the very concept that life evolved. I didn’t see Maher as especially ignorant of evolutionary theory. What are you referring to?
The “adaptation” Kingston came up with was just a face-saving way of wiggling out of the questions the Canadian woman inconvenienced him with. Of course the details of evolutionary theory change over time: that’s the exact difference between science and “faith-based knowledge”. When science stops adapting to new discoveries and insights, it’s no longer science, but dogma. Changing theory over time is its strength, not its weakness.
Can’t find the Hughley bit you refer to, but your usage of “(Darwinian) evolution” suggests that he was talking about something else. If you have a clip or URL of that, it would be interesting to see.
As to my language, yes, it’s rude. I’m sick to death of the 24/7 attacks by the neo-fascist Right on anyone with a developed intellect while the likes of Kingston, Palin, and Ron Johnson are treated as if they deserve some kind of deference. Ignorance, especially of the voluntary kind, kills democracy. I’m not interested in “winning over” these people. I’m interested in defeating them.
Dave here’s an unedited clip of the entire segment as they go from talking science and global warming to evolution. Hughley’s admission that he doesn’t believe in evolution comes in the final 30 secs or so.
Re-viewing that segment from opening night, it still seems to me Kingston is making some standard non-loony objections to evolutionary theory — short-term micro-adaptation argument does not equal evolution, relative paucity of “missing link” fossils which should be in abundance according to standard definition of evolution — which are valid in some respects and certainly are worth asking. If not, then the proponents of evolutionary theory are as guilty as the bible-thumping unthinking creationists of promoting dogma and a rigid belief system which doesn’t allow for questioning.
Mes deux centimes …
All living beings are spirit and matter, whether humans, chimps, birds, duckweed, or rocks. Now, as a Lakota holy man once told me: as spirit, rocks operate on a much slower frequency than we do. He was kidding me to make his point.
a textbook example of cognitive dissonance. a persistent trait of zealots, especially those of a fundamentalist persuasion.
too bad they didn’t go into what he means by “adaptation” and too bad his faith depends on such a house of cards. it’s possible to base one’s faith on, say, faith, for example, which can coexist with science – many examples of that beginning with Newton.
Reminds me of a fundamentalist who assured me cats never laid in the sphinx position (both paws out in front and on their haunches) because they were NOT related to lions. Imagine the short circuits he experienced when he saw my cat one day in the sphinx position..! 😉
I met a vp of a giant bank (MBA from Wharton) who argued that the Bible was written in English. His smile indicated that he didn’t really believe that but he was afraid to say, out loud, otherwise.
To understand this, you must read “Main Street”. While written almost 100 years ago, it remains true today.
Imagine his consternation if you told him we don’t one, not one single copy, of any original documents that make up the bible. Not one. None. Who knows how many different people copied (unless there were copy machines) these documents and inserted their own notion or made mistakes.
Given the hundreds of self-contradictions in the book, it’s clear that it became a repository of all kinds of propaganda, misreadings, and deceptions, along with honest errors. Assuming, of course, that some “original” even existed.
fyi
“Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why”
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Misquoting-Jesus/Bart-D-Ehrman/e/9780060859510/?itm=1&USRI=%22m
isquoting+jesus%22#TABS
I have several of Ehrman’s books. He has a very interesting biography.
In the end my largest disappointment is that the creationists forbid themselves from celebrating the brain a creationist God gave them and use it to embrace scientific thought which intelligent curiosity certainly would be a source of pride to any God driving his creations to be the best that they could be.