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Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

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Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#371

Post by willyt »

nickff wrote: post #162
jessaustin wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Clearly the EPA screwed up, but the BLM should have promoted rather than jailed the bureaucrat who sold the feral horses. That program should be ramped up: it would be better for the horses and for the arid environment that they inhabit if the absolutely necessary regular culling resulted in nutrition rather than thousands of horses penned up to no purpose for the rest of their lives. It's not as though we're going t…

I have heard of equivalent 'screwups' described as horrific criminal actions, described as being done by greedy, stupid, and lazy people who should be sent to federal prison; but alas, those were private parties. My point was that catastrophic negligence goes unpunished when committed by a bureaucrat. Horses were native to North America, and existed on the continent before humans arrived; they were probably wiped out…

IANAL and not in the US but legally 'Negligence' is a tort; it's a civil law matter not typically criminal unless it's Criminal Negligence because you actually kill or injure someone, I think. Someone would have to show how the destruction of the horses caused them damages and if no-one owns them because they are feral, who would this be?

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#372

Post by mirimir »

cb18 wrote: post #317
mirimir wrote: post #310

Earlier quoted context omitted.

True. But it's social and cultural evolution that matter now.

Societies and cultures are just the emergent results of the interaction of phenotypes. i.e. Culture and people are one and the same.

My first response was pathetic :(

Let's consider biology. Physics and chemistry constrain biological processes and systems, for sure. But the number of distinct proteins based on the same set of amino acids, for example, is arguably unlimited (or at least, huge). Selection may favor one protein over another, and yet have virtually no impact on amino acid structure and diversity. Let alone on atoms, nucleons, quarks, etc.

The same applies to societies and cultures vs peoples.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#373

Post by Zelmor »

The writer thinks in terms of human loves, excluding the fact that birds and other species thrive on mosquitoes. If you remove one step of the foodchain, you will hurt everyone, including us.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#374

Post by masklinn »

alwaysdoit wrote: post #38

We've done this lots[1] of[2] times[3] when it threatens agriculture, but when it threatens the lives of poor people in third world countries, suddenly we're worried about the ecosystem? There will be an environmental impact, but it will be from hundreds of millions of humans not getting malaria and climbing their way out of property, not from the lack of mosquitoes in the ecosystem. It's still a significant problem,…

> There will be an environmental impact, but it will be from hundreds of millions of humans not getting malaria and climbing their way out of property, not from the lack of mosquitoes in the ecosystem. It's still a significant problem, but our current solution of "let all the poor people die" is not a good one.

Ecosystem-wise, let's not forget mosquitoes and their diseases are as much threat as they are content. Hawaii didn't have mosquitoes until the 19th century, they did a number on native bird populations. Mosquitoes negatively affect any species they feed on, not just humans.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#375

Post by ajuc »

ElijahLynn wrote: post #194

Evolution requires the human population to go through epidemics in order to get stronger. Unfortunately what is best for the planet and species is not always the best for individual humans.

"Evolution's reaction" to malaria was to give people sickle cell anemia.

Evolution doesn't care for happiness, strength, health or anything like that.

It only optimizes the number of copies of genes in given circumstances.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#376

Post by saiya-jin »

abrookewood wrote: post #280
DanBC wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do sterile mosquitos spread their genes? (Genuine question! I don't know what the risk is)

When using sterile mosquitoes, the idea isn't that they pass on their genes, but that they dominate mating and therefore disrupt the breeding cycle. I.e. you release LOTS of sterile males and the normal females spend time mating with them instead of normal males and the population therefore decreases (until you run out of sterile males). I think the better option (also in the article) is to release engineered males t…

makes sense, but how do we 100% ensure nothing unforeseen will go wrong with it? playing god might end up pretty badly if some genetic/other corner case happens

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#377

Post by imakesnowflakes »

icambron wrote: post #367
imakesnowflakes wrote: post #303

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry. I have to ask this to you also. Are you a biologists/ecologists or some one knowledgable in the field?

I can tell you both the parent and grandparent posters are knowledgeable enough to help answer your question. I think you're misunderstanding how evolution and selection pressure work at a conceptual level, and you don't need an evolutionary biologist to give expert input on it any more than you need an astronomer to explain why the moon has phases. Let me take one more crack at this: think of natural selection as ev…

Thanks for the explanation.

But you haven't said anything that I don't know already.

>The point the parent and GP were making is that the advantage in being airborne exists whether or not mosquitoes is being killed off.

When there is an abundance of mosquitoes, an airborne strain does not have a sufficient advantage over the mosquito borne strain.

Now this is an assumption I am making. And this is where you people are hung on.

You are saying that an air borne strain has an advantage even now. But what if an air borne strain is limited by distances it can travel before it dies of for want of a host? A mosquito borne strain can travel arbitrary distance and spread over a vast area..

So when there are mosquitoes, it is more or less an even match.

When you take mosquitoes out, suddenly the airborne strain gains a huge advantage over the mosquito borne strain. Right? Because there are less number of mosquitoes, the spread of mosquito borne strain is reduced. This gives the air borne strain more chance to propagate to the next generation.

If you are thinking, how does it give more probability for the air borne strain to spread? Please consider this scenario.

Let there be two indviduals A and B, A infected with an Airborne strain and B infected with a mosquito borne strain. Let there be a healthy indvidual C that is, say, 10 meters away from A and B.

Case 1: Current situtation, with an abundance of mosquitoes.

A mosquito bites B, taking in the virus and takes off. At the same time, a virus of airborne strain start from A. Now, the mosquito proceeds to bite C right away. Now the virus enters C's body. After a while, C's immune system starts a response to fight this off. A day passes. C's immune system is still fighting the infection.

It is at this time at which the air borne strain enters C's body. But there is a fight going on in there with C's immune system in full alert and is killing of off the likes of this viruses. The small amount of air borne virus that manage to enter C's body gets slaughtered before it gets a chance to grow there. C might or might not get infected with mosquito borne strain...

But The airborne strain does not propagate to the next generation.

Case 2: Mosquitoes are being killed off.

Now there is a reduced number of mosquitoes. So when the airborne strain enters C's body, the mosquito borne strain is still not there yet. Immune system has not yet started fighting viruses of this type. So it gets a head start, and ends up successfully infecting C.

The airborne strain propagate to the next generation.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#378

Post by whiskers08xmt »

_AllisonMobley wrote: post #351
kchoudhu wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me know when you find a place that will accept and support 180MM Bangladeshis and 1B Africans. Kill the mosquitos. It's cheaper in the long run.

>It's cheaper in the long run. Is it? A human that survives to reproduce that would have otherwise died from malaria uses more non-renewable resources than a human that dies from malaria over the course of their lifetime, and continues to do so after their death by way of their progeny. In terms of how much time we have as a species before running out of non-renewables on earth, killing the mosquitos might cost more…

The benefits of human population control through disease, isn't much of a benefit at all, as child mortality and fertility tends to be correlated. The less chance of your kids dying, the less kids you'll have, in general. This probably means that while we might see a population boom in an adjustment period, we'd probably soon see drops in fertility.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#379

Post by qb45 »

ajuc wrote: post #370
qb45 wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But then you become a slave of those pesky humans and their whims, while trees grow freely in forests where they didn't face much danger from humans before the industrial revolution.

Actually in Europe there was heavy deforestation between 1100 and 1500 already.

Yeah, I was looking for information on pre-industrial deforestation and found that too. Apparently, deforestation was also a problem in the vicinity of some ancient cities.

Re: Let's Kill All the Mosquitoes

#380

Post by icambron »

imakesnowflakes wrote: post #377
icambron wrote: post #367

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you both the parent and grandparent posters are knowledgeable enough to help answer your question. I think you're misunderstanding how evolution and selection pressure work at a conceptual level, and you don't need an evolutionary biologist to give expert input on it any more than you need an astronomer to explain why the moon has phases. Let me take one more crack at this: think of natural selection as ev…

Thanks for the explanation. But you haven't said anything that I don't know already. >The point the parent and GP were making is that the advantage in being airborne exists whether or not mosquitoes is being killed off. When there is an abundance of mosquitoes, an airborne strain does not have a sufficient advantage over the mosquito borne strain. Now this is an assumption I am making. And this is where you people ar…

> If you are thinking, how does it give more probability for the air borne strain to spread?

Right, that's the important thing to think about: the size of the advantage over (or even disadvantage to) the status quo doesn't matter in itself; it only matters to the degree that competition affects the viability of the new strain. I'm glad we're on the same page about that, because that's the thing I perceived that you did not understand.

On your answer to that question, if you go up to the GGP post (your first responder, Slapshot), you'll see that's exactly what they were arguing against. Most people don't have a malaria at any given time, so they're not competing for hosts. So instead of considering how our two strains battle it out in C, the dominant question -- the one that determines whether the strain is viable -- is whether it can infect A's friends D through Z, all of whom don't have malaria, presumably because they weren't bitten by an infected mosquito in the last couple weeks. Since the answer to that doesn't depend on what's happening in C, we conclude that it has about the same probability now as when mosquitos are being eliminated.

I mean, that's the whole reason we're so scared of things "going airborne", right? That they spread so much faster and frictionlessly, and they're not constrained by the vagaries of their hosts.

Not crucial to this discussion, but worth knowing: malaria isn't a virus; it's a protozoa. It does mean the immune response is pretty different.

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