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How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

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Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#111

Post by nostrademons »

afavour wrote: post #61
nostrademons wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect a lot of the "woe, things are way harder for Millennials than past generations, I'm too poor to have a family" zeitgeist is actually this phenomena + literal survivorship bias. Every single person alive today came from parents that successfully reproduced. When you're a kid, it's very natural to think that having kids and a family of your own is the default state of being. After all, all of your friends hav…

Why would any of that be specific to millennials, though? The way you’re describing it nothing would have changed in a very long time. I’m pretty sure the “I’m too poor to have a family” perspective stems directly from the wild increases we’ve see in the price of housing and not a whole lot else.

That's the point - nothing has changed, except the narrative.

The wild increases in the price of housing is a symptom of the same dynamic we've seen throughout time, of competition over resources and survival of the "fittest" (where "fittest" occasionally means most brutal/devious/selfish). The differences are that a.) The (white) Baby-boom generation (in the U.S.) bucked the trend and enjoyed abundance and very little selection pressure. Note that the story was very different if you were black (where you had the gains of the Civil Rights movement, only to have the rug pulled out from under you with the 70s inflation and 80s crack epidemic) or if you were Chinese (where you probably died in the Cultural Revolution or Great Famine) or Russian / Eastern European (where you likely drank yourself to death after the breakup of the Warsaw Pact). And b.) that in our "civilized" society, we prefer to let people die rather than kill them outright. Not so for the WW1/WW2 generation.

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#112

Post by lotrjohn »

pfdietz wrote: post #103
mlcrypto wrote: post #14

Kinda morbid thinking about all the failed mutations as laying eggs evolved into the placenta

There's a reason religious types recoiled from Darwin's idea. It paints God as a vivisectionist on the grandest scale. Darwin experienced this as a father, watching his oldest child die slowly and horribly (probably from cerebral tuberculosis). It would not be a stretch to imagine this experience soured him on traditional religious dogmas.

According to Wikipedia it was Darwin’s second child (eldest daughter). I believe that is who you are referring to.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Darwin

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#113

Post by pfdietz »

lotrjohn wrote: post #112
pfdietz wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a reason religious types recoiled from Darwin's idea. It paints God as a vivisectionist on the grandest scale. Darwin experienced this as a father, watching his oldest child die slowly and horribly (probably from cerebral tuberculosis). It would not be a stretch to imagine this experience soured him on traditional religious dogmas.

According to Wikipedia it was Darwin’s second child (eldest daughter). I believe that is who you are referring to. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Darwin

That's who I meant, yes.

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#114

Post by blindriver »

salad-tycoon wrote: post #24
blindriver wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

People, capable of pondering life’s great mysteries, are going to place faith into something, only difference is if they accept it as a faith or argue their faith into fact. I think this makes many here uncomfortable.

Sorry but I believe in science and evolution, not science fiction. Just making up stories that viruses can create new organs in other organisms and also some get intertwined in the reproduction so that next generations can get the same organs is creationism mythology.

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#115

Post by qgin »

jmyeet wrote: post #28
mlcrypto wrote: post #14

Kinda morbid thinking about all the failed mutations as laying eggs evolved into the placenta

Here's another sobering thought: you represent an unbroken chain from the universal common ancestor of successful reproduction going back billions of years and probably trillions of generations (given that many of those were as a single-celled organism). Every one of those generations a success. So if you fail to reproduce you will break that billion year old chain of evolutionary success. Here's another: you have 2…

The idea of a genetic "line" is not the concept people think it is.

Humans already share 99% of their DNA. Of the 1% that creates our differences, after 5 to 7 generations, depending on how you look at it, the similarity of your descendent's DNA to your DNA would essentially be indistinguishable from noise or random variance in people who you aren't even related to at all.

Talk of lines and blood and bloodlines has more to do with people really wanting to not disappear into oblivion.

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#116

Post by concernedParty »

pfdietz wrote: post #30
blindriver wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

No "real" evidence? There's plenty of evidence, you just reject it for some reason.

What evidence have you considered to the contrary? Have you ever turned the chessboard around to look at this from the other side of the table? Most people I've spoken to who have strong feelings about this topic have only ever looked at it from one side properly.

The GP is skeptical that one can go from A, a chance interaction between two systems, through a continuous uninterrupted, robust, repeatable chain of unguided interactions, and arrive at Z, the placenta. An organ whose function and elegance is unrivalled by anything we as a species have made with logic and thought. And why should he not be skeptical, everything we've practically achieved in terms of technological progress has been the product of mind and intelligence, any claims to be able to do the same thing without that should be scrutinised very closely.

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#117

Post by ceejayoz »

blindriver wrote: post #114
salad-tycoon wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People, capable of pondering life’s great mysteries, are going to place faith into something, only difference is if they accept it as a faith or argue their faith into fact. I think this makes many here uncomfortable.

Sorry but I believe in science and evolution, not science fiction. Just making up stories that viruses can create new organs in other organisms and also some get intertwined in the reproduction so that next generations can get the same organs is creationism mythology.

That's not what the article asserts; you're complaining about a strawman.

It asserts that some virus genes made it into our genome, and that some of those were useful in the eventual evolution of the placenta.

That mechanism is well documented: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endogenous_retrovirus

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#118

Post by lamontcg »

jmyeet wrote: post #28
mlcrypto wrote: post #14

Kinda morbid thinking about all the failed mutations as laying eggs evolved into the placenta

Here's another sobering thought: you represent an unbroken chain from the universal common ancestor of successful reproduction going back billions of years and probably trillions of generations (given that many of those were as a single-celled organism). Every one of those generations a success. So if you fail to reproduce you will break that billion year old chain of evolutionary success. Here's another: you have 2…

> So if you fail to reproduce you will break that billion year old chain of evolutionary success.

All your genes are in other people and will continue without you. And your unique configuration of genetics is lost like a droplet in a river. Only around one in a billion people really put their stamp on our genealogy -- and you really need to rape, murder and empire build like Genghis Khan to achieve that kind of thing (and as the population expands it likely gets more and more difficult).

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#119

Post by Log_out_ »

vlovich123 wrote: post #37
mrphoebs wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I doesn't seem like the above commenter was making a value judgement.

> So if you fail to reproduce you will break that billion year old chain of evolutionary success. I’m responding to this and saying that’s not an accurate way to frame it. I’m saying you are participating in evolutionary success even if you don’t reproduce. For example, a more social family where there are siblings that don’t reproduce and instead invest in the success of the reproductive sibling’s offspring is still…

You also remove infection vectors for failed memetics from the pool

Re: How the placenta evolved from an ancient virus (2020)

#120

Post by pfdietz »

concernedParty wrote: post #116
pfdietz wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No "real" evidence? There's plenty of evidence, you just reject it for some reason.

What evidence have you considered to the contrary? Have you ever turned the chessboard around to look at this from the other side of the table? Most people I've spoken to who have strong feelings about this topic have only ever looked at it from one side properly. The GP is skeptical that one can go from A, a chance interaction between two systems, through a continuous uninterrupted, robust, repeatable chain of ungui…

> unguided interactions

I detect a creationist.

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