Thursday March 28, 2024
SNc Channels:

Search
About Salem-News.com

 

Feb-07-2011 18:48printcomments

Magnetic Fields

Natural Selection: Dead crabs and fish wash up on shores; dead birds drop from the skies, dead cows and water buffalo drop in the fields, bats felled by a fungus, if not a pellet gun.

Charles Darwin
Natural selection is one of the cornerstones of modern biology. The term was introduced by Darwin in his 1859 book On the Origin of Species

(BURLINGTON, Vermont) - One hundred and fifty one years ago, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace knew

Alfred Russel Wallace

that birds dropping from the skies, dead fish and crabs washing up from the sea, and cows flopping in the fields, are nature’s spectacular staging of what Darwin termed natural selection.

Darwin wrote, “As many more individuals of each species are born than can possibly survive; and as, consequently, there is a frequently recurring struggle for existence, it follows that any being, if it vary however slightly in any manner profitable to itself, under the complex and sometimes varying conditions of life, will have a better chance of surviving, and thus be naturally selected. From the strong principle of inheritance, any selected variety will tend to propagate its new and modified form.”

"It may metaphorically be said," Darwin wrote, "that natural selection is daily and hourly scrutinizing, throughout the world, the slightest variations; rejecting those that are bad, preserving and adding up all that are good; silently and insensibly working, whenever and wherever opportunity offers....We see nothing of these slow changes in progress, until the hand of time has marked the lapse of ages, and then so imperfect is our view into long-past geological ages, that we see only that the forms of life are now different from what they formerly were."

Wallace wrote, “An antelope with shorter or weaker legs must necessarily suffer more from the attacks of the feline carnivora; the passenger pigeon with less powerful wings would sooner or later be affected in its powers of procuring a regular supply of food . . . If, on the other hand, any species should produce a variety having slightly increased powers of preserving existence, that variety must inevitably in time acquire a superiority in numbers. . . . Now, let some alteration of physical conditions occur in the district — a long period of drought, a destruction of vegetation by locusts, the irruption of some new carnivorous animal seeking "pastures new" . . . it is evident that, of all the individuals composing the species, those forming the least numerous and most feebly organized variety would suffer first, and, were the pressure severe, must soon become extinct.”

In experiments conducted in the department of obstetrics at the Columbia Medical School in the 1920's, Raphael Kurzrock and Charles Lieb noticed, that when they attempted artificial insemination the uterus often expelled the semen. They found that human seminal fluid could affect the state of contraction of strips of muscle from the uterus, either contracting or relaxing them. They remarked in a paper published in 1930 that the history of the patients from whom the muscle strips were obtained made their experiments even more intriguing. Muscle from patients with a history of successful pregnancy responded to semen by relaxing, while semen always induced contractions in uterine muscle from women with a history of long acting sterility. This suggested to Kurzrock and Lieb the presence of factors in semen and uteri that differentiate between infertility and fertility. After studying this paper on numerous occasions, I realized that these factors are also those of natural selection.

In the early 1930's, Maurice Goldblatt in the United States and Ulf von Euler in Sweden showed that factors in the seminal fluid of boars act on various smooth muscles and lower blood pressure. Von Euler named these substances "prostaglandins" because the prostate contains small amounts of them, and he assumed that what he had extracted from semen must have come from that gland. Today we know that every cell manufactures prostaglandins, or other members of the eicosanoid family.


At the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sune Bergstrom purified several prostaglandins, determined their chemical structure, and showed that they are formed from essential fatty acids. After collaborating with Bergstrom from 1959-1962 on the structure of prostaglandins, Bengt Samuelsson provided a detailed picture of arachidonic acid and prostaglandin metabolism, and defined the chemical processes involved in their synthesis and breakdown. Samuelsson showed that blood platelets convert arachidonic acid to thromboxanes, while white blood cells convert it to leukotrienes. Thromboxanes constrict blood vessels and cause platelets to clump together and release more clotting factors. This is useful when clotting is necessary to stop bleeding; when this mechanism is overactive, it plays a pivotal role in heart attacks and strokes. And thromboxanes directly stimulate the smooth muscles of blood vessels to contract, including those of the heart and brain.

At Oxford University in the mid-sixties, Sir John Vane made the fundamental discovery that anti-inflammatory compounds such as aspirin block the formation of prostaglandins and thromboxanes. Later Vane and Salvador Moncada isolated a prostaglandin in the wall of blood vessels and named it prostacyclin. In dilating blood vessels and inhibiting the aggregation of platelets, prostacyclin opposes the actions of thromboxanes. For their pioneering research on prostaglandins, Bergstrom, Samuelson and Vane were awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine in 1982.

Prostaglandins are ephemeral, infinitesimal, and powerful molecules that signal throughout each cell, from cell to cell, organ to organ, brain to body, body to brain, and body to environment. Prostaglandins are not produced under resting conditions, but only in response to stimuli. If the enzymes that produce and degrade prostaglandins are resilient, they can absorb stress, and continue to function physiologically; if not, physiology becomes pathology. Prostaglandins orchestrate cognitive, emotional, behavioral, physiological, pathological, and reproductive responses to the environment, the latter including heat, cold, gravity, gases, humidity, light, dark, sound, electromagnetic fields, water, venom, microorganisms, and food. Electromagnetic fields regulate enzymes directly, and indirectly, by acting on cell membranes.

In Arkansas, thousands of red-winged blackbirds dropped dead out of the sky. 3000 drum fish died in the Arkansas River, 5000 birds in Louisiana and Kentucky. Pundits allowed that the birds died of blunt trauma to their organs, resulting from a midair collision instigated by the sound of fireworks. Devil crabs, sardines, croaker, catfish, bream, carp, roach fish, starlings, Cowbirds, and jackdaw crows perished in their hundreds, thousands or millions. More than two hundred cows dropped dead in a field in Wisconsin, seven thousand water buffalo in Vietnam. The blackbirds showed no signs of trauma or infection, but did have evidence of bleeding and clotting, indicating that thromboxane synthase, the enzyme that produces thromboxane B2, was induced by environmental stress, the enzyme a variant that Darwin and Wallace had in mind. .In other sudden deaths, induction of an enzyme in the prostaglandin pathways was probably responsible. Emil Zuckerkandl and Linus Pauling advanced the idea that enzymes, they referred to a semantides, fulfill the functions of biological clocks, changing slowly over time. Of the altered physical conditions responsible for the mass deaths, rapid movement of the Magnetic North Pole towards Russia has the edge.

From Charles Lyell the geologist, Darwin learned that evolution progresses extremely slowly. Francis Bacon learned this from reading Leonardo da Vinci’s writings. Slow progression explains the apparent increase in cancer, heart disease, and Alzheimer’s. Many humans will be vulnerable to disease, others much less so. The vulnerable will be able to medically protect themselves, and their close ones. The impact of the disadvantages of evolution will worsen very slowly, and could even reverse, judging from past patterns. But it is a moment in time to let ethical, non- commercial science make its statement.

Previous articles by Dr. Julian Lieb:

Apr-04-2009: A Solution to Resistant Tuberculosis? - By Dr. Julian Lieb for Salem-News.com

Mar-30-2009: The Amok of Lovelle Mixon, Michael McLendon, Tim Krestchmer, Robert Stewart, Kerby Revelus and Travis the Chimp - Opinion by: Dr. Julian Lieb for Salem-News.com

_________________________________

Julian Lieb, M.D is a retired Yale medical school professor, and author or coauthor of forty -five articles and nine books. With D Jablow Hershman as first author, Dr Lieb co-authored: “Manic Depression and Creativity” and “A Brotherhood of Tyrants: Manic Depression and Absolute Power.” In these volumes, the authors showed that manic- depressive disorder is paradoxical, in gifting society with most of its creative geniuses, and inflicting many of its great destroyers.




Comments Leave a comment on this story.
Name:

All comments and messages are approved by people and self promotional links or unacceptable comments are denied.



Etruscan February 8, 2011 1:47 pm (Pacific time)

In reference to your Bio, Meriwether Lewis (of Lewis and Clark) showed signs of manic depression, yet also was brilliantly insightful. If sheer genius was all that mattered, we would all be Einsteins. Survival requires a certain blunting of the senses, that we should at times avoid the spiritual and concern ourselves with more mundane tasks.


Graeme February 7, 2011 8:16 pm (Pacific time)

Natural selection?It is in the Holy Scriptures and mentions birds fish and beasts and states clearly that mankind is next.

[Return to Top]
©2024 Salem-News.com. All opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Salem-News.com.


Articles for February 6, 2011 | Articles for February 7, 2011 | Articles for February 8, 2011
The NAACP of the Willamette Valley

Click here for all of William's articles and letters.

Annual Hemp Festival & Event Calendar



googlec507860f6901db00.html
Tribute to Palestine and to the incredible courage, determination and struggle of the Palestinian People. ~Dom Martin