IDiots and HIV-1, now with gratuitous lazrs.

Posted by ERV on April 2, 2009
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Helpful hint to Creationists:

Never mention HIV-1. Just dont. It will make your lives much easier if you just see the word “HIV” and associate it with an ass whooping. You dont really understand what HIV-1 is or how it works, so just shut up, cause you look like a worthless IDiot.

On the Discovery Institute Blog, EN&V, David Klinghoffer wrote a nice TARDalogue about how EXPELLED victim Ralph Seelke does research that proves evilution is a lie and Jesus Christ is our Lord and Savior:

Seelke’s work tests evolution’s power to produce two necessary mutations in a case where the mutations, to produce a beneficial function, need to happen pretty much simultaneously. Realistically, it can’t happen. He finds that this represents an insuperable obstacle to evolution’s getting its job done.
…
An illustration of this that Seelke mentions is antiviral drug cocktails used to treat HIV infections. The cocktails, comprising three drugs working simultaneously, take advantage precisely of the HIV virus’s key weakness — its general inability, for all the virus’s notoriously high rate of mutation, to produce three separate protective mutations at the same time. To save lives, medicine here is using its implicit knowledge of evolution’s inadequacy.

LOL! The Arguments Regarding Design! HAHA! DIRP! LOOOOL! DIIIIRP!

NO ONE with even passing familiarity of how HIV-1 works could possibly say that shit with a straight face. From the things theyve learned here, Im sure long-time readers of ERV could laugh in those assholes faces.

Jesus Christ.

Well, gather round, children, and let me tell you a tale of how and why antiretrovirals work against HIV-1 infection:

A long time ago, like before the internet, in a galaxy really really close by… actually, this galaxy… a retrovirus called HIV-1 started a pandemic in humans. Humans were powerless against this teeny-tiny monster, and succumbed to the disease it caused, AIDS, one by one.

Well, in 1985, scientists started a clinical trial in HIV-1 patients with a drug called Zidovudine, or AZT. AZT had been sitting in a dusty warehouse for decades, as this weapon was useless against the cancer monsters, for which it was originally developed… However AZT was a fine, powerful weapon against the HIV-1 monster! YAY! A glorious lazr that could extend the length and quality of the lives of HIV-1 positive individuals.

But the HIV-1 monster did not want. It fought back against teh AZT, and eventually AZT didnt work anymore in some people. These people started dieing of AIDS again.

So scientists began working on lots of different antiretroviral lazrs. Lazrs they could point at different stages of the HIV-1 life-cycle. Lazrs that pointed to the same stage, but in a slightly different way. Many many many lazrs!

These lazrs can work together to attack the HIV-1 monster from many angles at once. It is called HAART therapy! It is very effective against HIV-1 monsters.

But the HIV-1 monster does not want. HIV-1 operates as a ‘quasispecies’, that is, a large population of genetically distinct, yet related organisms. It turns out that no matter how many lazrs scientists pointed at the HIV-1 quasispecies… they could not kill all of them! Just by chance, the quasispecies contains variants that are resistant to every lazr. Luckily, these variants are less fit than a wild-type virus– ‘resistance’ comes at a fitness cost. HAART keeps viral loads low because its harder for the drug resistant viruses still alive to reproduce.

But the HIV-1 monster DO NOT WANT! Slowly, but surely, these less-fit resistant variants start accumulating secondary compensatory mutations, which create viruses that are resistant to teh lazrs, but ALSO are extraordinarily fit. This is when HAART fails, and the patient needs to switch drugs.

The moral of this story, children, is that HIV-1 does NOT need to ‘evolve’ resistance to all the drugs in HAART therapy. The drug resistance mutations are already there, in every patient, for no reason at all. Just chance. Its just a matter of how fit those resistant viruses are, and they do regain fitness over time. In some unfortunate patients, their quasispecies contains viruses that are resistant and very fit– you must change their drug regime immediately.

This:

An illustration of this that Seelke mentions is antiviral drug cocktails used to treat HIV infections. The cocktails, comprising three drugs working simultaneously, take advantage precisely of the HIV virus’s key weakness — its general inability, for all the virus’s notoriously high rate of mutation, to produce three separate protective mutations at the same time. To save lives, medicine here is using its implicit knowledge of evolution’s inadequacy.

Is nothing but IDiocy. Arrogant IDiots who are so fucking stupid they dont even know what they dont know.

Stay in school, children. Pay attention in class. Dont grow up to be an IDiot.

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Comments

  1. #1 Magnus
    April 2, 2009

    The creationist DO NOT WANT! Will change argument randomly, must contain no reason at all.

  2. #2 Brian
    April 2, 2009

    The creationist seez HIV, sez: I can has lazrs!

    … Iz not so graet, aksually.

  3. #3 franz dibbler
    April 2, 2009

    Kind of like the body shields that the Borg use. “they’ve adapted” are the last words before assimilation.

  4. #4 Justin Wagner
    April 2, 2009

    “More power to teh lazrs!!”
    “DAMMIT JIM, IM AN IDIOT, NOT DOCTA!!!”
    “LESS QQ, MORE PEWPEW!!”

  5. #5 MitoScientist
    April 2, 2009

    Just a question, would it be incorrect to say that the resistant strains of HIV in an individual “evolve” in terms of developing mutations to increase their fitness, eventually necessitating changing HAART? So in a sense it is our in-depth understanding of evolution that allows us to understand HIV better and find potential ways to fight it.

  6. #6 BeamStalk
    April 2, 2009

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  7. #7 Moneymoney
    April 2, 2009

    quote
    The drug resistance mutations are already there, in every patient,
    /quote

    Can you say preadaptation :) ?

  8. #8 386sx
    April 2, 2009

    Can you say preadaptation :) ?

    Oh, you mean frontloading! Har har.

    This post should be on the Panda’s Thumb by the way. Actually it should be in a lot of places, so creationists can see how dumb their leaders are.

  9. #9 MrMarkAZ
    April 2, 2009

    As good conservative Christards, don’t the CrIDs already associate the word HIV with teh gay butt secks, aka “ass whooping?”

  10. #10 PalMD
    April 2, 2009

    If you are willing to accept one wrong thing, you’ve opened the door for every other idiocy.

    Start believing in chiropractic, and next thing you know, magic water sounds cool.

    If you’ve already abandoned science for your faith, you’ve already abandoned your greatest gift—intelligence.

  11. #11 jon
    April 2, 2009

    Seelke’s even misrepresenting the results of his own research…From what I’ve gathered, his bacterial population benefited from a mutation on a gene other than the one knocked out and still adapted to survive on phenylalanine…I’ll try and find the paper, because it’s actually pretty funny.

  12. #12 jon
    April 2, 2009

    It’s actually a trpA gene (so tryptophan). Just read slides 27 through 30 of this powerpoint:

    http://www2.uwsuper.edu/rseelke/What%20Can%20Evolution%20REALLY%20do%205_06.ppt

    Not surprisingly, he ignores the final results that he reports.

  14. #14 mgarelick
    April 2, 2009

    Just a couple of quick trivialities about the Klinghoffer piece. First, his reference to the Marshall MacLuhan scene in Annie Hall is completely screwed up. In the movie, the blowhard was saying, essentially, “MacLuhan says A, B, and C, and I’m a professor and proponent of MacLuhan, so I know what he meant;” Alvy produces MacLuhan to say, “I never said those things, and you obviously know nothing about what I did say.”

    In Klinghoffer’s version, David Hills says “Seelke hasn’t shown anything like what he claims are the implications of his research;” Klinghoffer produces Seelke to say, “I did too!! You’re a poopy-head!”

    Second, I don’t think Klinghoffer believes that Jesus Christ is our lord and savior, and he certainly has never said that, to my knowledge. He may in fact want non-Jews to think that, because he dizzily thinks that is “best for for the Jews,” but I don’t think he would ever say it himself.

    Sorry to clutter up your space with this, but as you know ENV is not really a blog, so I had to look around for somewhere else to trash Klinghoffer as an interpreter of Woody Allen.

  15. #15 John Phillips, FCD
    April 2, 2009

    FSMdamn, I am not even a biologist and apparently I understand the subject better than their own IDiot scientists. Though their one saving grace is that they are the gift that keeps on giving the lulz.

  16. #16 ERV
    April 2, 2009

    mgarelick– Are you with The Banned? Youre always welcome to vent here, even if its O/T :) I know Klinghoffer considers himself Jewish– I was just non-subtly calling him a house slave. :)

    Also, the sound is shitty, but The Church put up a clip from my ‘debate’ last week. Dont get your hopes up, its 30 seconds of me pwning him, + 3 minutes of him not recognizing that I JUST PWNED HIM ON THE SAME TOPIC 30 SECONDS EARLIER, and all pro-Abbie comments on this vid are deleted. Typical Creationist sound chamber :)

  17. #17 Mobius
    April 2, 2009

    So let me get this straight…Klinghoffer is saying his Intelligent Designer (aka God, aka Jesus) is intentionally modifying HIV so that we poor humans can’t eradicate it? Is that what he is saying?

  18. #18 MPH
    April 2, 2009

    I just watched that clip…. Did that guy just switch off completely when you spoke??

    Oh well, his self-pwn was major lol :D

  19. #19 CatBallou
    April 2, 2009

    I’m not a biologist so obviously I couldn’t have produced ERV’s excellent rebuttal. However, my first thought on reading Klinghoffer’s explanation was this: No biologist claims that evolution allows every species to survive through adaptation! Doesn’t he realize that, in fact, countless species have failed to adapt and thus have gone extinct?

  20. #20 ERV
    April 2, 2009

    @18– The context is even more self-pwn than you think. That clip of me was from the very end of my presentation. After spending ~10 minutes explaining how ERVs support common descent, I spent about 5 minutes going through ‘Creationist Claims about ERVs’.

    He clipped it out, but I literally just repeated Claim #2, and gave the Zaboomafoo ERVs as an example of how that Creationist Claim is wrong. We can differentiate between independent insertions, and common descent.

    Then Charles Jackson stood up and repeated Claim #2, with added win that he thinks proviruses mutate at the same rate of retroviruses, and not the host, which I corrected after he spoke.

    Youll all see it when I put it online ;)

    Though I quite like being quote-mined. It makes me feel important *puffs up chest cause shes important enough for a Creationist to need to alter footage to make himself look better*

  21. #21 Cody
    April 2, 2009

    Okay, so I know to always be wary about short bits of quoted text from creationists, but I’m just plain baffled by this:

    “Hillis claimed to be a ‘world’s leading exper[t] on the tree of life’…”

    How did they alter “exper[t]“? Did it originally say “experts”? Like, “one of the world’s leading experts on the tree of life”? If that was the case, why didn’t they just write “Hillis claimed to be ‘one of the world’s leading experts on the tree of life’…”? What’s the deal, DiscoTute?

    Also, New Scientist tree-of-life-ZOMG-Darwin-was-WRONG cover referred to once again. Yawn.

  22. #22 mgarelick
    April 2, 2009

    #16 — Hi Abby! I don’t know if I’m on the official list. I was banned as “mgarelick” from UD for “polluting threads with nonsense,” but I rose from the dead as “pubdef”. I have to keep reminding myself how little of my time and brain UD actually deserves.

  23. #23 LogicLad
    April 3, 2009

    I have only recently found this blog, hooray for learning complete with Lzrs

    Biology was never my strength, too much to remember, but even i find this stuff easy to follow, seems odd the ‘experts’ make such a hash of it, bu thats what happens when rationality gives way to fanatasy.

  24. #24 minimalist
    April 3, 2009

    Whoa what the fuck, THIS Ralph Seelke? Dr. Ralph “my only publication in 22 years actually demonstrates the power of mutation and selection” Seelke?

    Ten-to-one Seelke was responsible for slipping in this bit in the last paragraph, and it’s the only part the TARDs zoom in on:

    Based on our results and the known functional information on many ohnolog gene pairs, there appears to be a trend that the complexity of the genes (amount of functions in one gene) is slowly decreasing due to gene duplication and subsequent divergence.

    The paper’s worth a gander, if only to have something to beat TARDs over the head with if they ever try flogging this guy’s scientific credentials.

    For those who don’t have access, the short version (with the emphasis on refuting the above quote) is:

    1. 100 million years ago, yeast underwent a whole-genome duplication event, where they ended up with twice the chromosomes, twice the genes, and twice the fun. Most of these ended up inactivated, but some of the pairs of genes are starting to show functional divergence (this is part of what I do).

    2. These researchers found 15 pairs of genes where one mutated much faster than the other.

    3. The trend is that the slowly-mutating gene retains the putative ancestral function, while the fast-evolving one loses some functions but gains others.

    4. The functions are largely determined by sequence conservation between the slow (closer to ancestral) and fast genes; that is, does Binding Site A in the slow/ancestral gene exist in the fast-mutating gene?

    5. Patterns of conservation, change, and localization indicate that even the fast genes could maintain some critical function, while undergoing other changes (like a specific localization to the nucleus, etc.)

    6. However, consider that many of these proteins are poorly characterized and their actual functions are not known. If we could predict function from gene sequence alone, we’d be set for life! But we don’t. Even the well-characterized ones can have novel protein binding sites or other functions that eluded researchers so far.

    Given #6 especially, it’s ridiculous to try to make even a vaguely quantifiable statement implying that the fast-mutating genes have lost functions or “complexity”. We don’t know that yet and nothing in that paper can even give you a reasonable estimate of “how many” functions one protein has over another.

    It’s not a bad paper at all in terms of science, just overreaches quite a bit in its conclusions. But it is pretty surprising that this is coming from a guy who apparently believes in a young Earth and whose webpage is full of the dumbest TARD arguments ever (as in, “nobody ever saw no dogs turn into cats, therefore evolution is speculative and false and bad juju”)

  25. #25 MPG
    April 3, 2009

    Nice article. I’m no scientist but it was easy to follow, and I learned some interesting things.

    Again the creotards display their ignorance though, thinking populations have to face a new challenge in their environment, then develop a mutation after the change, and that this is the only way evolution/natural selection can occur. I think this is somewhat related to the old “no beneficial mutations” canard – they seem to think that just because a particular mutation has no immediate benefit that it won’t have some future benefit. That’s how I see it anyway.

  26. #26 Optimus Primate
    April 3, 2009

    I think this post needs to be animated. Like, in PlayDoh.

    It would still be over the heads of anyone and everyone at the Discotute, but damn, wouldn’t that be fun to watch?

  27. #27 Ktesibios
    April 3, 2009

    Thank you, Abbie. I think I more or less understand what you’re saying (it seems to help if I think of a patient’s viral load as a whole population and the patient as the ecosystem in which they live).

    It appears, at least to my layman’s eyes, that what Klinghoffer thinks he’s refuting is a pathetically crippled strawman version of how mutation and selection operate, which really syas more about Klinghoffer’s authoritarian-follower psychology than about anything having to do with biology.

  28. #28 minimalist
    April 4, 2009

    Mmm, I give that one a 2 out of 5, Rob. Nice try, though. If you’re going to pretend to be a loony fundie and say things that stupid, using RANDOM capital LETTERS helps make it more convincing.

  29. #29 blf
    April 4, 2009

    Rob, Some additional tips to make it more convincing:

     * Unfamiliarity with the concept of paragraphs.

     * Include a mined quote or two. Extra bonus points if you quote-mine the babble.

     * Sign off with “respectively yours” or offer to prey onpray for the evilutionistas.

    The invented facts and disregard of history are nice touches.

  30. #30 Javar
    April 4, 2009

    whole debate here:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ifr2BMDBfOQ&

  31. #31 386sx
    April 4, 2009

    whole debate here:

    Funny stuff. Jackson hates evolution so much that he doesn’t even like “micro” evolution. The funniest part was his faux concern troll outrage about how creationists too should be more careful with their interpretations of the evidence. That’s ironic considering his whole gig pretty much amounts to… Jesus can do anything… so, therefore the evidence always makes better sense from a creationist worldview than from an “evolutionist” worldview.

    Sadly, he will probably make millions and billions of dollars from his dog and pony show.

  32. #32 Christophe Thill
    April 6, 2009

    Question:
    “Why don’t scietists like Isaac Newton exist anymore?”

    Answer:
    Because it’s the 21st century now.

    No offense to Sir Isaac intended, of course. He was much, much better than all the fools who pit him against modern science (which he helped found) put together.

  33. #33 jon
    April 6, 2009

    @derender:

    Dude, In newton’s time almost everyone was a “godbot”.
    Who gives a shit who believed what a few centuries ago,
    it means nothing.

  34. #34 jon
    April 6, 2009

    ^^OBVIOUS TROLL IS OBVIOUS^^

  35. #35 Stephen Wells
    April 13, 2009

    Let me guess: the guy with the issue about “dinosaurs mutating into chickens” probably thinks that _all_ dinosaurs were 100 feet long and cold-blooded, right?

    Honestly, some people need to realise that you don’t get to have an opinion if you don’t know anything.