(this post is me laughing at Sternberg, intermittently talking about ERVs, ask Qs if Im not clear-- sorry, laughing so hard, must share this joke as well as I can between snorts)
HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
AAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
RICHARD STERNBERG IS SO STUPID!
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Arrogant, stupid little twat that doesnt even know what he doesnt know.
*wipes away tears*
*sniff*
I was just listening to the 'debate' between Shermer/Prothero and Meyer/Sternberg.
Prothero brought up ERVs, and how they are leftover garbage cluttering up your genome.
Sternberg was all like, "NUH UH! IZ SO HAS FUNKSHUN!!" Its at about 1 hour, 28 min.
Sternberg tries to say that there are lots of 'ERVs' around during embryological development, therefore, PURPOSE AND JESUS!
*snicker*
**SNICKER**
AAAAAAAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!
Early in development, your epigenetic slate is wiped clean. That means that any endogenous retroviral protein that retains the ability to code protein that was held in check by epigenetics, is now free to... roam. And they are going to. LTRs are very powerful promoters.
This is a very bad thing.
When youve got reverse transcriptase going, plopping shit it where it aint supposed to go, making shit you arent supposed to make, bad things happen. We think that a large contributor to the vast number of spontaneous abortions/miscarriages is this DNA damage, but as Ive said a million times, epigenetics research is young. Another avenue to explore in the future. *shrug*
Anyway, thats why 'ERVs' are present during development.
But even if these mistakes do cause trouble, are they, overall, useful like Sternberg implies?
Well, a handful of endogenous retroviral proteins (not endogenous retroviruses) have been domesticated by the host genome. Thats been in the Index of Creationist Claims About ERVs for years.
But this 'explosion' of 'ERVs' is in no way necessary. We know this, and weve known it for ABOUT 20 YEARS NOW.
Okay, follow me here--this is where I fail to believe Sternberg is any form of biologist-- He says "If you knock out these sequences... if you block their expression..."
Those are two completely different things. 'Knocking out' implies genetic manipulation that physically removes any and every ERV sequence from the mouse genome. No one has done that. No one did that 'in 2005', including 'Shapiro', whoever the fuck that is.
Blocking ERV expression, on the other hand, is relatively trivial-- Weve got a multitude of antiretroviral drugs that weve been using on HIV-1 for decades. Anti-HIV drugs work on any other retrovirus too, including 'active' ERVs. So what happens if you give mice antiretrovirals when theyre pregnant?
Well, that research might have been done in 2005, as Sternberg suggests. But I know it was already done IN 1992 (heres one everyone can read from 1993). Because we wanted to know what would happen to HIV-1(+) pregnant mothers on antiretrovirals. We didnt want a generation of thalidomide kids in Africa.
The reason why mouse embryos arrest in development in the presence of antiretrovials like AZT is because of the drugs cytotoxic side-effect profiles. AZT, for instance, is toxic to mitochondria, which everyone who knows shit about antiretrovirals knows. Hey, lets look at Wikipedia! OH LOOK, ITS IN WIKIPEDIA! Fully grown people can 'handle' the stress of antiretrovirals (like AZT) better than embryos, but even some embryos can tolerate the cytotoxic stress of antiretrovirals (as that 1993 research shows). And we know in 2009 that children born to women taking antiretrovirals are fine.
The effects of AZT on embryos has shit to do with 'getting rid of ERVs'.
Jack shit.
Sternberg knows jack shit about ERVs and embryological development.
Sternberg also knows jack shit about 'tethers', what you readers know as Envelope and syncytia in placental development.
Sternberg also knows jack shit about LTRs and Junk RNA.
Sternberg is not stupid because he didnt know this information. Hes stupid because he stood up on a stage and lectured bout stuff he doesnt know anything about.
But thats not just stupid. Thats IDiot!
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Richard von Sternberg is an American hero.
I think that Sternberg was misunderstanding/misconstruing his own work: JA Shapiro, R von Sternberg (2005) Why repetitive DNA is essential to genome function. Biol Rev 80:227-250.
You are my hero.
Oh William, you are my hero for blindly posting something like that and totally ignoring the post above.
"'Knocking out' implies genetic manipulation that physically removes any and every ERV sequence from the mouse genome"
A "knock-out" is a genetically manipulation that removes (or disrupts) the original genomic sequence in question, however knocking out the expression of something can also mean doing something like an siRNA or shRNA procedure.
I 'm not sure if he was referring to this (probably not, from how you've described him).
By the way there are interesting pathways (such as that involving the protein Piwi) being looked into at the moment regarding silencing of the derepressed ERVs in gametogenesis.
I call Poe on "William Wallace"!!111
I admit he had me going there for the last couple of years, going on as a typical Christer no-brained knucklehad. BUT the simple, yet elegant post above reveals the truth! Nobody that is sane and that can tie their own shoes could really consider Sternspamburg a hero, so QED, Wallace has been Poing us all along.
ps: Abbie - Thank you for deconstructing Sternspamburg so well. Perhaps he will return to his Smithsonian closet and fade away now.
"Early in development, your epigenetic slate is wiped clean."
This confuses me; I thought the definition of epigenetic was heritable but outside the genome. If it's wiped clean, it's not inherited. Or do all the heritable changes happen earlier than early in development, and no epigenetics are passed on for more than one generation?
If anyone else gets stuck at the statement above, it might help to refer back
to this
post. Once I remembered that, everything sort of fell into place.
Ok. At this point it seems that Willie isn't even trying to say something with content. He's just trolling.
I think there are some bits of the 'epigenome' that are heritable from generation to generation - I think that's relatively recently-discovered from research.
Tthe epigenetic state is heritable between parent and daughter cells. (Hey, why are cells girls?) Histone acetylation and the like keep the genes presented and hidden in the same pattern in tissues - liver cells stay liver cells and the like - but that's what gets [mostly?] stripped off for the next generation, and sometimes when you starve cells, it seems (cue Dolly the sheep).
Have I got that about right?
"Richard von Sternberg should become an hero."
*Fixed.
Nuh-uh. Look at what an impeccable source says:
See, and if Crowther says it, uh, oh, what were we talking about again?
Well anyway, this is wrong:
It's "PURPOSE AND TORAH!" And baramins, don't forget those.
Glen D
http://tinyurl.com/mxaa3p
Oh Tyler, don't make me laugh like that. You are one horrible person. But then again, so am I:-) Maybe I should make a motivational "an hero" poster for Richard von Sternberg.
I am not actually that big of a fan of hero worship anyway. It generally seems to make people forget the bad things about people. Like William here. Will he even consider his hero has said something silly, or could be wrong about something? It seems especially funny considering how often creationists accuse scientists of worshiping Darwin. I guess it is only a problem to do that when someone else does that (of course I have never seen someone worship Darwin, pretty much everyone who cares knows he had his flaws and was not always right).
I would encourage you to make that poster, Travis. It's also good to see another computer science guy with aspirations in computational biology.
"It seems especially funny considering how often creationists accuse scientists of worshiping Darwin."
It leads to some funny attempts at insulting us by "blaspheming" Darwin, at least. Wallaids here has tried that at least 100 times, all of which have resulted in absurd amounts of fail. Worse yet, he doesn't appear to realize how fucktarded the whole idea is, making him exactly like all other creofags.
To be honest I still see myself more as a physics guy who has gotten into the squishy sciences, but I have that CS degree as well so I suppose I am a computer science guy getting into it as well.
I have to admit I sort of missed Wally. I had not been checking this blog for a while and had not seen him posting. I remember him saying he was writing some program over the summer and I asked him to post preliminary results, or at least details of his implementation. I wish I could remember where those were. I would LOVE to see that analysis, whatever it was.
Unless it was Rho who was doing it. Well, it was someone silly.
For those of you who want to know why the left hates Richard Sternberg, google "Smithsonian-Sternberg affair". Hint, the left tried and failed to control the peer review process. To see other examples of how the left does this, google "cru emails" or "climagegate".
A new low, even for Limp Willy!
Willy, you dishonest prick. Google "lie" and "liar" and "dishonest fucktard" and see how many times you pop up.
If you came in and told me the sun rose in the east, I'd check for myself. You are the third most dishonest person I've ever had the misfortune to deal with.
William Wallace does, however, serve a useful function: He riles people up, thus hiking the hit totals on ERV and making more money for Abbie. So Wallace brings the stupid, Abbie brings in the money.
I think Wally feels obliged now to come in and troll any post of erv's regardless of the subject content.
[sings]Looks like someone has a cruu-uush![/sings]
LOL
Yeah, ERV's about the only blog on Scienceblogs that hasn't banned his lying, did-you-stop-beating-your-wife-yet, trolling. And just like the lonely loser in high school who started stalking the only girl who was ever nice to him, Limp Willy just won't leave.
Travis:
I actually got Billy Ball-less to send me some details of his program, but he chickened out before he told me anything very useful. Sounds like he made the astonishing discovery that something that has a .01% chance of occurring randomly will likely occur several hundred times given a million trials - completely neglecting that the evidence requires that it occurs every time given a million trials. I discussed it on my blog - I think I linked to some of the places discussed on ERV.
Thanks for mentioning that. I will have to go have a looksie. Not that I am that interested in actually finding out, and I certainly did not expect much. But I am a tiny bit curious.