#malaria

Random mutations much more easily debilitate genes than improve them, and that this is true even of the helpful mutations. Let me emphasize, our experience with malaria’s effects on humans (arguably our most highly studied genetic system) shows that most helpful mutations degrade genes. What’s more, as a group the mutations are incoherent, meaning that they are not adding up to some new system. They are just small changes - mostly degradative - in pre-existing, unrelated genes. The take-home lesson is that this is certainly not the kind of process we would expect to build the astonishingly elegant machinery of the cell. If random mutation plus selective pressure substantially trashes the human genome, why should we think that it would be a constructive force in the long term? There is no reason to think so. ↗

— Michael J. Behe

#chance #darwinism #evolution #macro-evolution #macroevolution

She wasted and grew so thin that she no longer was a little girl, but the shadow of a little girl. The flame of her life flickered so faintly that it appeared sufficient to blow at it to extinguish it. Stas understood that death did not have to wait for a third attack to take her and he expected it any day or any hour. ↗

— Henryk Sienkiewicz

#death #death-and-dying #disease #malaria #sickness

Aside from all that, we recall that antibodies to malaria and other diseases prevalent in Africa show up as HIV-positive on tests. ↗

— Serge Lang

#aside #diseases #malaria #other #prevalent

There is no question that global warming will have a significant impact on already existing problems such as malaria, malnutrition, and water shortages. But this doesn't mean the best way to solve them is to cut carbon emissions. ↗

— Bjorn Lomborg

#best #best way #carbon #cut #emissions

He knows that there will be days ahead, long, tedious days which have no real beginning or ending, but which run together into night and out of it without changing color, or sound, or meaning. He will lie in his bed feeling the minutes and the hours pass through his body like an endless ribbon of pain because time becomes pain then. Light and darkness become pain; all his senses exist only to receive it, to transmit to his mind again and again, with ceaseless repetition, the simple fact that now he is dying. ↗

— Beryl Markham

#death #malaria #change

It's wonderful that so many people want to contribute to fighting aids or malaria. But, if somebody isn't paying attention to the overall health system in the country, a whole lot of money can be wasted. ↗

— Paul Wolfowitz

#attention #contribute #country #fighting #health

Baseball and malaria keep coming back. ↗

— Gene Mauch

#baseball #coming #keep #malaria

I have family members who live in Africa. Because of the family that lives there, I know what is happening in these countries, and it seems so silly to me that diseases like malaria are so prevalent when they are entirely preventable. Yet children are still dying every 35 seconds. ↗

— Katharine McPhee

#because #children #countries #diseases #dying

Most of the villagers were hiding in the bush, where they were dying from bad water, malaria and malnutrition. ↗

— Nicholas D. Kristof

#bush #dying #hiding #malaria #malnutrition

Of those who die from avoidable, poverty-related causes, nearly 10 million, according to UNICEF, are children under five. They die from diseases such as measles, diarrhoea, and malaria that are easy and inexpensive to treat or prevent. ↗

— Peter Singer

#causes #children #die #diseases #easy