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When somebody tells you something, sometimes it's something they personally experienced and sometimes it's something they heard from somebody else. How do you tell the difference?
  • Yes, and sometimes you have to throw in a real curve ball!

    By the way, as head of quality at a saltworks in Europe, I should point out that there are as many shapes and sizes to processed salt as there are subtleties to their trace mineral concentrations. So "a grain of salt" isn't a well defined quantity.

  • Could plants/trees be an evil alien species that came to earth and made us dependent on them ?
  • Plants don't appear to be of a different origin than animals on this planet. They share most of the genetic code* with all other life we know about. The simplest explanation is that we share a common origin, and furthermore that was a common ancestor that likely began from simpler materials on this planet.

    *The genetic code is the translation of nucleotide triplets into amino acid sequences

  • Why does incest result in birth defects?
  • If you selectively inbreed for long enough, the deleterious alleles are weeded out by selection. This is true for strains of laboratory mice, but not for any royal families that I know about.

  • Why does incest result in birth defects?
  • Recessive alleles like the O blood type are preserved when paired with a dominant allele. So parents that are AO or BO can have children that are OO. The recessive allele's effects are suppressed, but it doesn't disappear. It keeps popping back up in future generations. That was one of Mendel's key discoveries.

    The frequency of alleles circulating in a population is affected by drift and selection. Assuming no or very weak selection against type O, it's a matter of chance each generation if there are fewer or more children with type O alleles. The O allele could drift to 100% (also called being fixed) or to 0% by chance. This takes a very long time when the effective population is large but is faster for small, isolated populations. There are some variant alleles that are circulating in humans which have been there since before our split with chimps and gorillas.

    The largely mathematical field that studies this is called population genetics.

  • Why does incest result in birth defects?
  • You're on the right track, and others have explained it. Mutations happen regardless. The important thing is that because of redundancy between two copies, the effects of many mutations can be masked. The mutated alleles circulate throughout the population and only face selection when combined with another loss-of-function allele in the same functional unit (gene).

    Those recessive mutations are more likely to be matched with an identical partner allele if you reproduce with close relatives. Even if you don't do that, the odds are higher if you're in a closed community.

  • What are your thoughts on photosynthesis ?
  • I'm in favor. Helps fix carbon and ultimately release oxygen into the atmosphere. Essential for growing plants and blue algae, which are the basis of the global food chain.

    Couldn't live without it.

  • InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)AM
    AmidFuror @kbin.social
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