Hello.  I’m Nick Neef and I’m a MCB major.  This is my second semester at the U of I and I am recognized as a senior.  I transferred from Parkland College here in Champaign.  The evolution of diseases has a lot to do with my future career since I am planning on applying to medical school and hoping to become a doctor.

 “Darwinian Medicine”…USELESS!!

Another argument over the theory of natural selection for pathogens

Necessity for the understanding of evolutionary medicine

Many parts of the last post (Necessity for…) intrigued me with its overall support of evolutionary medicine.  Many of the other blog posts I read from others sites were discrediting all the arguments that this post was defending.

Many posts spoke of how people are becoming obese due to an appetite for foods loaded with high calorie fats and starches.  This post simply supported this argument with another situation that occurs over the competition of the host and the pathogen trying to stay alive.  In consideration of cystic fibrosis, “…individuals with only one of the alleles that codes for cystic fibrosis are better resistant to cholera, typhus, E. Coli and tuberculosis.”  Even though many theories don’t make since with the argument towards evolutionary medicine, there are reasons why the host and pathogens interact the way they do.

Since I have taken a molecular genetics course, the variability of antibodies, is a subject that I have a great understanding of. Within the post the author makes a statement:

“Infants receive immunoglobulins A  and G from the mother through breast milk. As the infant encounters new antigens new specialized lymphocytes lineages are created. This activation of lymphocytes is known as clonal selection.”

I disagree with this statement’s reasoning behind the creation of different lineages of lymphocytes (producer of antibodies).  A quick breakdown of antibody production is that the structure consists of 2 variable regions, the light chain and the heavy chain region.  Both have different regions within them consisting of V, C, and J, as well as D only found in the heavy chain region.  Each region other than C has many different subunits which will give the possibilities of antigen recognition to be over 2 million.  With post transcriptional modifications there can be even more.  The lymphocytes are the B and T cells of the immune system.  B cells produce antibodies only regulated by the number of paired antibodies that it comes in contact with.  This means that the more of one species of antibodies are infected, the more copies will be produced to counteract the pathogen infection.

This has meaning to my argument because antibodies are made at random all the time.  The introduction of immunoglobulins would not create new lineages of lymphocytes, it would just increase the number of pre-existing lymphocytes in order to counteract the pathogen infestation.