Makings of a sad day
If Jeb Bush is the Republican’s candidate in 2016, it will not take much more than an average voter’s common sense to allow all too see that his plan was to capture most of his party’s funds early to beat back any others to run for the presidency. This showing that a powerful person, who has received most of the donated funds from the core of wealthy backers of that party, have bought and paid for his efforts to gain that job. Those backers will expect him to tow the line for issues they want passed and/ or continued.
If so, that knowledge will surely make many people downgrade the importance of the rest of this nation’s voters and will be a very sad day indeed.
Jim Hall, Clearlake Oaks
Have it both ways
In Stacey’s letter of May 1, she posits that “mutations are never observed to be beneficial and actually decrease viability … but if you really believe that mutations are beneficial then true Evolutionists should be against abortions.”
Trouble is that the question of whether a mutation is good or bad isn’t as simple as it sounds; yes, many mutations are devastating, but some are actually helpful. For example, a mutation that broadens a parasite’s host range is certainly helpful for the parasite — though it is doubtful that the new host would agree. Eagles have evolved eyes which are at least four times that of a person with perfect vision and fish can swim faster than humans. Are these mutations good or bad for mankind?
In his book “Not Even Wrong” Peter Woit wrote: “What happens when scientific theory departs the realm of testable hypothesis and comes to resemble something like aesthetic speculation, or even theology?” The legendary physicist Wolfgang Pauli had a phrase for such ideas: He would describe them as “not even wrong”, meaning that they were so incomplete that they could not even be used to make predictions to compare with observations to see whether they were wrong or not.
I don’t think there are any people in America who would not love to have the number of abortions reduced; believing that mutations are good or bad does not change this!
Greg Blinn, Kelseyville
Beneficial mutations
Stacey Salvadori’s contention that mutations are never beneficial reveals ignorance of a vast body of knowledge of the microbial world. In biology, beneficial means that which enhances the survival and reproduction of a genetic lineage. Microbes go through the phases of their lives much more rapidly than do multicellular organisms and therefore have more opportunities for both generating mutations and for having the mutants tested against environmental challenges.
The reason why influenza vaccinations are recommended annually is that the influenza virus is mutating rapidly, the surface proteins of the virions changing so that antibodies formed in response to exposure to the previous year’s virus cannot bind to and inactive the new mutant strain. The mutant viruses may be bad for their hosts, but help the virus to be perpetuated. Changes in antibiotic sensitivity in bacteria works in a similar fashion. Species of bacteria that were susceptible to penicillin 80 years ago now are often quite resistant to it.
Much of the fundamental research on mutations, population genetics, and evolution has been done with microbes because they are medically and economically important and because they help us understand the dynamics of the biological world within useful spans of time. There is no evidence that the patterns of evolution we can observe in hours or days in microbes are in any way different from those acting on larger, longer lived, and more complex organisms. We just have fewer opportunities to observe mutant forms in nature over several generations. That they exist is evident in the appearance of artificially selected varieties of plants and animals derived from wild stock through humans selecting for survival and reproduction those individuals bearing new traits advantageous to humans.
Steve Harness, Witter Springs
Pensions?
I was reading in the newspaper that Sonoma County was thinking about cutting their pension obligation in half. For many years people went to work for the cities and counties for small wages, looking ahead to retirement having good insurance and a good pension, but peanuts wages while you work. Now these people have worked 20-30 years for the City and the County and now we have no money to pay them. That is totally unfair and I believe possibly illegal. Other cities have filed bankruptcy to get out of the obligations they have made. It seems that the powers that be need to think about today and tomorrow when they make obligations to employees, unions and voters, they should think about doing the right thing. Now after a certain amount of time the powers at be are voted out or retire themselves, and the mess is left for new city counsel and new board members to solve the old problems.
When you sit up there as a power at be you should think about the things you are personally doing because the money you are agreeing to spend is the voters’ money … period. All voters are usually taxpayers. Hopefully, our county and our cities in the County of Lake are not in that same position now or will be in the very near future. Because it is easy to calculate…you might have 100, 200, or 500 employees with what they are basically getting paid today and the build up of retirement over the years. It is easy enough to figure out how much money you, as a city or county, will spend each month in the retirement process. Many employees go to work and work 20 years and retire and possibly go to work someplace else, retire then double dip the retirement system and the taxpayers always pay in the end. We also had the same problem in the State of California and every year more and more problems arise regarding shortage of money.
Just thinking out loud.
Ron Rose, Lakeport
