Re: diseases and immunity
Philip Deitiker (pdeitik@bcm.tmc.edu)
Sun, 14 Jul 1996 19:27:20 GMT
agdndmc@mizzou1.missouri.edu (Domingo Martinez-Castilla) wrote:
>What a way to finish this Saturday!!
>In article <4rm29b$pr0@gazette.bcm.tmc.edu>,
>..many things which I do not think appropriate or useful to repeat.
>It seems that the last two posts that (Dr.) Philip (Deitiker, Ph. D.) (Dept.
>of Biochemistry) (Baylor College of Medicine)
....cuckle....
> (the other one in the co-thread
>titled "This used to be...") has written establish his thinking quite clearly.
> I really believe that we do have very different knowledge and opinions on
>many things. In particular, I seem to have irked him really bad when I said
>the he was "... way, way, way ..." off regarding agricultural domestication,
>which I believe it is a very difficult process. I wish I had more time to
>look for some long-forgotten references regarding animal behavior and
>domestication.
I think you fail to realize one thing about animals, with a few
exceptions behavior is the result of variable intraspecies genetics,
and given a few generations and good animal husbandry this can be
dealt with quite readily. There are certain animals in which there
biology is so selective for aggresion and fear such that this is more
difficult and more animals must be taken from willd populations in
order to get a desirable result.
BTW, Irked I'm not, I'm really enjoying all of this, unfortunately in
the last week I've been so busy (sorry) I have no time to keep up.
> He thinks one thing about the topic, I think other. Neither
>of us will apparently yield. But it seems that .. Philip.... may know a lot about
>the topic, because he called my points as " stupidness" (sic).
I think a badly placed "way way way off" deserves a little
"stupidness" <grinning>. I was mearly making the point that you might
have focused to heaviliy on a area of animal husbandry which already
had a full complement of animal speices 500 YA. (Namely food and wool
animals). As has been pointed out to you there are now animals being
domesictated for many other purposes...... such as medicine,
recreation, some have been domesticated (like killifish) to save them
from inevitable extinction, some are domesticated for feathers or
skin, others industrial fibers, and others for furs which became
protected in the wild population. That is why I made the point about
broadening your horizen. _IF_ we get into the sementics and strictly
focused definitions you can have your set and I can have mine and yes
we will never see eye to eye on the issue. But my point is
A. what has happened in the last 500 Y is not relavent to a discussion
of what the events leading up to what happened 500 YA.
B Even if it was, your statements are, at best, overly focused on one
or two catagories of precolumbian animals.
>>Go for it, just try to be more accurate in your responses. Seems to me
>>that U o Missuori needs to make a better effort on well-rounding its
>>student population.
It was a little jab for not considering all the time and effort spent
by recreational pet keepers and the great deal of time and effort
spent on selecting and <gulp> and dealing with the effects of
artificial selection of, literally, hundreds of species. If I'm not
mistaken Dr. Herbert Axelrod, who got his honerary Ph. D. from your
university was a crucial instument for the identification,
classification and domestication of hundreds of recreational species
world wide, most of this work was done in the last fifty years.
BTW, Domingo our failure to maintain constituitive health in these
strains in not something I say I'de be proud of. It should not be the
goal of any type of domestication program to have an organism which is
so neccesarily dependent on humans for surivival. This is not a
favorable byproduct of artificail selection, its more the result of
unfavorable numbers of wild stocks used in the domestication process
and lack of attention placed on survival characteristics in the filial
(or conversely overzealous breeding for ascetic purposes). Therefore
i think the definition of whether something is domesticated or not
depending on its reliance on human kind is somewhat an artifactual
defintion, since the goal should be a versatile animal that will be
productive with the least amount of neccesary human intervention, and
sometimes there might be ferreling.
Also, just to bring this issue back to its starting topic. There
are a number of diseases which have been encountered with the
introduction of these new animals, such as salmonella, tuberculosis,
etc. So the acquisituion of new species by 'humanity' has to be
considered in light of the fact that there are usually effective
countermeasures (antibiotics, antiparasitic agents, immunization
programs, veterinary services for land vertebrates) in place. If such
protections were/are not avialable the number on new animals
introduced might have been attenuated by the concern of disease
transmission to already domesticated animals and humans.
Philip
|