1/10/2006: Cyclops kitten born

[xoxoxoBruce]

"We didn't want Cy becoming a joke or part of a personal collection," Traci Allen said.

Yeah Tracy didn't want their precious kitten to become a joke but named it Cy.
The kitten was a special part of the family so she sold it.
Cy's not the joke, Tracy is.

[Clodfobble]

Don't forget; first she preserved it somehow for three months, then she sold it.

[skysidhe]

@jinx

When I was a little girl. We had a white cat with blue eyes. She had 3 black polka dots on the top of her head. When she had a litter of kittens they were white and born with either 1,2 or 3 black polka dots on the top of their head.

I remember because I kissed every one. Was the oddest sight.

[glatt]

I hesitate to post this, because it's a bit gross, but there was a recent birth in India of a human cyclops. The baby was still alive after 7 days, and doctors thought it might survive.

[glatt]

The Indian cyclops baby was still alive as of 11 days old. Wired magazine has done an article about it. They think the mom took some cancer medication that is known to cause birth defects when she went to a fertility clinic for fertilitytreatment. The story is a little unclear, but the plot line is similar to The Constant Gardener, where drug companies do unethical clinical trials in poor people in the third world in exchange for basic healthcare.

Here's a very hi res picture of the baby. I won't post it into the thread, because it's disturbing. Poor thing.

[xoxoxoBruce]

I've seen that kid's Father.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by wah

Actually I think the word you wanted to use (i.e. the word I would have use if I were you) was "evolution". As in "evolution is amazing and complicated". I realize that our difference in expression may be due to differences in political thought.

I'm no expert on birth defects, but my understanding is that there are genetic birth defects (which you could call evolution) and birth defects caused by other factors like exposure to certain toxins during pregnancy. One of the links in the Snopes article says that this particular condition in farm animals is cause by the mother eating a certain plant during pregnancy. Such a birth defect wouldn't change the DNA of the fetus, it would just interrupt its development. Without a DNA change, the defect wouldn't be passed along to the offspring of the fetus (assuming the fetus lived and could reproduce.) It's not genetic, so it's not evolution.

[York]

Im no expert either, but it seems to me that it is missing indeed like a strip of skull in the middle of the head! Thats propably why the eye is so big and there is no nose! Maybe even a part of the brain ....There are surely humans born like this, look at the years that came after the Tsjernobil disaster...we didnt get to see all those "things" that wer born...

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by glatt

It's not genetic, so it's not evolution.

Well, there is such thing as a genetic succeptibility to outside factors. Allergies, for example.

[glatt]

My point is more along the lines of:

If you cut a dog's tail off, and then breed it, it will not produce puppies with short tails.

If a dog wears plutonium underwear, it may get a mutation of its sperm's DNA, and may have puppies with short tails.

In this case, according to the Snopes linked article, after many weeks of gestation, the fetus "has its tail cut off" when the mother is exposed to toxins which interrupt the development of the fetus. The DNA isn't altered, so the changes aren't a mutation that can be passed along to the next generation, the way evolution works.

[mrnoodle]

Originally Posted by glatt

My point is more along the lines of:

If you cut a dog's tail off, and then breed it, it will not produce puppies with short tails.

If you cut off the tails of 100 generations of 100 lines of the same breed of dog, wouldn't they eventually start evolving shorter tails? I thought that was one of the basic tenets of evolutionary science -- that the environment can make us change over time. Like back when we were apes, we started standing upright to see over the tall grass, and it stuck.

I'm really not joking.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by mrnoodle

If you cut off the tails of 100 generations of 100 lines of the same breed of dog, wouldn't they eventually start evolving shorter tails? I thought that was one of the basic tenets of evolutionary science -- that the environment can make us change over time. Like back when we were apes, we started standing upright to see over the tall grass, and it stuck.

I'm really not joking.

No matter how many generations of women get their ears pierced, they won't be born with the holes. For evolution to happen, the change has to be in the DNA, and DNA isn't affected by injuries (radiation excepted, not that radiation effects are predictable). Evolution happens if a dog happens to have a short tail, and that somehow lets it have more babies. The next generation of dogs would then have a slightly larger percentage of short-tail dogs in its population, who would have a few more babies than average, further increasing the percentage of short-tail dogs in the next generation population. Eventually, they are the vast majority, and the species has evolved.

Here's a thought experiment relating to your example - Let's assume a predator that loves dog tail. If it sees a pack of dogs, it tries to bite off a tail. If it succeeds, that dog has a chance of getting an infection and dieing. Therefore, dogs with long tails attract more attacks, and have a correspondingly high death rate. Short tails are hard to get a hold on, so they fare better, and a mutant dog with no tail will escape unscathed.

But in a clinical trial, if you snip off the tails of some dogs, and then make sure each one survives the procedure and has the same number of babies, those babies will have roughly the same range of tail sizes as the parent generation, no matter how many generations you continue the experiment for.