Thoughts w/ Casey

One disease of civilization that interests me in particular is diabetes because nearly everyone on my mom's side has this disease and it has negatively affected their health and lifestyles. 34 million Americans have diabetes, which is about 10% of the population. In fact, the United States leads developed countries in diabetes prevalence, which is definitely not something to be proud of.  Even further, heart disease, which highly associated with diabetes, is the leading cause of death in the United States, taking nearly 2000 Americans each day. First of all, there are two types of diabetes, type 1 and type 2. Type 1 is caused by an autoimmune reaction that destroys pancreatic B cells, the producers of insulin. Therefore, the pancreas is unable to produce the hormone insulin or makes very little of it, causing blood sugar levels to rise to dangerous levels in the blood stream. Type 1 diabetes is usually genetic and there is usually nothing one can do to prevent it. Type 2 diabetes,

Hello all, this week's topic is about the speed of speciation. From doing a little bit of research on this topic, many factors contribute to the speed of speciation and determine whether or not the organism will develop into a new species. For example, in this week's R exercise, certain fish were put in a pond that contained sulfide drainage versus a pond that did not. It did not take long for the fish in the sulfide drainage pond to develop characteristics that would help them survive in this extreme environment. This evolution of new traits allowed fish in the sulfide drainage to mate with each other and become more adept to that specific environment. When given the opportunity to mate with non-sulfide drainage fish once again, barely any gene flow occurred. It appeared that sulfide drainage fish only wanted to mate with other fish from the same group and the same trend was seen in the non-sulfide drainage fish. This may be in part due to sexual selection, as same group matin