Zach+Miller

=Charles Darwin and his Contribution to the World=

By: Zach Miller
As soon as we started talking about evolution, I had be instantly intrigued by the work of Charles Darwin. So this post is just a little bit of background information on his life, his work, his contributions to modern day science, and how he changed the paradigm of how we all view the world.

Charles Darwin was born on 12 February 1809 in Shrewsbury, Shropshire into a wealthy and very well-connected family. Darwin initially planned to follow a medical career, and studied at Edinburgh University but didn't like it andswitched to divinity at Cambridge. In 1831, he joined a five year scientific expedition on the ship HMS Beagle.

At this time the belief of the world was mainly the view that stated that God had created the world in 7 days, and that the earth was only a few thousand years old. But around the time of Darwin's birth, people started to believe and come up with theories that the world was millions, if not billions of years old. Some of the so called "Evolutionists" of this time were: Jean-Baptiste Lamark, Georges Cuvier, and Thomas Malthus. //Charles Darwin//

While on the Beagle, Darwin started to become more well known back in England. As he was on the ship and travelling through the Galapagos Islands, he started to note and record the changes he was seeing in Finches from island to island. He noted that depending on the island he was on, Finches had different beaks. This led him to believe and start thinking that over time, the Finch had slowly transformed the shape of the beak depending on what food and resources were available on that island. Examples of the Finches found on the Galapagos.

After all time on the HMS Beagle, Darwin returned home to England, got married, moved into a nice home. This is when he really started to develop his theory of Natural Selection, he worked on this for a few years and was ready to publish all of his findings in 1844. But at this time new views of evolution were not being to well received, especially by one Thomas Huxley tearing apart the works of many others at this time.

The reason Darwin decided to wait until 1859 to finally publish his works was because a man by the name Alfred Russel Wallace was about to publish his own works very similar to Darwin's. They both published their works at the same time and Darwin's was the one recognized first because we was already well known in the scientific community. His paper //On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection// was and still is to this day, one of the most controversial papers ever published in our history. Unfortunately, at that time there was so much information that was not yet discovered and Darwin had no knowledge of. Like Mendel's work (was available but not recognized), the structure of DNA and how it works and what it does. (The picture below is an example of the evolution of man)

media type="youtube" key="rIM1glECugU" height="315" width="420"This is a neat video showing a timeline of organisms from billions of years ago to modern day.

Websites to check out!
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/darwin_charles.shtml http://evolution.berkeley.edu/ http://www.newscientist.com/topic/evolution http://io9.com/5964672/is-every-living-thing-on-earth-related

What is Haemophilia?
by loss or impairment of the normal clotting ability of blood so that a minor wound may result in fatal bleeding. || This image shows how the haemophilia can be passed from one generation to the next.
 * An inheritable disease, usually affecting only males but transmitted by women to their male children,

Haemophilia Symptoms
Symptoms can be anything from easy bruising to prolonged bleeding. Bleeding can occur spontaneously or as a result of injury. How badly a person bleeds depends on the severity of their deficiency. Minor cuts don't usually cause any significant problems, but internal bleeding can be life threatening, while repeated bleeding in the joints typically leads to arthritis or long-term joint damage. Mobility problems may also result from spontaneous bleeding. Haemorrhages into the brain are particularly difficult to manage and can be fatal.

media type="youtube" key="LQJhTefWslA" height="315" width="560"This video talks about a few methods for Haemophilia treatment.

===

Haemophilia Causes === <span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #424242; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Haemophilia is an X-linked recessive disorder. Women have two X chromosomes while men have one X and one Y chromosome. This means that most people with the condition are male- if a woman inherits the abnormal gene from her mother she will still have a normal X chromosome from her father but a man has only one X chromosome so if it contains the abnormal gene there is no normal chromosome to counter it.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #424242; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Haemophilia Treatments
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #424242; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">There is no cure for Haemophilia, so people with this disorder usually have regular injections of a concentrate of the blood clotting factor which is artificially produced. What this does is makes their symptoms much worse if they get a cut or bruise.

<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #424242; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">The "Royal" Disease
<span style="background-color: #ffffff; color: #424242; font-family: Verdana,sans-serif;">Haemophilia is also known as the "Royal" disease because of its history in the Royal family. It started in Queen Victoria who had Haemophilia and then it was passed along the "Royal" blood line to all of her descendants after her.

This is a photo of Queen Victoria (1819-1901)

Resources
http://sciencecases.lib.buffalo.edu/cs/files/hemo.pdf http://www.bbc.co.uk/health/physical_health/conditions/haemophilia1.shtml http://www.haemophilia.org.uk/ http://www.betterhealth.vic.gov.au/bhcv2/bhcarticles.nsf/pages/Haemophilia

=Lobotomies=

What is a Lobotomy?
A Lobotomy, or Ice Pick Lobotomy is a surgical operation involving incision into the prefrontal lobe of the brain, formerly used to treat mental illness.

Why did Doctors Preform Lobotomies?
Doctors used to preform the Lobotomy operation becasue they thought is way the proper way to treat mental illness. The most commonly used method, was the Ice Pick Lobotomy. This is where they litteraly took a large ice pick and inserted it up through the patients eye sockets and dragged it back and forth cutting the connections from the prefrontal cortex to the anterior part of the frontal lobes. This picture shows the path which the pick would enter the body.

What Were Patients Like After a Lobotomy?
After a Lobotomy, patients were always known to lack emotion, be completly dull, had little to no enrgey, and many couldn't think of things in the future because they could only focus on objects right infront of them. This is an image of a typical patient after the surgery.

The Founder of Lobotomiess
The development of the Lobotomy procedure was first done by the Portuguese physician and neurologist António Egas Moniz. Despite having no clinical psychiatric experience and in 1935 at the Hospital Santa Marta in Lisbon, he created the surgery called prefrontal leucotomy which was carried out under his direction by the neurosurgeon Pedro Almeida Lima. He was also responsible for coining the term psychosurgery. The procedure involved drilling holes in the patient's head and destroying tissue in the frontal lobes by injecting alcohol. He later changed this by using a surgical instrument called a leucotome that cut brain tissue by rotating a retractable wire loop. Dr. Egas Moniz media type="youtube" key="DHKHZ9Q5Wf0" height="315" width="420"Short video about the origon of Lobotomies

Why Lobotomies are no Longer Used.
The use of lobotomies began to decline in the late-1950s, for man reasons. Although there had always been critics of the technique, opposition to its use became very fierce. Secondly, and most importantly, phenothiazine-based neuroleptic (anti-psychotic) drugs, such as chlorpromazine, became available. These had much the same effect as psychosurgery gone wrong; so the surgical method was quickly replaced by the chemical lobotomy. Just a funny picture

Resources/Further Reading.
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