I've been writing a little on genetic diseases, here is an excerpt:

The way genetics works, some genes that have terrible effect only when inherited from both parents. This means, the gene can be successful and get passed on from generation to generation, but, it occasionally wrecks havoc on a baby or child. It is very unfortunate that this type of gene exists, but, thankfully the march of evolution means that most dysfunctional genes are eventually removed from the gene pool because they reduce the average viability of offspring. If would be so much better if evolution could see what it was doing, because there is an unfortunate twist to the way that proteins are produced from the haphazard order that genes are thrown together in. Some of these terrible diseases, which only strike families occasionally, have an advantage> when they're not showing their ugly side. This is known as "heterozygote advantage". Examples of this type of disease include sickle-cell anaemia. This disease is spread because in its hidden, harmless form it gives an advantage against malaria. Likewise, cystic fibrosis is believed to give protection against cholera, and the terrible neurodegenerative tay-sachs disease linked with protection against tuberculosis.

“Sickle cell [...] exhibits the phenomenon known as "heterozygote advantage." Heterozygotes have only one copy of a mutant gene. Since sickle cell is a recessive disorder, heterozygous people carry the sickle cell trait but do not usually get sick. It is now known that the mutation that causes sickle cell arose several thousand years ago in parts of Africa where the parasite that causes malaria had recently made its appearance. Over time, the mutation became widely disseminated in those populations, because, even though people who inherited two copies of the gene often died, those with just one copy, the heterozygotes, had significantly improved resistance to malaria.[...] Heterozygote advantage explains why some harmful mutations persist and proliferate.”
Prof. Ronald M. Green (2007)

If I was an evil architect who wanted to create a species that would suffer needlessly, then, I would design evolution in such a way that terrible diseases were hidden by genes that conferred an advantage and therefore spread well in the population. If I was a good designer, I wouldn't create genetic diseases at all. Which way does the evidence point? The existence of genetic diseases with heterozygous advantage is evidence that, if there is a creator, or a designer of evolution, such a being is either malevolent or a very poor geneticist.

Anyway, the rest of the this text is on http://www.humantruth.info/#Heterozy... along with much more detail on evolution in general, and some of its other quirks and inefficiencies.

Since January I've been in a new position and role at work - something suitably technical yet still very diverse, and it's much better than the radio-repair work I was doing in Germany! Although I did get away for 12 months to do computer networking in faraway places, the rest of my time I was mostly bored.

Now my day to day job is interesting, productive, lots of opportunity to learn things (Oracle infrastructure), and I work with people who aren't really stupid. Which is nice!

You cannot trust much of the news when it comes to issues that have commercial impact, not even when it comes to the reporting of scientific studies on nutrition and food. Some of these studies were funded and managed by scientists supplied by the food industry itself!

From my page http://www.humantruth.info/food.html#PR :

“The food industry in Europe recently has been funding groups to protect its position against public and government alarm over obesity, junk food, misleading food labelling, diabetes and the advertising of fatty foods to children. British newspapers routinely carry reports and quotes on diet from the Social Issues Research Center, the British Nutrition Foundation and the International Life Sciences Foundations and routinely fail to point out that all three have received significant funding variously from Cadbury Schweppes, Nestlé, Kelloggs, the Dairy Council, Kraft and the Sugar Bureau. In 2003, Fleet Street reported the comments of a nutritionist called Dr Susan Jebb who attacked the Atkins Diet as 'a massive health risk', without explaining that her research into the low-carbohydrate diet had been funded the Flour Advisory Bureau. This kind of research may or may not be accurate; but it is the hidden hand of PR which is paying for it to happen and promoting it into the news.”
"Flat Earth News" by Nick Davies (200 15

My page which criticizes the mass media explains why such lobby groups find it so easy to insert content into the news. From http://www.humantruth.info/mass_medi... :

“Modern journalists work at breakneck speed to process stories as fast as possible. Therefore most news services rely heavily on public relations (PR) material in order to rapidly produce the stream of news. Much of this news comes from trusted wire agencies, but these also rely on PR input. Because of these pressures, public relations firms and commercial companies are having a heyday and find it easy to insert material into news media. In general, over half of all news stories are mostly PR or contain substantial PR-sourced material. Journalists themselves do not check the facts or figures of such inputs, nor admit in the articles themselves that PR material is the true source of the information, so the news often appears unbiased. Powerful commercial lobbies use this weakness to pervert public opinion.

For example in the 1950s the smoking lobby created a waft of innocent-sounding and scientific-sounding groups in order to discredit government information about the dangers of smoking. Oil and petrol lobbies have spent fortunes on the same PR tricks, as have food industry lobbies. They produce scientific reports engineered by their own scientists, which serve to boost their own industries by deceiving the public. In short, don't trust the news media directly even when they are reporting on scientific-sounding research groups. Always check facts with long-standing scientific bodies such as the Royal Society. Rich and activist commercialist lobby groups have a set of well-practised and efficient methods for manipulating the news and public opinion. The scientists and welfare groups who wish to get real scientific worries about certain industries out into the open are not funded or equipped to run public relations campaigns. Only multinational information campaigns, legal agreements and inter-national political bodies such as the EU have the oomph to be able to fight back against such powerful industries.”
"The Modern Mass Media: The Bane of Human Cultural Evolution" by Vexen Crabtree (200