Excellent News. Both for the nifty lizard material, and for it's paradigm-shattering. And what do good scientists do about contradictions? Dig deeper!
I love it.
Venom or no, I'm pretty sure bacteria help do a number on the dragon's prey. Cultures of Komodo dragon saliva generally turn up all sorts of bacterial nastiness.
What's more, the dragon has a bizarre evolutionary trait in which its gums cover its teeth, so it actually cuts its skin whenever it attacks. That means all that nastiness has access to the animal's own bloodstream. For this reason, researchers have suspected for awhile now that the animal must have a spectacular immune system, and indeed it turns out that even the Komodo's saliva swabs turn up some pretty cool antibiotic peptides and other molecules with antibiotic properties.
I know at one point there was a cottage industry of bioprospectors looking at the Komodo dragon's immune defenses, hoping to find something useful to combat drug-resistant bacteria.
But whether it uses venom or bacteria or both, you have to respect an animal that can take down a 2000-pound water buffalo.
As far as I know, they're still looking at the KD's own defenses as well, but now they've added the venom to their stash of drug discovery potentials. And yeah, I don't doubt that the bacteria play a role as well--I think it's just so surprising that no one had realized before they also have venom glands.
It isn't clear that IDist fear anything. I haven't heard an ID argument yet that depended on logic, and it seems that ID is independent of facts as well. When I've seen an ID argument change, I've not seen a retraction from a previous argument.
It is a rather intriguing discovery. What sorts of drugs would the develop out of KD venom?
Don't know. Don't even know if they know yet, or if they're just testing them to see what properties they have. I mean, look at all the applications of BoTox--it may be at just a "cool, what does this venom do?" stage right now.
Along the lines of what Carl Zimmer stated at the end of his post, it must be hard to figure out whether venom or bacteria contribute more to the kill when the victum tends to loose all its blood fairly soon after the attack.
I loved the episode of Crocodile Hunter when these critters tried to get Steve Erwin and came pretty close.
Deuteronomy 32:32-33 speaks of a dragon bite and snake poison as separate evils.
There were no Komodo Dragons in Canaan, but, if one subscribes to a young Earth theory, there may have been big reptiles (dinosaurs)in Canaan and they may have had plague around their gums. This is to say that a large reptile in the modern world has it and ancient reptiles could have had it, also.
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