Mike Adams
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| It's almost as if these people deny the laws of natural selection. If you know anything about natural selection and human evolution, you know that any organism programmed to develop disease would have been unable to survive and reproduce over the hundreds and thousands of years during which human beings have evolved. Bad genes are automatically removed from the system based on the actions of natural selection. And what's left are the so-called "good genes" — the genes found in every single human being who is alive today.
So you are not some kind of genetic defect. |
Devra Davis
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 Slavery, which he opposed, could not be ascribed to natural selection. Many of Darwin's early followers missed this subtlety. They naively believed that they could create a better human society based on natural selection, through what was dubbed eugenics—literally meaning well-born.
Unlike Darwin, his cousin Francis Gal ton was not a man of nuance. Like many staunch advocates of eugenics, he opposed philanthropy on the ground that it propped up those who would naturally perish. |
Rainer W. Bussmann and Douglas Sharon
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 Herbal medicine is, however, a dynamic phenomenon in constant evolution and additional knowledge has been acquired by natural selection over the centuries.
The border region of Ecuador and Peru is one of the most biologically diverse areas in the world, and thus is a "biodiversity-hotspot" par excellence. Low passes in the Andean chain allow an easy exchange between the flora and fauna of the Amazon Basin and the Pacific lowlands. |
Win Wenger, Ph.D. and Richard Poe
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 WE ARE EVOLVING
Charles Darwin believed that a species advances only through "natural selection"—the survival of the fittest. Yet most geneticists today recognize that other forces are at work. In modern society, advanced medicine and social services shield most people from the grim consequences of natural selection. Yet evolution moves implacably forward.
Today, for example, more and more people are being born without third molars, especially among Eskimos and Europeans. More people are also appearing with three roots on their first molar, rather than the usual two. |
Erich Grotewold
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 It thus provides an illuminating counterexample to the claim of the "Intelligent Design" movement that complex biochemical adaptations that are irreducibly complex cannot be assembled gradually by natural selection. In this case, the complex biochemical adaptation is flower color produced by anthocyanin pigments. Its complexity lies in the fact that anthocyanin production requires at least six sequential biochemical reactions enabled by six different enzymes. Looking at this character by itself, there is no question that it is irreducibly complex. |
| Because timing and spatial pattern of expression controlled by MYB] and TF2 probably were dissimilar, natural selection would probably have favored a more coordinated expression of CHS and F3H to increase the efficiency at which dihydroflavonols were produced. This could be accomplished easily by adding MYB 1-protein binding sites to the promoter region of F3H (Figure 7.4C). At this point, F3H would be activated by either MYB1 or TF2. Subsequently, selection also might favor the elimination of ?/2-protein binding sites, if activation of F3H by TF2 were deleterious (Figure 7.4D). |
| Adaptation at specific loci 1. natural selection on phosphoglucose isomerase of Colias butterflies—biochemical and population aspects, Genetics 87: 177-194.
Watt, W.B, 1983, Adaptation at specific loci. 2. Demographic and biochemical-elements in the maintenance of the Colias PG1 polymorphism, Genetics 103: 691-724. Webby, R. F., MarkJiam, K. R., and Smith, R. I. L., 1996, Chemotypes of the Antarctic moss Bryum algens delineated by their flavonoid constituents, Bioch Syst Ecol 24: 469-475. Williams, C. E. |
| In this context, if an environmental change caused the production of one or a subset of these compounds to become advantageous, natural selection would act to enhance its production. At first, the mechanism of enhancement may have been quite crude (e.g., up-regulating a key enzyme of primary metabolism) and probably would have had deleterious pleiotropic effects. If, however, the advantages of increasing the production of flavonoids were large enough, this would evolve despite the pleiotropic effects. |
Michael Pollan
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 The authors of the study suggest that natural selection has favored the gene in those populations that began eating cereal grains after the birth of agriculture. George H. Perry, et al., "Diet and the Evolution of Human Amylase Gene Copy Number Variation," Nature Genetics published online September 9, 2007; doi:10.1038/ng2123. food comes to them, delivers a shock to the system. This shock is what public health experts mean by the nutrition transition, and it can be deadly. |
| After all, we evolved to obtain whatever our bodies need from nature and wouldn't be here if we couldn't. But natural selection takes little interest in our health or survival after the childbearing years are past, and as we age our need for antioxidants increases while our bodies' ability to absorb them from food declines. So it's probably a good idea, and certainly can't hurt, to take a multivitamin-and-mineral pill after age fifty. And if you don't eat much fish, it might be wise to take a fish oil supplement too.
EAT MORE LIKE THE FRENCH. OR THE ITALIANS. OR THE JAPANESE. OR THE INDIANS. |
| Could the need for so much remedial work on a body part crucially involved in an activity as critical to our survival as eating reflect a design defect in the human body, some sort of oversight of natural selection? This seems unlikely. Weston Price, who was born in 1870 in a farming community south of Ottawa and built a dental practice in Cleveland, Ohio, had personally witnessed the rapid increase in dental problems beginning around the turn of the last century and was convinced that the cause could be found in the modern diet. |
| It's no wonder we've been hardwired by natural selection to prize sweet foods: Sugar as it is ordinarily found in nature— in fruits and some vegetables—gives us a slow-release form of energy accompanied by minerals and all sorts of crucial micronutrients we can get nowhere else. (Even in honey, the purest form of sugar found in nature, you find some valuable micronutrients.)
One of the most momentous changes in the American diet since 1909 (when the USDA first began keeping track) has been the increase in the percentage of calories coming from sugars, from 13 percent to 20 percent. |
| But there was so much vitamin C in our ancestors' plant-rich diet that over time we lost our ability to make the compound ourselves, perhaps because natural selection tends to dispense with anything superfluous that is metabolically expensive to produce. (The reason plants are such a rich source of antioxidants is that they need them to cope with all the pure oxygen produced during photosynthesis. |
Mike Adams
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| If you know anything about natural selection and human evolution, you know that any organism programmed to develop disease would have been unable to survive and reproduce over the hundreds and thousands of years during which human beings have evolved. Bad genes are automatically removed from the system based on the actions of natural selection. And what's left are the so-called "good genes" — the genes found in every single human being who is alive today.
So you are not some kind of genetic defect. In fact, you are a genetic champion. You are a survivor of survivors. |
Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
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 When he awakens, he finds himself in a world populated and run by complete idiots -- the result of 500 years of reverse natural selection, where the stupid people fornicate the most, and the smart people stop having children. (Sound familiar, anyone?) The result of it all? A tabloid quality, corporate-controlled world of idiot consumers whose thought processes are limited to the three-word phrases pounded into their heads by relentless advertising campaigns. Phrases like, "Money is good" or "Plants need electrolytes. |
Erich Grotewold
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| In a few cases, such as the evolution of red flowers in hummingbird-pollinated Ipomoea, it is clear that pathway inactivation was the mechanism of natural selection used to produce an adaptive phenotype. In most other cases, however, it remains to be determined whether pathway inactivation arises from fixation of neutral inactivating mutations by genetic drift when certain flavonoids are no longer needed or whether selection actually turns off the pathway. In either case, however, loss of function is likely to constrain the possible directions in which future evolutionary change can occur.
8. |
David R. Montgomery
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 Given a fixed gene pool already subjected to intensive natural selection over millions of years, further major gains in crop yields would require working around morphological and physiological constraints imposed by evolution. Growth in ctop yields has already slowed while the cost of research to bring even incremental increases in crop production has skyrocketed. Perhaps genetic engineering might yet substantially inctease crop yields—but at the tisk of releasing supercompetitive species into agticultural and natural environments with unknowable consequences. |
Mehmet C. Oz., M.D. and Michael F. Roizen, M.D.
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 So infections have shaped our genes through natural selection and have forced humans to jump through hoops in developing complex systems to protect ourselves. Aging can weaken our well-honed immune function, which becomes one of the first places we see an obvious change in our health. Sometimes we catch things we used to duck, and sometimes these meticulous defenses go awry. Next we'll explain how to keep your immune system a loyal fighting machine. and Immune System
YOU Test: Sick Sense
Do you get sick when you travel more often than other people you know? |
Devra Davis
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| They naively believed that they could create a better human society based on natural selection, through what was dubbed eugenics—literally meaning well-born.
Unlike Darwin, his cousin Francis Gal ton was not a man of nuance. Like many staunch advocates of eugenics, he opposed philanthropy on the ground that it propped up those who would naturally perish. In a tract written in 1869 he urged that marriage be regarded as an opportunity to promote a better race: "As it is easy ... |
Dr. Sharon Moalem
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 In those cases, natural selection comes into play, the mutation spreads throughout the population through successive generations, and you have evolution. Adaptations that confer truly significant benefit to a species will eventually spread across an entire species, as when a strain of the flu virus acquires the new characteristic to go pandemic. But organisms, so the collective wisdom went, only happen upon helpful mutations by chance. |
| That preference for genes that give us a survival or reproductive advantage is called natural selection. Here are the basics: If a gene produces a trait that makes an organism less likely to survive and reproduce, that gene (and thus, that trait) won't get passed on, at least not for very long, because the individuals who carry it are less likely to survive. On the other hand, when a gene produces a trait that makes an organism better suited for the environment and more likely to reproduce, that gene (and again, that trait) is more likely to get passed on to its offspring. |
| The system that filters one from the other is natural selection. When a gene mutates in a way that helps an organism survive and reproduce, that gene spreads through the gene pool. When it hurts an organism's chance of survival or reproduction, it dies out. (Of course, good is a matter of perspective—a mutation that helps bacteria develop antibiotic resistance isn't good for us, but it is good from the bacteria's point of view.)
Finally, DNA isn't destiny—it's history. Your genetic code doesn't determine your life. |
| Remember how natural selection works. If a given genetic trait makes you stronger—especially if it makes you stronger before you have children—then you're more likely to survive, reproduce, and pass that trait on. If a given trait makes you weaker, you're less likely to survive, reproduce, and pass that trait on. Over time, species
"select" those traits that make them stronger and eliminate those traits that make them weaker.
So why is a natural-born killer like hemochromatosis swimming in our gene pool? |
| Human skeletal structure allows us to walk upright and gives us large skulls filled with big brains—and the combination means an infant's head can barely make it through its mother's birth canal. When natural selection goes to work, it doesn't favor adaptations that make a given plant or animal "better"—just whatever it takes for it to increase the chances for survival in its current environment. |
| Mutation was an accident; natural selection occurred when the accident was helpful.
The problem with this theory is that it takes the evolution out of evolution. After all, what would be a more helpful mutation than one that allowed the genome to react to environmental changes and pass on helpful adaptations to successive generations? Surely, evolution would favor a mutation that helped an organism to discover adaptations that would help it survive. |
Jeffrey M. Smith
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 Transposons do not have a "viral promoter to drive continuous expression" and "while the transposon event in wild-type plants is rare and subject to natural selection," the GM insertion is artificially selected by the scientist. In addition, the "sites of transposon insertion are not completely random throughout the chromosome, and may be quite distinct from the insertion sites of engineered genes."49]
CC^ I ^he creation of novel JL RNA molecules by insertion of DNA into the maize genome could create species ofRNA that are harmful to humans, possibly through food. . . . |
Michael Pollan
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| Also, many of the chronic diseases caused by the Western diet come late in life, after the childbearing years, a period of our lives in which natural selection takes no interest. Thus genes predisposing people to these conditions get passed on rather than weeded out.
So we turn for salvation to the health care industry. Medicine is learning how to keep alive the people whom the Western diet is making sick. Doctors have gotten really good at keeping people with heart disease alive, and now they're hard at work on obesity and diabetes. |
Dan Buettner
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 After leading 17 expeditions to explore ancient mysteries, I noticed that over time, customs and traditions of successful cultures seem to undergo an unconscious but intelligent natural selection: Practices not good for a society tended to disappear while beneficial ones often survived—no matter how counterintuitive they may seem. I remember a story about a tribe in sub-Saharan Africa that cooked over open fires inside their huts. The huts filled with smoke that the villagers breathed. When a Peace Corps worker saw this he reasoned that the people's lungs were blackening with smoke. |
Henry Hobhouse
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 The development of immunity in Negroes, which has had such a vast influence on history, appears to have been due to a process of natural selection. The only original inhabitants cf the "white man's grave" of West Africa, for instance, were Negroes with mdarial immunity. Asians, whites, or non-Negro blacks do not have the ability to develop such immunity, at least during the time-scale of the last five hundred years. Other forms of hemoglobin, such as HbC, HbF, and HbE, exist in malari;d areas of southeast Asia. |
David Wolfe
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 The Random Mutation Theory
Let's think logically: natural selection implies the selection of certain traits from a larger pool of traits within a group. Thus, over time, it is a mechanism which reduces biological diversity. Obviously, the diverse natural world itself represents the opposite. The random mutation theory has to provide the favorable characteristics to create diversity. Micromutations, we are told, stem from random mistakes in copying the commands of the DNA's genetic code. |
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