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Every day a new explanation for human evolution This time, it’s worms.

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Free Teachers Worm Signs Clipart

From “The Driver of Human Evolution Isn’t the Climate Around You, It’s the Worms Inside You” (Discover Crux blog, December 2, 2011), we learn what one team of researchers concluded:

… the authors found that adaptation to pathogens exhibited particularly strong signals of local adaptation—in particular, adaptations to varieties of worms. This aligns with the deduction of some evolutionary biologists that host-parasite interactions drive much of adaptive evolution in complex organisms. Why the local adaptation with worms? The authors posit that worms evolve slower than bacteria, and are also more localized in distribution. Climate and diet? Not so much effect. At least for humans the public perception is close to 100% wrong. Humans adapt to local biological forces, not to the local natural environment.

Finally, this should perhaps allow us to reconceptualize adaptation. It’s not due to something out there, but something in there. Biological organisms by and large aren’t reacting to geological forces, but to other biological entities. This is what makes biology such a frustrating science when you’re faced with the beauty and linearity of physics. The planets may move, but they move regularly. In contrast, as organisms trace evolutionary paths they exhibit chaotic creativity, responding to each other’s dodges and jabs. Evolution is not a smooth gradual geological process, but a noisy and scattered perpetual re-oganization of living organisms again and again in kaleidoscopic patterns.

Well, that might be the reason so much of Darwinist evolutionary biology is a mess. On the other hand, it could be growing incoherence in the face of mounting disconfirmation. By 2011, they weren’t even doing reigns of terror well any more.

Comments
Every day a new explanation for human evolution This time, it’s worms.
I realize it was hyperbolic, but really, a couple weeks ago there was a story here saying the same thing “Parasites drove human genetic variation”, and a few weeks before that, the same thing, ”Pathogens were the main selective pressure in human evolution?” If I kept looking I’m sure I’d find older examples. It’s hardly new. I remember reading stories suspecting as such many years ago. After all, we all know what happened when Europeans met Native Americans 500 years ago.goodusername
December 3, 2011
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