Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Evolution?

Evolution is a time consuming process. Most of the adaptions that we see around us today took hundreds if not thousands of years to develop. Any search on this topic will tell us how evolution is caused by a single mutation on an original specimen. This mutation more often than not fails. When it does not fail it still does not survive the specimen. The mutation is considered an evolution only if it survives the specimen and can propagate genetically via reproduction. And this cannot be seen in a lifetime. So extinctions are easy to notice but evolutions are not. Consider the earth over the lifetime if the human species. What the first of our kind saw in the world is very different from what we experience now. The climate, the land and the atmospheric composition has changed. But until recently there has not been any known evolution to combat this change. Thinking about the last few decades, one of the major things that one notices is the increasing spread of cancer - of all kinds. Cancer is the abnormal mutation of body cells that cannot be controlled by our existing defense mechanisms. The concept of cancerous cell is very close to mutation except for the fact that the specimen does not usually survive. It Is a known fact that the chances of cancer increase if you are exposed to it genetically. I wonder if cancer is actually the next step in the human evolution process. We will never know in our lifetime but maybe over time there might emerge one mutation that helps it's specimen adapt and survives the specimen and maybe propagates. Maybe but will we ever know?