• givesomefucks@lemmy.world
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    9 months ago

    There’s very few things that are a flat negative evolutionarily.

    Like sickle cell, in most of the world it’s a significant disease. But if you live somewhere with malaria before modern medicine, then for 99.9999% of human existence, you’d be dead at a young age without sickle cell in those places.

    Or how appendix bursting was worth the risk of retaining gut bacteria. Once we got clean water, the adaption of not having an appendix started to spread. Until modern surgery took out the negative evolutionary pressure so humans will be stuck with appendixes for ever now.