As I understand it, birth defects are like 99.999% of the time unhelpful. But that 0.0001% of the time the genetic freak is a huge advantage and that gets passed down in the gene pool and thus, over many many generations, evolution.
Alcohol, which is known to increase birth defects, should increase the speed at which that happens. Right? Like playing the lottery with more tickets.
None of the birth defects caused by boozing it up whilst pregnant affect the genetics of the child. it disrupts the development, and does not generally effect the genetic make up.
in short, fetal alcohol syndrome is not a heritable trait and have no reasonable effect on ‘the rate of evolution’.
Keep in mind, evolution is a slow process consisting of gradual changes resulting in divergent species.
I also want to add that evolution is a species-wide phenomenon over hundreds or thousands of generations, it’s not done individually.
I guess I was understating the slowness, lol.
I do wonder if it might not actually slow down evolutionary change by removing otherwise beneficial traits?
Probably not on the scheme of things. It’s not like alcoholic mums haven’t always been around.
No. Alcohol is not mutagenic, the issues it causes in fetus are not DNA related. On the other hand smoking or other carcinogens definitely do affect DNA so they could “speed” evolution. Unfortunately any species advanced enough to smoke will also be advanced enough to be able to control the environment around them to a certain extent, so besides the one good trait getting develop you would also have dozens if not hundreds of bed ones that get preserved because the species is somewhat above natural selection.
Of course!
You need to have evolutionary pressure to have directed evolution, and “alcoholism is a disadvantage” is as good as any. By drinking more, one reduces their and their kids’ chances to survive, making those alcoholic genes less frequent.
By the way, I hear propensity to alcoholism is also an inheritable trait.
I wonder if that cuts the wrong way in humans.
Alcoholism generally keeps people down societally, but I imagine a shitload of babies are born because drunk people didn’t worry about a condom
Well, in the early 2000s, WWE had a faction called Evolution. Ric Flair was part of it.
So yes.
