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Alex Bäcker's Wiki / Evolution within bodies
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Evolution within bodies

Page history last edited by Alex Backer, Ph.D. 13 years, 7 months ago

Relevant to the speed of evolution, it seems hard to believe that in a community of trillions of cells, such as an animal's body, the choice of which genomes get to represent the trillions in the mating game for posterity is left completely to chance. Trillions of cells must have figured out a way to test genomes within the body before deciding which genomes make the cut. Could that be related to cancer? An evolutionary game within bodies to determine the survival of the fittest? Does a cancer-like or evolutionary process like that determine the gametes fit to mate? Or is the theater of the body such a poor proxy for an organism's true ecological niche to serve as a proxy selector for natural selection? Surely some selection can only happen on full bodies in the outside world, but surely at least severe misfits incapable of basic cellular processes can be weeded out prior to reproduction. Perhaps that is the most important function of our elaborate reproductive systems: to select the fittest in order to represent trillions for posterity.

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