BLOODY EVOLUTION

Evolution is not about survival of the fittest.  It’s about small variations in the template of life and then — in interaction with the changing environment — which ones are slightly better suited.  Evolution is not a choice, but a consequence.  Therefore it is not moral.  It has nothing to do with justice.  Evolution also opens opportunities.

Near-sightedness might not be an advantage in a hunting culture, but it might count as helpful if one’s work is close examination of something small.  But if one’s environment has no place for close looking, it’s not going to persist.  Or if a near-sighted individual refuses to realize that they are better at looking closely, it’s not an advantage.  So there are more dimensions to evolution than simply having a mutation that’s an advantage.

We tend to look at individual creatures to try to draw conclusions.  But now we can look directly at the DNA formula to see if there are variations and to make comparisons.  But DNA double helixes are not all there is to what can vary.  A sleeve of epigenetic materials, some from the environment, can turn genes on and off.  Beyond that, the body contains microbes that interact with human cells and that change, the elements that a body takes in might be different isotopes in different places that can subtly change function, and there are terrifying non-living phenomena that fold proteins wrongly: prions.  http://sitn.hms.harvard.edu/flash/2010/issue65/

Not only humans suffer from these glitches in repetition that eliminate many variations.  

Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) is an always fatal, contagious, neurological disease affecting deer species (including reindeer), elk, and moose. It causes a characteristic spongy degeneration of the brains of infected animals resulting in emaciation, abnormal behavior, loss of bodily functions and death.

http://cwd-info.org/faq/   Mad cow disease.

We are advised not to eat nor handle animals we think have CWD.  Carcasses carrying CWD can be contagious to other animals for two years.  This is serious enough to require a sizable advertisement in the local newspaper.  The consequences in terms of the animals themselves or in the lands they use are still unknown.  We don’t even know where the stuff came from.

A recent paper suggests that the microbes in the gut of a pregnant woman can influence the development of her fetus.  Who knows even what microbes are in one’s gut?  They are a changing population in terms of kinds, much less variations in each kind.  We are learning that even viruses have detectable mutations since some survive and others just didn’t get a chance at a good victim.  This last, making new carriers scarce or absent, is the best way we know to baffle a virulent virus.  Any one can do it.  If they will.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NTeOhj6dxsU

There are several variations in the idea of evolution according to better adaptation.  For instance, whether it can be gradual or abrupt.  The changes in genes may be like putting bb’s on a scale — nothing seems to happen until critical mass is reached and the balance beam suddenly drops on one end.  The capacity to read might be like that, which means that one necessary bb might fall out, making it hard or impossible to read.

Then there is the catastrophe that changes genetic drift into a kind of piskun — buffalo jump.  Smallpox.  Out of control American cavalry left over from the Civil War.  Local prejudice withholding medical care or commodities.

“The bottleneck effect is an extreme example of genetic drift that happens when the size of a population is severely reduced. Events like natural disasters (earthquakes, floods, fires) can decimate a population, killing most individuals and leaving behind a small, random assortment of survivors.”

Founder effect is when a subset of the population goes off to avoid others.  Inbreeding can becomes a problem.  Hutterites know about this.  It is imputed to tribal people though they had always pulled in outsiders one way or another and still have strong taboos on getting too close to cousins.  

The Blackfeet/Blackfoot split nation, half on the US side and half on the Canadian side, offer a fascinating study in evolution which in varying ways guided separate development at some points and a re-integration at others.  The Alberta side, which was basically Hudson’s Bay fur company, sequestered the aboriginal people in small reservations with tight supervision by the British, but didn’t meddle much in the community cultures, treating them as communal units.  On the Montana side the people were first afflicted by ranchers after grass for cattle who deliberately exterminated competing buffalo, then by religious conversion that criminalized the existing culture.  

The fates of the Metis began in a demographic that tried to form an internal nation in Canada but was defined as treasonous and dispersed into Montana where their Euro side gave them an edge with education and fiddle-playing.  They are marked on the Montana side by French surnames and are often Catholic, resisting the Methodist assignment given them, but not so much the land allotment in imitation of homesteading meant to break communal strategies.  The practice of sending tribal people to cities has created mixed DNA and culture, both.

A thoughtful person who managed to weave the pattern of the various systems might reveal some deep forces in the lives of the people.  What about “post-addiction”, post-alcoholism, and how they drew back old forces from pre-Christian times?  What about the importance of women in sustaining family relationships so that each generation somehow believed in love and protection?  What about steady men who never went on the warrior trail but stayed home, learned to work for salaries and grew gardens?  What about those who saw tourists as opportunities and took white wives, often German or Irish?  What about those whose allotments were on top of oil wells?

When the struggle for identity began a few centuries ago, nothing was known about physical blood or DNA.  Even the basic blood groups used to protect transfusions weren’t known until WWI.  “Blood” was also a metaphor with great importance for Euro inheritance ideas, which were a system of entitlement for land-owning.  This was transferred over to the concept of “Indians” as a separate demographic group.  Now that we look at biological categories through DNA, we see the populations on reservations have become mixed.

We can no longer say which alleles (DNA sections) are proof of descent, indicators of identity.  Siblings may have different sets of alleles. Identity may have been wrong when the original lists were made, which were simply for the distribution of commodities rather than land, and which are used to trace affiliation provenance from days when no one could really be sure of genetic parents.  

Over the centuries, culture has divided from genetics so that we know, as Macfee noted early in the 20th century, a genetic tribal person may have been raised as an assimilated white person or vice versa.  But the Euro notion of “blood” is almost as powerful as the idea of “soul” in much the same way, an abstraction that can hardly be challenged.  In fact, it is a high-tension dangerous subject.