MSP46 Evilution [The Dark Side of Evolution]

Science is building an impressive toolkit that is enabling us to fight back against Evolution’s darker urges. How? It’s time to Mattsplain.

Episode Excerpt:
You made up a word for today’s show…
•Yes. We’re all about the clickbait on this show.
•Hold tight for 7 reasons why evolution will kill you.

Really?
•No, of course not.
•But we are talking about evolution. We're going to talk about the ways that Evolution targets us and some other ways in which we are starting to fight back.

You’re not going to talk about the giant ants again are you? I keep telling you that Them! is a 1950s B-movie not a documentary…
•You clearly don’t spend enough time on the Internet.
•Look at the way that the local wildlife population has survived the Chernobyl disaster.
•Is it really so far-fetched that radioactive tests after WW2 resulted in giant ants that roamed the New Mexico desert neighbouring towns?
•You’ve got to start thinking more clearly Jeff. Forget your obsession with the lamestream media.
•Take off the blinkers, open up your mind.

I’m not hopeful about today’s show. When Charles Darwin wrote the Origin of species, do you think he ever imagined, well, you?
•Darwin was oddly interested in finches and pigeons.
•My face is often recognised as kittens by AI but I think I’m probably a fair distance away from what he imagined as natural selection.

Does Unnatural selection exist? You may be a prime example.
•As with a lot of things in life: only in Star Trek.
•One of the early episodes of Star Trek TNG – Season two, I believe–featured a bunch of genetically altered children whose immune systems altered the environment around them and caused normal humans to rapidly age and die.
•And of course that’s the easiest way for one species to conquer another.
•Not with anything so complicated as war, but by infecting them with pathogens that they can’t fight.