If there's one thing that causes confusion in the paleo forest, it's
evolution. Now evolution ain't all it's cracked up to be, but it is a
powerful force leading to changes in a species to help it better
survive and
breed in its environment.

The main point is that EVOLUTION occurs AS A RESULT of selective
stressors
that ACT PRIOR TO PARENTHOOD. It occurs as a filtering effect, the
unsuccessful organisms filtered out, leaving the successful behind. It
does
not occur as a response (that is Lamarckian evolution which is fairly
much a
non-event with a possible exception in the immune system).

Most of the chronic diseases that paleo protects us from occur BEFORE
parenthood and thus have NO evolutionary effect. The few which do
include
dental caries (some effect prior to modern dentistry), buckteeth
(little/no
effect), insulin dependent diabetes, juvenile arthritis etc, but
overall the
numbers are small, thus leading to zero net evolutionary effect. Which
perhaps is to say that the Neolithic diet has done a lot of good
things for
mankind, and now that we all live long enough to get its
complications, we
can start worrying about it.

Evolution will only occur in a particular direction if it is actually
possible for the animal's biochemistry to do that particular thing. If
it in
the too hard basket, it will be a long or non-existent process.

I am also saying that the 10,000 years of Neolithic foods would have
been
long enough to make more adaptations if the diet were more toxic and
affected us more. Most of the adaptations that occur are fairly
simple- eg
persistence of the lactase enzyme in some races, weeding out the odd
gene
that needs too much folic acid etc etc etc. Adapting to lectins take a
whole
lot more mutations than that, and just hasn't happened.


Ben Balzer