EDIT: Seriously, how is this not contributing? Please provide a comment if you think it is not contributing.

~2 billion base pairs * ~1 in a billion error rate = 2 mutations per generation (on average)

Edit: Slight clarification and a brief (and greatly oversimplified) lesson on how this works.

Let Ne = effective population size. And I'll define "fitness effect" as the advantage conferred by a particular mutation in a particular fitness landscape. e.g., If you're an E. coli, the fitness conferred by penicillin resistance is very high if you're sitting in a pool of penicillin, but generally mildly negative otherwise because you're wasting energy.

When the fitness effect size is much larger in magnitude than 1/Ne (or 1/2Ne if you're diploid, like us), the fate of the gene is largely determined by natural selection. (But add the occasional coin toss in there b/c the real world is messy.)

When the fitness effect size is much smaller in magnitude than 1/Ne, the fate of the gene is largely determined by genetic drift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_drift (tl;dr Mostly chance mod a few other effects, like if the mutation of interest has a physical location close to another mutation with strong selection pressure)

However, there are slightly deleterious or slightly advantageous mutations, whose fitness effect size is close to 1/Ne (or 1/2Ne for diploids), and things get kinda interesting, because it's a combination of genetic drift and natural selection. For instance, if it's a slightly deleterious mutation, it will decrease Ne slightly (increasing the proportion of mutations that are considered neutral of the new value of Ne), and the previously "slightly deleterious" mutation may now be effectively neutral for the new value of Ne.

There is a lot of evidence that the "slightly" deleterious and the "slightly" advantageous mutations contribute substantially to evolutionary dynamics.

This is further complicated by the fact that the fitness (whether a mutation is deleterious or advantageous) is not constant everywhere geographically, or over time.

Sure, and it's also possible the human body has already adapted to processing grains without long term damage, and it's possible that there was never any damage by consuming grains in the first place (the body is highly adaptable). All this line of argument is stating is that without any information, we have no information.

What Retric was stating is different though. There exists digestive adaptations that have happened relatively rapidly in relatively recent history, therefore merely the fact that foods were not available in more ancient history is not sufficient to argue that they "aren't good" for the body.

It’s more likely that gluten sensitivity is just caused by a cross-interaction with an additive used for bleaching or similar.

I'm not suggesting it isn't but your dismissive comment doesn't enlighten those who are not aware of the controversy.

Paleo's basic premise is loosly based on the malnourishment seen when we transitioned from a diverse hunter-gatherer diet to a much less diverse agricultural diet (largely caused by iron deficiencies). Its a misunderstanding of history. We ate those foods before, but they weren't the ONLY things people ate. The result is ultimately still restricting diet to healthier foods which means it's nutricious, but still unnecessarily restrictive and without a realistic premise.

Any argument?

Not to mention the fact that your food has evolved as well.

My question was an oversimplification.

I've been vegan for 10 years, have lived in 3 different countries and have met a lot of vegans, usually in situations where food was involved. My personal experience indicates that, overall, vegans eat less processed/refined foods than non-vegans and are more knowledgeable about nutrition than the average.

Regardless, the rest of my comment points out why the person I was replying to is wrong. Even your comment points it out. All you need to do to be a vegan is not eat animal products. This means you can avoid all of the foods that are good for your biome. That was the entire point of the quote from the article that was completely missed by the op.

In addition, not all vegetables are equal with regards to bacteria.

The other valuable information is why whole grains are OK to eat (I favor them in small portions only) and processed grains are so bad for us.

Is animal welfare the reason for dairy goods being out of fashion? I doubt it; it's easy to come by humane milk and eggs, although humane cheese, butter, kefir, yogurt, etc. are less common. And yet, vegans are the new vegetarians -- even the Jains are going vegan -- while we also get the paleo diet with its own reasons for being anti-dairy...

There's also hostility to bread. Bread and milk are historic European staples; a part of me suspects that hostility to these (at least in white Americans) is really about hostility to the past.

I switched to a2 milk and the difference to my digestive system was extremely obvious. Time will show that for many people, if they consume milk, it should be a2 milk.

Also, change as little else in your life as possible while you're performing the experiment to control for confounding variables.