Re:The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples
by chii on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @05:36AM
(#9419311)
Perhaps they do well, because the radiation kills off the weak ones relatively quickly (compared to other habitats), and thus the remaining population is actually stronger over time. For humans, that doesn't happen because we try to cure those afflicted which would've otherwise have been "naturally selected out", and so weakens the gene pool over time.
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That does not make sense. If the radiation culled the weakest, then it would also affect the stronger individuals. Essentially, radiation would make the stronger weak and make the weak too unhealthy to survive.
Re:The Woman Who Ate Chernobyl's Apples
by saalweachter on Wednesday April 22, 2015 @07:44PM
(#9424255)
More importantly, 'strong' and 'weak' only have meaning relative to a particular evolutionary niche. Adding massive radiation changes the niche so that strong means 'able to survive massive doses of radiation' and 'weak' means 'not'. There is no reason to assume this definition of 'strong' correlates with 'strong' outside a highly irradiated zone.