Tag Archives: contemporary evolution
Cancer, the ultimate renegade?
“We have met the enemy and he is us.” Walt Kelly, Pogo comics I have been writing about resistance to toxic chemicals. And though I have plenty of posts on other stuff, I have shied away from cancer, even though one of the biggest problems with treating cancer is resistance. Yet it is difficult to […]
Regulating in response to evolution?
One of the questions that became apparent while writing Unnatural Selection was, could the risk of evolution become part of the regulatory process? Here is a bit of a Wall Street Journal article by Jacob Bunge reporting on EPA’s attempt to reign in evolution in response to rootworm-resistant corn (i.e. Bt corn.) A product that […]
Rapid evolution, not all that bad?
In case you missed it, there’s some positive news on the rapid evolution front. We all know that HIV the virus that causes AIDS is a master of evolution. Rapidly evolving in response to both drugs and the human immune response. Yet after battling it out over several decades at the cost of too many human lives, […]
Unnatural Interview with Salon.Com
Recently had the opportunity to chat with Lindsey Abrams of Salon.com about Unnatural Selection book. Here is an excerpt from that interview: Abrams: How much time passed between the time when humans began to have this outsized effect on other organisms, and when we began to really understand the implications of that, or even that […]
Unnatural Selection Reviewed in Publishers Weekly, National Nurse, LA Review of Books
Here are a few reviews of the new book, Unnatural Selection: Publishers Weekly: The power of evolution, toxicologist Monosson (Evolution in a Toxic World) demonstrates, is quite amazing: when strong selective pressure is coupled with short generation times, significant changes in populations can occur over very brief intervals…..more here National Nurse Magazine: This fascinating and thought-provoking book […]
Changing the world gene by gene
Here’s the skinny: evolution is happening all the time, all around us. Living things are like one roiling mass of DNA. OK, so that’s a little over the top. But DNA is far more dynamic than once believed, and our use of toxic chemicals — from antibiotics to pesticides — is making this abundantly clear. […]
Antibiotic resistant bacteria caught in flagrante delicto in wastewater treatment plants
I’ve been writing about antibiotic resistance from the perspective of rapid evolution. That totally drug resistant bacteria exist is scary enough. Now we find that even in places like sewage treatment plants designed to destroy the buggers, they are happily breeding away. A report out of Rice University this week describes research revealing survival and […]
