What if someone said that we should not worry about pollution? We would develop detoxifying lungs?

Question

What would you say if someone said we should not worry about air pollution because through natural selection, the human species will develop lungs that can detoxify pollutants?

Answer 1

We all withstand some type of pollution every day, so why worry about it? It doesn't make me want to buy an electric car!

Answer 2

I would point out that this would involve a lot of death and misery if it was even possible. And I would point out the time scale that evolution happens over. The smoking analogy is a good one.

Then, as if this wasn't enough, I would point out that there are limits to what evolution can achieve. I would ask them to think of mammals, reptiles, birds or amphibians and to name any with more than 4 limbs. There aren't any. All tetrapods, descendants from a 4 limbed ancestor, have 4 limbs or less. We can loose limbs but we can't gain them as our body plan became ingrained at an early stage. Similarly some of our biochemical processes are so ingrained that there are some toxins that will always be toxic to us.

Finally, I would move past theory and use the past as a natural experiment. I would describe what has happened during some of the mass-extinctions in the past. The Permian-Triassic boundary is a good one (if the most extreme) as recent evidence is pointing towards massive global warming and sulphide poisoning of the atmosphere having occurred at this time. 90% of species went extinct. Clearly, these species didn't just adapt.

Answer 3

You can say that :
I dont think that kind of lungs can help human from being affected by pollution. You can prevent yourself from being influenced but, what about your children and the next generation. Moreover, air pollution also creates the Glasshouse phenomenon that heats our planet. As a result the Ice at the North Pole and South Pole will melt, making the level of sea higher, causing flood all over the whole. Do you think that human wont be affected by it ?

maybe I cant show my opinion clearly, because I'm just a pupil. But I think that these are the inescapable results of air pollution

Answer 4

People who say such things understand neither genetics, nor lung disease.

A great education would be gained by sitting for a few hours at the bedside of somone who is dying of a lung disease. Except for cancer (mostly cigarrette related) , most lung diseases kill by slow asphyxiation, gradually starving the brain & other organs of oxygen until they fail, inducing dementia along the way.

People who suffer from non-cancerous lung diseases are overwhelmingly passed their reproductive years - there is no way for such diseases to alter the offspring's genes when they have already been born decades before. In genetics terms, the selection pressure is zero.

So to answer the question, I would say that it would make more sense to try to limit air polution than it would be to wait for our anatomy to adapt to solve a man-made problem.

Answer 5

Evolution happens over hundreds of thousands of years... The industrial revolution hit, and hard, back in the early 1900's... Our bodies will not have time to adapt to fatal dosages of pollutants for another few thousand years, and by the time that goes around, we won't have anything left to pollute.

Answer 6

I'd say that you have a very good point! However (and this is a big however), we're just to damn smart for our own good!!!! We'll fight it tooth and nail utilizing any and all scientific methods at our disposal. We'll either destroy the earth trying to prevent what we perceive to be a catastrophe (our knowledge of the earth's cycles is minuscule, global warming could be a natural cycle for all we know) or we'll destroy ourselves trying to prevent what we perceive to be "un-natural" genetic mutations. Either way, life as we know it today will end and we have to face that inevitability. We're living on borrowed time, people should listen to David Suzuki more!

Answer 7

Assuming they're correct - it won't happen in our children or grand children's lives - and shouldn't that be our concern, rather than what might or might not happen many, many generations in the future?

Answer 8

I think not. Humans have smoked for ages but we still die from lung disease and cancer.