The wolves are exposed to cancer-causing radiation as they roam the wastelands of the abandoned city - with researchers finding part of their genetic information seems resilient to increased risk of the disease.
40 years seems like a relatively short time for natural evolutionary processes to adapt a mammal to a highly radioactive environment. That’s like 10 to 20 generations of wolf and suddenly they are cancer resistant?
After all the needless loss of life surrounding the Chernobyl reactor explosion, finding viable cancer-resistant genetic mutations would be the ultimate silver lining.
If you have an extremely high infant mortality rate, it won’t take that long.
If the radiation kills off a high enough percentage of individuals without cancer resistance it won’t take long at all.
Theoretically you could do it in only 2-3 generations if you had environmental factors that could give 100% of individuals without resistance cancer.
And that trait does exist in nature already, it’s just rare and mostly useless until environmental pressures only allow those individuals to reproduce.
The thing is, the exclusion zone isn’t uniformly radioactive. The hottest spots are not areas that wild life would normally spend a lot of time near.
Then there’s the fact that the way we’re all taught about radiation and cancer is just flat out wrong. The Linear No Threshold model that most people know was actually created by the Rockefeller Foundation in an attempt to slow the adoption of nuclear power.
Combine those two factors, and you get stories like this, where researchers are shocked that higher than average radiation exposure doesn’t equate to a simple linear increase in cancer rate.
Not that these wolves haven’t developed an increased resistance to radiation. But it’s not a new thing. Every living creature on this planet has mechanisms to repair DNA from radiation exposure. These wolves are simply better at it now than generations past.
40 years seems like a relatively short time for natural evolutionary processes to adapt a mammal to a highly radioactive environment. That’s like 10 to 20 generations of wolf and suddenly they are cancer resistant?
After all the needless loss of life surrounding the Chernobyl reactor explosion, finding viable cancer-resistant genetic mutations would be the ultimate silver lining.
If you have an extremely high infant mortality rate, it won’t take that long. If the radiation kills off a high enough percentage of individuals without cancer resistance it won’t take long at all.
Theoretically you could do it in only 2-3 generations if you had environmental factors that could give 100% of individuals without resistance cancer.
Only if you have some individuals with [cancer or whatever] resistance though.
And that trait does exist in nature already, it’s just rare and mostly useless until environmental pressures only allow those individuals to reproduce.
The thing is, the exclusion zone isn’t uniformly radioactive. The hottest spots are not areas that wild life would normally spend a lot of time near.
Then there’s the fact that the way we’re all taught about radiation and cancer is just flat out wrong. The Linear No Threshold model that most people know was actually created by the Rockefeller Foundation in an attempt to slow the adoption of nuclear power.
Combine those two factors, and you get stories like this, where researchers are shocked that higher than average radiation exposure doesn’t equate to a simple linear increase in cancer rate.
Not that these wolves haven’t developed an increased resistance to radiation. But it’s not a new thing. Every living creature on this planet has mechanisms to repair DNA from radiation exposure. These wolves are simply better at it now than generations past.
High evolutionary pressure + large gene set = fairly rapid adaptation
evolution could happen in jumps. How often that happens is debatable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punctuated_equilibrium