Survival of the Sickest: Jump into the Gene Pool

get it? man I am hilarious.

Anyways, chapter six of survival of the sickest focuses of the study of mutation and how the previous theories, that mutations were rare and random in time, was wrong. The truth about mutations is that it is constantly happening and will usually either have a harmful effect or no effect at all. In some rare cases, a random mutation will provide an advantage that will better the organisms chance to survive and thrive. This leads to natural selection which helps this mutation spread throughout a species, and boom, this is evolution.

This chapter also spoke of viruses and their ways of penetrating and getting into an animals system. A virus itself is not considered an animals though, because of it's inability to reproduce of their own. They actually have to find a "host cell" that it can use to multiply and then move into another cell.

To continue on this subject, the chapter discussed vaccines, and how we inject non-harmful viruses into our systems in order to scare away more dangerous viruses. At the beginning of this chapter,we are told of a the first man to discover a vaccine for a dangerous disease. Edward Jenner studied and found out that people contracted with cowpox were able to defend themselves from small pox. He decided to test this by exposing a few men to cowpox, in order to defend them from small pox. By doing this, he developed the first vaccine.

Lastly, Inherited traits were brought up. It brings up an old belief that off-springs inherit developed traits, and denies it. It your parent had something that they developed during their lifetime, that doesn't mean that you will be born with that trait.

This is quite an interesting book.