Quote:
Originally Posted by AGDee
They have found some common genetic markers in kids with peanut allergies. Perhaps, before there were better medications to deal with it, people died of these reactions before they could reproduce and pass the genes on? Perhaps it is recessive (neither my ex husband or I are allergic to peanut products and neither is my son).
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Without going into nitty gritty genetics, it's highly unlikely that this upsurge in allergies is a natural selection type of shift. Natural selection doesn't happen over 2 or 3 generations. While there are certain diseases, notably cancer, that people used to die from because it went undetected or untreatable, there isn't a huge history of kids suddenly going into anaphylactic shock from peanuts and nobody being able to do anything about it. I'm not saying it never happened, but if it did, it was nowhere near as common as seeing kids today who can't be around peanuts without a severe reaction. The huge gap between the number of kids with such an allergy now and the number of kids who had it, say, 50 years ago, is so large that it couldn't possibly be considered a normal genetic shift.
Whether the change is caused by our lifestyle, an environmental agent, underexposure to peanuts, overexposure to peanut products (like latex allergies), I couldn't exactly say, but to me, it's apparent that these allergies are a byproduct of people's actions over the last few decades, not just random genetic selection.