Dear Eva, Great rebuttal. The few thousand of years since human lifespan started to be longer is bagatelle in evolutionary timescales. People used to die by the time their teeth decayed. Of course, this is just one of those assumptions made over a long period of some sketchy archeological evidence that came from a few decayed skeletons. Form these tiny bit's of evidence great generalizations are made that make mine look pretty amateurish. I don't think we can assume that all humans settlements in all areas of the world over a period or 100,000 years consistently had short and brutish life spans. That some of those communities existed for 1000's of years and the theory of natural selection (note still called a theory) had plenty of time to develop decent teeth as a life support to longevity. That once those genes had evolved ?, they have had plenty of time to integrate themselves into the general population. Science has no "love affair" with anything; if the theory works, it is kept, if it found wanting and one found approximating reality better, it is chucked. Science may have no "love affair" with anything, but scientists do. I am currently reading a book by Fritjof Capra called the Web of Life in which he is developing the history of "systems" thinking which is providing a counterpoint to reductionist Cartesian Logic which basically says, if you want to understand anything, take it apart. Systems thinking, as I rudimentarily understand it, says you can't learn much from taking things apart because the parts do not have the properties of the whole. You can only learn about things by finding the relationships between other wholes. Anyway, this has been developing over the last 100 years and from what he says, I would guess it is 90% reductionist and 10% system. So yes, over time science as we know it does change, in the meantime it is often a heresy to offer a criticism such as I did in my off hand remark about teeth. Respectfully, Thomas Lunde
