Malarial Evolution Nightmare

Malaria 3 (1)Evolution paradigms increasingly struggle to survive under the weight of new scientific evidence. The malarial evolution nightmare is the latest. “Think of a deck of cards,” said Dan Larremore in an interview with Quanta Magazine science writer Veronique Greenwood. “Now, take a pair of scissors and chop the 52 cards into chunks. Throw them in the air. Card confetti rains down, so the pieces are nowhere near where they started. Now tape them into 52 new cards, each one a mosaic of the original cards. After 48 hours, repeat.”

Plasmodium falciparum, the species that causes malaria in humans, uses this complex type of process to evade human immune system detection. As the world’s most dangerous malaria parasite, it is responsible for 600,000 deaths every year and kills more children under the age of 5 than any other infectious disease on our planet. Greenwood’s card story is a malarial evolution nightmare – the var genes.
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