As I understand it, birth defects are like 99.999% of the time unhelpful. But that 0.0001% of the time the genetic freak is a huge advantage and that gets passed down in the gene pool and thus, over many many generations, evolution.
Alcohol, which is known to increase birth defects, should increase the speed at which that happens. Right? Like playing the lottery with more tickets.
Nibodhika@lemmy.world 5 hours ago
No. Alcohol is not mutagenic, the issues it causes in fetus are not DNA related. On the other hand smoking or other carcinogens definitely do affect DNA so they could “speed” evolution. Unfortunately any species advanced enough to smoke will also be advanced enough to be able to control the environment around them to a certain extent, so besides the one good trait getting develop you would also have dozens if not hundreds of bed ones that get preserved because the species is somewhat above natural selection.