Interesting profile of Roman Catholic evolutionary biologist Francisco Ayala. As an aside they note:
In conducting the studies he had suggested, Ayala also made the unexpected discovery that the parasite P. falciparum can reproduce not just sexually, but clonally as well: it can fuse male and female gametes - sexual reproduction - or transmit all of its genes as a single unit, the cloning that was an unexpected phenomenon. Ayala's discovery has helped reveal that malaria, which now kills up to 2.7 million people per year - mostly African children - became common only within the last 5,000 years; while it once existed only in a small region of Africa, the adoption of slash-and-burn agricultural practices enabled the disease, which is transmitted by a certain type of mosquitoes, to flourish.
I suspect that the rise of agriculture and resultant population densities were one of the greatest selective forces to reshape ...
