The Mosquito and the Bottle

Natural selection is not natural perfection. Time and again, biologists have discovered traits that are both beneficial and harmful. Perhaps the most famous example is the devastating disorder known as sickle-cell anemia. To get sickle-cell anemia, you have to inherit two faulty copies of a gene that helps build hemoglobin, the molecule that traps oxygen in red blood cells. In this condition, hemoglobin can't hold its shape if it's not clamped around oxygen. Without it, the defective hemoglobin collapses into needle-shaped clumps, which then turn the cell itself into a sickle shape. The sickle cells snag in small capillaries, and the blood can no longer supply as much oxygen to the body. People who inherit only one copy of this defective gene can get by on the hemoglobin made by the remaining normal copy. But people who get two copies of the bad gene make nothing but defective hemoglobin, and ...