Fukushima's Genetic Legacy: Japan's butterflies abnormal or dying.

If you Google the words “Chernobyl” and “evolution” you’ll find accelerated evolution, and greater than before biodiversity is established fact.

Chernobyl's ecosystems seem to be bouncing back, 19 years after the region was blasted with radiation from the ill-fated reactor. Researchers who have surveyed the land around the old nuclear power plant in present-day Ukraine say that biodiversity is actually higher than before the disaster. www.nature.com...

There’s more to read in that article about the beneficial effects.

Basically: Your sources say “less bio-diversity” mine say “more”! I might know how both are telling truth…
Your sources are comparing bio-diversity in e.g. radioactive forest, to non-radioactive forest. My sources are comparing bio-diversity in Chernobyl’s (today forests) with the fact they used to be agricultural fields & football pitches. Basically my point that the wildlife of Fukushima will massively benefit from the accident is true, yours that it’s massively less healthy than that in other places is also true.

Wertwog Only if these are passed along reproductively.

That was my only point! Obviously cell mutations (otherwise known as “cancer”) don’t do any good, to anything at all, and of course you’re going to get reduced populations in a radiation effected environment (barring those species filling a vacuum left by other species, or those benefitting from no humans –it so happens the latter being most species!).

My other point is that the silver lining to Chernobyl is (reproductive mutations) (whilst being negative around 99.9% of time) for the simple reason that
A. Survival of the fittest is underway (so advantages passed in time, disadvantages neutralised in time)
B. Radiation rarely contaminates things equally (i.e. there are still unaffected areas where undamaged genes can readily be reintroduced)
C. And even when it contaminates equally, it rarely effects two things equally (so if creature B is resistant, then that resistance is passed on). This is why the area could help develop "space crops" www.newscientist.com...

I do not deny evolution. I deny that nuclear accidents injecting catastrophic radiation into the environment assists evolution.

You should for the above reasons said. We both agree that if radiation is high enough, few creatures will benefit from it, but we disagree if you think what few organisms can survive there, don’t undergo more rapid evolution than other environments.

Selective breeding is a natural way to effect change over time. It has nothing to do with radiation.

Natural radioactivity plays a part too…

Humans, animals and plants have been exposed to natural radiation since the creation of life. Interestingly, life evolved in a radiation field that was much more intense than today. www.ecolo.org...

Selective breeding is limited as far as it will never ever create a gene for e.g. orange in horses, if it does not exist. But chemical or radiological contamination from the environment (can over many, many decades) happen to create genes that where not there before i.e. by randomly causing damage, that happens to create a new gene, which happens to be beneficial.

Almost all the insects in Chernobyl suffered catastrophic population failure, the same is true for the animals and the plants. In fact the shorter the lifespan the faster they die-off.

Under what logic is this?
If a creature lives and dies, naturally within a year, then it is about 80 times more lucky enough to go through its entire life without suffering from radiation, than a human (and that’s making the assumption this creature would be the same size as a human!!!).
The smaller the creature the less likely it to be hit by radiation, the shorter the life cycle, the shorter the opportunity to be effected.

That Said…
(Purely out of interest in an honest discussion) I know children are more effected by fallout than adults. I also know it’s not because they are smaller, or have lived less, but because they are physically thinner. Therefore whilst something like an ant will be thousands of times less likely to be effected by radiation than a human, it won’t be in the tens of thousands (even though its volume is tens of thousands of times less) because it is physically than we are.

Note: There's other reason why cockroaches did well in areas under nuclear testing. Myth Busters actually did an experiment, and found it plausible… dsc.discovery.com... They found only 10% of coaches could survive 10,000 rads for 30 days –however just 1000 can kill a person in ten minutes.

PS I liked that Logical Fallacy link!