Last month, I explained Why Paleo Is the Healthiest Diet Possible. One of the underlying topics I covered was the role of natural selection in human evolution.

I think that understanding human evolution is the single most important step to understanding nutrition.

Here’s the thing. As I said last time, people misunderstand or reject evolution more often than not. While reading one reader’s comment on that post, I cringed:

Evolution is a response to the idea that adaptation will either kill us or make us better/fitter/more adapted. So, by eating grains, potatoes, and yes, even milk, I’m ensuring that my children can digest a wider range of foods than my ancestors could.

Wow! I don’t think it works quite that way. I felt that this reader was misguided, but understandably so. There is such a strong anti-evolution, even an anti-science, bias in this country that it’s amazing anyone learns anything about it at all.

I hope I don’t come across as a jerk for this post. I’m not an expert and I won’t pretend to be one. I just want to share my own understanding of natural selection.

I wrote a quick and dirty genetic algorithm. Genetic algorithms are specialized computer programs that mimic real evolutionary mechanisms to solve problems. Therefore, they’re a good way to show how natural selection works. My genetic algorithm attempts to simulate a small population (20) of organisms of the same species. Here’s how it works:

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