This is simply the most ridiculous column I've read from this guy yet. It's almost funny just how depraved of accurate information this article is. The degree of ignorance on display here is astonishing.
When the Bubonic Plague ravaged Europe in the middle ages, a certain number of people possessed a genetic makeup that made them immune to the terrible disease.
Over time and death, the number of people that possessed a vulnerable gentic makeup to the disease no longer existed, because they died. Because they were dead, they did not make any more babies vulnerable to the disease. Most people that were left possessed a genetic makeup of immunity to Bubonic Plague.
The people left over had babies that also possessed the immunity gene, and so did their babies and so on.
So over time, an extremelly short period of time when considering things like natural selection and evolutionary theory, most people were people immune to Bubonic Plague, and the disease stopped its scurge.
This is called natural selection, albeit a simplistic explanation, it is nonetheless an observable and testable demonstration of the vehicle behind evolution. It's only a theory inasmuch as "the Earth is round" is a theory.
What's funny about this guy Farah is that in another column he talks about mutated (mutation: an important property to the very thing he is saying does NOT exist in this column) diseases coming back stronger than ever.
Hence, according to Farah, an evolutionary term such as "mutation" can apply to diseases, but not humans, and even then primarily in cases where the disease attacks predominately homosexuals.
Nice to know Darwinian ideas work when they're convenient for bigotry.
For some reason religious people fear facts like evolution and "the Earth is round" and so on, as something that threatens their beliefs and faith. I have no idea why, because it is the very details of most organized religions that discredit themselves (giant arcs with 2 of every species on it for 40 days, rivers into blood, unicorns, etc.) far more than anything Darwin ever proposed.
At any rate, there are more false statements in this column than I've seen from one of these hacks in a long time. My four year old daughter understands more about molecular biology than this guy.
Thanks (and Farah, you should read something sometime),
-GA