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Biology professor: Trump’s presidency will permanently alter human genetics
A biology professor at the University of Washington believes President Donald Trump’s tenure in the White House will have “evolutionary consequences” on the human genome. (Win McNamee/Getty Images)

Biology professor: Trump’s presidency will permanently alter human genetics

A biology professor at the University of Washington in Seattle believes the stress caused by President Donald Trump’s time in office will lead to a permanent change in human genetics.

Peter Ward, a professor who works in the earth and space sciences department of UW’s College of the Environment, offered his bizarre prediction to Gizmodo earlier this week when the publication asked a handful of evolutionary biologists, “Can superhuman mutants be living among us?”

Ward argued that significant traumas — like abuse or military combat — can cause “permanent change” to the human genome. He went on to suggest Trump’s presidency is akin to those traumas and will have an “evolutionary consequence” on humanity.

“We’re finding more and more that, for instance, people who have gone through combat, or women who have been abused — when you have these horrendous episodes in life, it causes permanent change, which is then passed on to your kids,” he said. “These are actual genetic shifts that are taking place within people.”

Those shifts, Ward contended, “can cause huge evolutionary change.”

He added: “On a larger scale, the amount of stress that Americans are going through now, because of Trump — there is going to be an evolutionary consequence.”

Earlier in his statement, the professor also predicted the U.S. military will manipulate genetics to create some sort of superhuman soldiers.

“A soldier who’s much harder to bleed to death, or a soldier that doesn’t need to drink as much water, or doesn’t need to eat for five or six days, or doesn’t need to sleep — any one of these things would be an enormous advantage in warfare,” he said.

This isn’t the first time Ward has raised eyebrows for his ideas.

In his 2009 book — “The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?” — Ward argued that life on earth will cause its own destruction in order to save the planet.

He argued at the time, The Christian Science Monitor reported, that life will self-destruct prematurely, many years before the sun, which he believes will begin to expand in roughly one billion years, burns the biosphere away.

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