Vulnerability to wildfire smoke is in our genes, thanks to an evolutionary quirk

When the sky becomes orange and hazy from wildfire smoke, modern humans are at greater risk than our earlier ancestors would have been. This is because mutations that occurred tens of thousands of years ago made humans exquisitely sensitive to some types of air pollution. Wildfire smoke includes two dangerous components: volatile chemicals, which include the things you can smell, and small particles, which you can’t. Both these components cause a lot of inflammation when we breathe them in and…