the so fallible Bible

[John V]

Good question. I've heard that it was a genetic mutation that we eventually were able to adapt to with diet. The other option is that because of our self-selected diet the ability to synthesize C was not preserved because it wasn't as needed. Gary Taubes illustrates in his book Good Calories, Bad Calories that carbohydrates (sugars) serve to age us and also compete with the same molecular pathways that Vitamin C does with priority given to sugars. Therefore if you eat lots of carbohydrates you will need to consume more vitamin C to compensate for the pathways blocked with sugar and the degradation caused by excess sugar consumption. He concludes with the implication that paleolithic peoples eating their typical diet would not need as much vitamin C if the diet was lower in carbs. Most higher carb fruits and veggie seem to have lots of vitamin C. On a similar note, the Inuit traditionally consumed very little fruits and veggies and ate mostly meat and fat. They needed very little vitamin C which they were able to procure from whale blubber.

I'm grossly oversimplifying but that's the basic idea. Evolution can be a bitch.

Yes, this is one explanation - that due to temporary dietary abundance of vitamin c, an otherwise deleterious mutation was neutral for the time, and fixed via drift in a common ancestor.

The other explanation that I've heard is the piggy-back or coat-tails scenario - a deleterious mutation fixes because it is located near a very advantageous mutation.

Neither of these are supported, and neither are the most likely fate of a deleterious mutation.

In DP's terms, this is fan-fic.

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Of course there's never any evidence that there were two different definitions for a particular word, or why one is necessarily more correct than the other.

It's pretty easy to go to blb and find all the Biblical usages of the underlying greek or Hebrew word and so make a case.

For instance, consider the famous bear attack passage. The word usually translated as rend or tear can also mean divide. So, the scenario could have been that the group was blocking the road, the bears charged their middle, and they were divided, clearing a path for the prophet. The evidence that there were two definitions for the word is that it is translated as divide in other places, such as Moses dividing the red sea.