Abstract
This chapter will focus on malaria, which John Whitfield, writing for Nature, starkly labeled as a disease that “may have killed half of all the people that ever lived.” This statistic has been criticized directly, and an alternative value of between four to five percent put forward. However, it is stubbornly difficult to clearly disprove, in part because humanity evolved in regions of Africa where malaria was endemic. Malaria seems to have impacted human genetics, as resistance was selected for, and continues to be a blight on large populations that cannot avoid malaria-carrying mosquitos.