the wrecked Chernobyl have built up doses of 10 Gy, these workers received these doses in small fractions so the acute effects were avoided. It has been found in radiation biology experiments that if a group of cells are irradiated then as the dose increases the number of cells which survive decrease. It has also been found that if a population of cells are given a dose before being set aside (without being irradiated) for a length of time before being irradiated again then the radiation has less of an ability to cause cell death. The human body contains many types of cells and a human can be killed by the loss of a single tissue in a vital organ. For many short term radiation deaths (3 days to 30 days) the loss of cells forming blood cells (bone marrow) and the cells in the digestive system (wall of the intestines) cause death. Inheritance of radioresistance There is strong evidence that radioresistance can be genetically determined and inherited, at least in some organisms. Heinrich Nöthel, a geneticist from the Freie Universität Berlin carried out the most extensive study about radioresistance mutations using the common fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster, in a series of 14 publications. Evolution of radioresistance From the perspective of evolutionary history and causation, radioresistance does not appear to be an adaptive trait because there is no documented naturally occurring selection pressure that could have bestowed a fitness advantage to the ability for organisms to withstand doses of ionizing radiation in the range that several extremophile species have been observed to be capable of surviving. This is primarily because the Earth's magnetic field shields all its inhabitants from solar cosmic radiation and galactic cosmic rays, which are the two primary sources of ionizing radiation across our solar system, and even including all documented terrestrial sources of ionizing radiation such as radon gas and primordial radionuclides at geographical locations considered to be natural high-level radiation sites, the yearly dose of natural background radiation remains tens of thousands of times smaller than the levels of ionizing radiation that many highly radioresistant organisms can withstand. One possible explanation for the existence of radioresistance is that it is an example of co-opted adaptation or exaptation, where radioresistance could be an indirect consequence of the evolution of a different, linked adaptation that has been positively selected for by evolution. For example, the desiccation-adaptation hypothesis