> put the lungs into a constant state of readiness, allowing fast responses to almost any invading germ
Succeeding at this would prove that our bodies have the capacity to do that but evolution "tuned" the system differently. A corollary would be that this vaccination is probably a net negative for public health, even if nobody'd really know why.
We're not really calorie constrained anymore and most humans live in much denser environments than they used to. You would expect rate of exposure, the rate of mutation / change and the rate at which new pathogens appear to be higher than in the past.
Consequently, you wouldn't necessarily expect ancestral "defaults" to be optimal for modern environments.
> you wouldn't necessarily expect ancestral "defaults" to be optimal
I like the term ancestral defaults and indeed, we've come a long way since then and our biological and environmental reality is substantially different.
There is this book series Mortal Coil by Emily Suvada which imagines a future where technology has advanced enough to allow one to tweak their genome as easily as we use apps on our phone today. It was a fascinating read.
Not the OP, but evolution will often select for less energy expenditure as most animals are calorie constrained or at least during certain times of the year (c.f. animals that hibernate to survive low calorie availability).
It seems plausible to me that the immune system might be calorie intensive to be on full alert all the time. However, I suspect that having the immune system be more active will likely lead to other complications such as autoimmune disorders or even something as common as hayfever.
An always full alert immune system won't have any lee way to address any onset of an infection, and also considering that pathogens also evolve to by pass the increased alertness, this will probably be catastrophic for the species.
That is unless of course like bats, this was the result of evolution and natural selection. But bolting on like this vaccine do it, yea, going to be pretty bad.
No. Evolution is not "tuning" it's just statistics at a huge scale. The high likelihood of back pain, the lack of important sensors, broken synthesis pathways, this is not a carefully tuned system, this is just blind luck plus statistics. Which means we can do better because we're purposeful.
We know enough specific things about immunology and about the illnesses we're trying to avoid to be something more than clueless and we're learning more all the time, including about the potential applications of "everything vaccines" that are being tested for potential programmatic use.
Don't we have a problem of ever increasing auto-immune diseases? If we know "enough" then I think we should be able to make it go away. Until that happens, I don't think humanity can claim to know "enough".
Also, evolved systems are hard to reverse engineer.
If something simple like an electronic circuit with comparatively short evolution can end up with mysterious, un-intutive and complex inter-dependent behavior, imagine how non-understandable an immune system that evolved over millions of years can be..
So I still think we are mostly clueless, and it is nearly impossible to safely engineer changes into something that was not engineered in the first place...
I would flip that framing around entirely. If we were clueless, we would not have had a centuries worth of progress of any kind whatsoever, let alone be brought to the point of testing general purpose vaccines, something that would have been unthinkable perhaps even a decade ago.
Electricity is a convenient example, because it's indisputable that we have leveraged it to do real work based on real understanding. I suspect any and every area of knowledge is subject to a kind complexity crash where the combinations of variables outstrip our ability to track them. But treating that like it negates the knowledge we do have is almost literally what it means to miss the forest for the trees.
It does not negate the knowledge that we do have. But we should also acknowledge that certain undertakings are impossible to do safely with the amount of knowledge that we do have.
There's no reason to believe that's true, that there some inherent reason we can't change our selves to better fit our new environment. Arguably that's exactly what humans have been doing now for tens of thousands of years.
The reason is that we cannot fully figure how evolved systems work. Let me explain..
Let x be the set of all physical behaviors in nature. At any point in time, we (human beings) are aware of a subset of x, let us call it y.
When a human entity design a system, they can only use the behaviors in y.
But an evolved system could potentially use all of x. Since y is always proper subset of x, this means that we will never be able to know everything required to safely modify an evolved system.
In the agriculture world, application of harpin proteins (https://www3.epa.gov/pesticides/chem_search/reg_actions/regi...) can be used to help treat diseases by inducing a defense response. Mind you, it’s not a standalone treatment, but helps make applications of fungicides and the like far more effective.
Pathogen defenses can roughly be thought of having a metabolic cost at the very least. Meaning if there’s no selection pressure (such as death) otherwise, then it often ends up being more optimal to not have a defense active until it’s needed.
Problem is we have a global distribution system that is forcing organisms that have previously evolved into an equilibrium with the disease complex in their area, to encounter multiple novel threats in rapid succession. Like how aggressive species of downy and powdery mildews are now everywhere in the US. Giving plants a boost by inducing defenses early on helps them resist the onset of infection and helps treatment succeed.
Don't bat immune systems work like this? Except they end up in equilibrium instead of eliminating the viruses, which is why it's so dangerous to come into contact with them.
I think almost everyone would avoid this if it meant you became deadly to your dog or cat.
Evolution is not a process toward better quality of life and life expectancy of individuals. As long as enough individuals can reach the age to procreate in their environment evolution is done. Evolution didn’t train our bodies to reject the diseases we already have the vaccines for neither, so your reasoning would apply to smallpox as well. And what about viruses appeared after Homo sapiens evolved (such as HIV)?
I don't think it works like that, from my recollection of the uni courses I did 20 years ago.
Even a small advantage like 1% will quickly propagate in a population, because it's about advantage over 1,000s of generations.
That this disease defence CAN be turned on, means some people would have at some point had a genetic mutation to turn it on.
As the GP pointed out, therefore it must be a net negative from an evolutionary stand point.
I also suspect it would be calorific consumption, as someone else said, so it might be ok.
However, there are plausible other explanations. For example there are medical conditions that result from a too aggressive immune system and it could instead be reducing the chance of that occuring.
The problem is implying that “if evolution did not do it there must be a reason”, because 1) it makes evolution look like an engineer evaluating trade offs, which is not and 2) it considers the current state of affairs the final “product”, which is not. For example, flowers did not exist in the Cretaceous, so somebody looking at what evolution did until then would say “if evolution did not invent flowers, then we’d better not do it”. But of course that’s absurd.
Also as I said evolution is not a process towards a goal. There are 8 billion people around the world which proves Homo sapiens is quite fit for its environment so the pressure to evolve further features is quite low.
I'm really sorry, but you're really misunderstanding how evolution works.
Worth reading something like the Selfish Gene if you want to understand it a bit better.
There are always reproductive pressures and there are always genetic variations.
Modern civilization and medicine has simply changed what the pressures are.
As an example if a genetic variation occured tomorrow which gave resistance to spermicide, within 100 generations that variant would probably be quite successful and prevalent in the human population.
I know about reproductive pressure and I’ve read The Selfish Gene. What you say is correct but does not explain that “if evolution did not, better not do it” attitude of the original comment, which I think is wrong for many reasons as I’ve wrote.
I would say you are both right in that if you have two competing variables (on-time for the defence vs calorie consumption), when the main causes of death before procreating were infectious disease and malnutrition before modern times, I would expect some equilibrium to be reached and we have not had that much time to evolve since caloric scarcity in the western world was a solved problem for large swaths of the population.
If in the future we could trade a few hundred extra calories per day for a great immune system (without auto-immune side effects) we would have found a nice cheat code!
Thinking about your point- I bet we do not know if some people have it on or not. It feels like something that would have to be specifically investigated.
Autoimmune diseases often are due to suboptimal vitamin D3 softgel intake (typically 4-5K IU) or suboptimal magnesium intake (300-400 mg). Bringing both to highly optimal levels should minimize the risk of development of new or worsening autoimmune diseases, although it won't revert any existing ones. Low dosing either one doesn't work in this context.
Those who reject this even after reading the following 100% deserve to suffer, but worse yet, they make others suffer, often due to their conflict of interest as shills for pharma. The general commitment to truth is well below zero for those who stand to gain from its suppression.
Whilst I agree that there's a lot of people with D3 deficiency (at least during winter), it's also worth being careful of taking too much D3. Typical signs of too much D/D3 are nausea, loss of appetite, more frequent urination, thirst, weakness, confusion or brain fog.
It's worth being aware of that as the recommended limits for vitamin D are laughably too small, so it's common for people to take much larger amounts. I believe that 4k IU is considered a safe adult dosage.
But "false positives" could be very likely, resulting in chronic inflammation or, worse, the cytokine storms that made COVID deadly. I'm guessing there needs to be some slack in the system.
Sure. The problem is that most (probably all) of these drugs give severe withdrawal symptoms when abruptly discontinued by a patient. You'd have to spend a lot of time to slowly wean her off all(!) drugs to know if they're helping or harming. Nobody does that.
This is only true if advertisers can threaten to shift their ads to someone who does suppress content.
A court ruling binding all (or at least all sufficiently large) players in the space acts like a (legal) cartel: Customers (advertisers) don't have a choice, the conditions are the same everywhere.
Journalists Carola Houtekamer and Rik Wassens introduce Nick Lim:
> Nick Lim, a young American Internet fundamentalist with absolutist views on freedom of speech
Later, journalists Carola Houtekamer and Rik Wassens use a quote to illustrate how they want their readers to think about Nick Lim:
> "Right now, Nick Lim is like a wounded elk ... It is time to move in quickly for the kill, before he gets away again."
Lovely. "Move in quickly for the kill". Such upright anti-haters!
> At least three suicides have been linked to the brigading on [Kiwi Farms]
If a young American Internet fundamentalist ever has a bad meeting with some upright anti-hater stirred up by lovely words about "moving in for the kill," will journalists Carola Houtekamer and Rik Wassens admit to being "linked to" homicide? If Nick Lim should die by his own hand, will everybody in "anti-hate" understand that journalists Carola Houtekamer and Rik Wassens are linked to at least one suicide?
How so? The fight for animal liberation is the same as any other rights movement. It’s easy to see how those aren’t very destructive.
Also, you misunderstand: you shouldn’t care because I do. You should care because it’s right. Whether or not I personally believe it is irrelevant to anyone else’s moral obligations.
The guy is doing his best trying to eradicate from the gene pool the kind of people receptive to arguments like his. In other words, he's doing God's work.
Succeeding at this would prove that our bodies have the capacity to do that but evolution "tuned" the system differently. A corollary would be that this vaccination is probably a net negative for public health, even if nobody'd really know why.
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