So there's a chance that the cold is a feature and not a 'bug'? That those that weren't vulnerable to it died off from other diseases like cancer so evolution went the other way?
My point was that if getting a cold made a significant difference in the likelihood of some cancer then you may be substantially undercounting the risk of that cancer to children in the counterfactual where there is no susceptibility to colds.
(To be clear, I don't think the parent's speculation is likely accurate. I do think it's interesting.)
Do kids (and people in general) get substantially less colds in warmer climates? Because then we can check cancer rates there. (And spend a lot of effort on controlling for other differences.)
I wonder if anyone did this kind of data fishing.
Yeah, there's some tension between risk of being seen as condescending and making sure everything is sufficiently clear. In a low-stakes context like this (and outside of clarifications or responses to ELI5 requests) I try not to fill in all the gaps - when it goes well it leaves us all feeling a little smarter and when it goes wrong it occasionally leads somewhere interesting. The increased risk of misinterpretation was made even worse here by the priming of several other people making the point I wasn't.
Flu are truly scary causing deaths throughout childhood with increased survival around two years and then again around five years. My youngest turns five this month. Before she was two she was hospitalized with croup and she has had a rougher ride with illness than my other kids along the way too.
Other special populations of children include those with AIDS, CF, DM, and any other immunocompromising condition or respiratory anomaly.
Having addressed the special populations that are implicitly not the targets of broad comments:
Typical children tolerate colds just fine. It’s not the flu.
(Croup is also not a cold.)
I appreciate you being complete here, though your opening also reads like you are doubling down on your previous response.
Your comment about croup is also bizarre, as the paragraph I included mention of it in is not about colds. Context matters.
Evolution started without any of those.
Your reply fails to acknowledge it.
Your comment seems, by implication, to make a similar mistake: it doesn't matter much how long we were in a different situation - what matters is whether we've had enough of a chance to adapt to the new one. It doesn't take (k)X years to "undo" adaptations that took X years to find.
And yes, the 100 years you give are clearly not enough generations to do much adapting. Some of the items mentioned in the earlier comment (clothes, fire, shelter) are things humans have had for substantially longer than 100 years. But I don't know enough about the relevant time scales for anything to be clear to me about how much we've probably adapted to having them, which is why I didn't speak to that.
My view is that the past century or so may be an increased period of both driftband (through geographic contact) remixing, possibly to be followed by a selection process, whether by civilisation collapse, singularity, or other mechanisms.
In particular, it seems that the dramatic reductions of, e.g., early childhood mortality, represent the lifting of an immense amount of selection. To what end becomes an interesting quesstion.
Similarly how we have the surplus resources to keep people alive and well (and thus productive) with seriously adaptive-maladaptive trait groups, eg. Stephen Hawking and other famous physicists of the 20th century. https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/05/26/the-atomic-bomb-consid...
Those supplements work, they changed life of my entire family. I personally find it ridiculous for people to object. Yes, some may not get full blown effect just like with anything but in majority of cases they work. Personally, they changed my life and I didn't measure on a one year sample.
I don't know. I've noticed that if I take zinc pills along with vitamin C pills on the first or second day of the cold I start feeling better within two or three days and within a week the cold is almost gone. If I do not then the cold can easily last a couple of weeks.
There are hundreds of variants of the common cold virus, and you are at any time more or less immune to a subset of them, so many times after you're exposed you just feel ill for half a day. If you pair one of those occurances with your magic pill intake, you'll truly believe the pill caused you to get better, and then you'll keep buying that pill every time you feel a cold coming up for the rest of your life.
A real medical study is 10,000-100,000 patients, it's not possible to draw any conclusions from a single human's observation in this regard... but people keep trying, it's due to the nature of the human mind and its analysis of causality :)
Colds last a week. That’s normal.
Depends on what we consider "modern". Last I checked, they found cancers on dinosaur fossils. see e.g. https://www.cancerquest.org/cancer-biology/cancer-wild-anima...
As for humans, it is documented back in the ancient Egypt, etc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_cancer
The hunter gathers tribes we all encounter have very low (if non existent) rates of cancer, diabetes, obesity, and other western diseases. Once they start consuming a modern diet of flour, sugar etc these diseases are now at extremely high rates. You can see this in the aborigines of Australia for example. The inuit of Canada, and so forth.
https://www.nationalgeographic.com/foodfeatures/evolution-of...
Your links about dinosaur cancers said they found cancers only one type of dinosaur. I would say that's a genetic thing more than an environmental. Then the other animal cancers mentioned underneath seem to have a human component involved.
I would say that further supports the theory.
70 is easily a cancer age. Going by the current research at https://scienceblog.cancerresearchuk.org/2015/02/04/why-are-... one can expect 3/4 people over 60 to have cancer. And it's increasing.
So yeah the not living long enough doesn't really hold water. Also juvenile cancers weren't really a thing at all until the modern world (more likely bacterial infections until we discovered penicillin were more likely for juvenile deaths).
(Perhaps all their recorded history was digital or otherwise ephemeral so we cant find it, assuming history repeats itself)
Even worse, both of these ideas, while obvious "crackpot" territory, are much more believable and less fantastical than the claims of most of our current religions, which most people in the world still believe. So as long as we continue to respect peoples' religious beliefs, I have a hard time with dismissing these ancient aliens/advanced civilizations claims out-of-hand.
First, if you have the ability to engineer a bioweapon like this and spread it around to eliminate cancer in humans, why wouldn't you just genetically engineer the humans to not have cancer (i.e., just bake the ability into people, instead of having an airborne agent which will have much less efficacy since not everyone will catch it)? And secondly, why would you want to give people the suffering that comes with colds?
So, that leaves 2 possibilities: 1) Cold viruses were engineered, but they evolved to their present state where they're actually a big nuisance rather than a big help, or
2) Cold viruses were just a natural evolutionary outcome.
Either way involves cold viruses getting to their present state through evolution (both ways being undesirable to humans), not engineering, and #2 satisfies Occam's Razor better because of what I wrote at the top (i.e., engineering contagious viruses to fix a problem in human biology is a Rube Goldberg-esque solution).
I guess if you really want to get wacky, you could postulate that in this ancient society, they had some sort of religion or philosophy that humans shouldn't be biologically "tampered with", so either most people or at least the authorities would have rejected a straightforward medical solution, so some rogue person or group came up with the virus scheme (somewhat similar to how we can't get everyone to actually update their software to fix security vulnerabilities).