Inflammation seems to be a general enemy to health.
What is the evolutionary value of inflammation? It must have a reason for being such a prominent part of life…
What is the evolutionary value of inflammation? It must have a reason for being such a prominent part of life…
An individual organism surviving for the longest amount of time is not necessarily optimal at the species level. It could be that mice (for instance) have a bit too high of an IL-11 response, but there's either no evolutionary pressure against it or there's some species-level value to it.
Above all, since only one interleukin was targeted in the research, we can't assume that all inflammation is bad and that no inflammation is ideal.
On a related note, I wonder if there's anything commercially available that can suppress IL-11. Currently, I'm taking phycocyanin extracted from spirulina, which is supposed to suppress COX-2 and IL-17, but I don't see any research confirming whether it has an effect on IL-11. Would be cool if I've unwittingly begun extending my lifespan. :D
Though it can be argued that among social, intelligent creatures, living grandparents holds value for the species. Humans and orcas both seem to benefit from them in many ways.
> I am not convinced though, wealth seems to dissipate over long periods (e.g. most billionaires today did not inherit their wealth).
The single most reliable predictor of wealth BY FAR is being born into wealth. And arguably, it dissipates because it gets decentralized as it gets split up between heirs as it passed down to future generations which are typically less ambitious and focused on maintaining that power and wealth.
Imagine if Ghengis Khan, Stalin, Mao, Rothschild, Rockerfeller, all of the kings/royals/despots/dictators were immortal and still running the world - I don't think most people would want to live in that world.
I highly doubt that. I would guess that income and age would be much better predictors for example.
> I don't think most people would want to live in that world.
I would, if the other option was death.
Regardless, I doubt any of them would still rule the world had they not died of old age. Regimes survive despite the death of their rulers and fall while their rulers are still alive.
I'm talking about predictors of wealth for a new person. The age and income are both zero. If you have their income - you probably have their wealth already as well - nothing to predict.
And for the record, coming from wealth is the strongest predictor of future wealth. [0][1]
> I would, if the other option was death.
But you have no choice/option in my hypothetical scenario - you're born a slave and you die...
> Regardless, I doubt any of them would still rule the world had they not died of old age.
Really.... ? Why? All of the people I mentioned, maintained and grew their wealth/power their entire life up until their death. Having power/wealth is just a huge advantage if you're trying to gain/maintain power/wealth.
[0] https://www.ctpublic.org/education/2019-05-15/georgetown-stu... [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/05/29/study-to-succeed-in-america-...
That's almost a tautology then. If you only know one thing about someone, that's also necessarily the best predictor for anything about them. However, it doesn't tell us much about whether wealth does concentrate over time.
> Really.... ? Why?
Because regimes change all the time despite rulers being alive. The death of a ruler by old age rarely triggers regime change, they just get succeeded by someone else. It's usually another event that triggers regime change (peaceful and violent revolutions, war, etc.). Immortal rulers wouldn't be immune to those events.
You can know a great deal about someone at birth, such as race, gender, country of origin, eye color etc. Yet you can accurately predict someone’s wealth at age 60 by looking at their parent’s wealth even though a babies income is generally 0.
Further wait until someone’s 10 and you can measure IQ, grades, etc and parents wealth is still #1. Wait even longer and high school GPA still isn’t nearly as useful.
No... it's not? Do you know what tautology means?
> If you only know one thing about someone, that's also necessarily the best predictor for anything about them.
Except it's not the only thing you know about them... so your point is kinda meaningless.
> However, it doesn't tell us much about whether wealth does concentrate over time.
There are soooo many studies supporting this, like the two I linked above, not to mention common sense.
It's like the most basic game theory + common sense - you have X people competing with each other, you give (0.001 * X) of those people massive advantages - who do you think is going to be winning?
Part of it is wealth becoming diluted with offspring and secondly being raised in wealth diminishes people value of money until it is too late.
With an average fertility rate of 1, which is higher than that of many countries including where I live, even complete immortality would lead to an asymptotic population. Since some people will still inevitably die in accidents even if aging is solved, a fertility rate of 1 would be a declining population even with unlimited lifespans.
Another thought I had was that revolutions over inequality almost always happen when there's a large youthful population. The old just don't have the energy or the future-focused outlook for big change. Inequality might be less stable if all adults had the health of their youth.
That's a very specific scenario, where everything happens to be going great for you. Do you honestly believe wealth inequality has no negative consequences for those at the bottom?
"But if we cure aging won't that mean that the ultra-rich will never go away??" That's what these conversations always seem to devolve into and it seems to miss the bigger picture.
This is taken to an extreme in Larry Niven's "known space" setting. There's a bunch of interesting stuff I won't mention because spoilers, but imagine a very-humanoid race where the adults are not intelligent, but later they lose the ability to reproduce and gain hyper-intelligence, strength, and a ruthless drive to protect and advance their descendants.
For a second, I thought you wrote "humans and orcs..." I don't think orcs really value grandparents that much, but who knows: Tolkein might have completely maligned them as mindless monsters when they were in fact just a fast-growing pre-industrial civilization.
Surely this is directly dependent on the context of the organism.
The Cleveland clinic has a nice, informative page if you want more information [0]
[edited to add]
The response of the innate immune system to the infectious agent / injury is what causes inflammation - i.e., for instance, fever, swelling, etc. It is a very very complex multi-cascade process, but one of the first responses to an injury, for instance, is the release of signalling molecules that results in localised swelling, slightly elevated temperature (which makes the tissue a little more inhospitable to bacteria / viruses), etc. all of which serve as the front line defense. <This is a severe over-simplification> Wikipedia has a good explanation that goes into the roles and triggers of the inflammatory response. [1]
Acute inflammation in response to infections and injuries is a good thing, and from everything we know, it is a necessary part of the immune response. The challenge is when the same inflammation response is mis-directed to target the body - for instance, in rheumatoid arthritis, and other inflammation related auto-immune disorders.
[0] https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/symptoms/21660-inflamm...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflammation?useskin=vector
I ask because I used to be very concerned with particulate matter (I still am, but I used to too), and it seemed a big problem with that was it triggering inflammation.
I forget about exercise, I think it's a case of temporarily increasing it (hours) and then lowering it long-term.
The point is that chronic inflammation is bad. The comment I'm replying to isn't recognizing that it's just saying "oh inflammation is fine because it's a response to injury" which is very much missing the point.
I'd love it if cheap shitty food wasn't bad for me. At the end of the day a calorie is a calorie and many animals handle the stuff that shortens our life with no problem.
Look at it another way, if dogs can't eat chocolate but humans can, is the problem with chocolate or with dogs?
Also, the reason chocolate is unhealthy isn't because of the cacao plant, it's because of all the added sugar used to make it taste good, since raw cacao (or cocoa, which you get after cooking it) is horribly bitter.
For example, young people might encounter more new infection sources, and thus need a faster/stronger responding immune system. This protein might be evolved for giving you that, with a side effect of having too strong an immune system at older age.
Evolution may not yet have found a solution that turns down its production at later age, or it might have evolved it at some time, but found its benefits do not outweigh the cost of maintaining the necessary control mechanism.
It’s far from a given that having more humans live to old age has evolutionary benefits.
If you can prove this .. which things specifically is this linked to? There is a lot of completely terrible nutrition "science" out there.
So this seems to imply excess calories are a cause of chronic inflammation.
Also, the ketogenic diet has been shown to significantly reduce inflammation, though I'm not sure if that's from reducing carbs, or reducing something else associated with high carb intake.
HbA1C results from the non-enzymatic reaction between glucose and hemoglobin. It serves as a measure of your long-term glucose level and is elevated in diabetics.
Low carb diets dramatically reduce this source of inflammation.
This is obviously false as stated, extreme athletes consume vastly more calories than sedentary people of their same weight. Phelps was rather famous for a 10,000+ calorie per day diet but even just manual labors need significantly more calories.
I’m assuming there’s some unspecified criteria such as while sleeping?
But this compensation is nowhere near 100% and it also isn't clear to what extent this is mediated by food availability and possibly the intensity of the activity. The Hadza don't have a lot of food and they're spending all day walking around. Similar studies have been conducted on the Amish, who are doing far harder manual farm labor and have enormous amounts of food, and these studies found much high energy expenditure among the Amish compared to post-industrial sedentary Americans, as well as an average 9% bodyfat for males for whatever that is worth. Similarly, the experiences of endurance athletes with bad health symptoms like amenorrhea and low bone mineral density are limited to people who feel pressure to be as small as possible and don't eat anywhere near enough food. Those who simply eat more don't have the same experiences.
As you stated, we also have quite a bit of clear cut existence proofs that energy expenditure is not simply constant among all people regardless of activity. Pontzer himself has studied some of these extremes to figure out how much energy a human actually can expend. From what I recall, it seemed to be around 3.5 times whatever your base metabolic rate is, at least in the long run. Over short bursts, energy expenditure can be up to 10 times base. The greatest longer duration energy demands he has seen in the field is the Tour de France for men and pregnancy for women, both of which are about equal and seem to represent the limits of what humans can do. Obviously, the people doing these things are eating far more than they would be if they weren't doing those things. Nutrition advice for athletes is nearly the opposite of what it is for the obese and sedentary. Eat sugar like there's no tomorrow. Get as many liquid calories as possible. Avoid high fiber because it'll sit in your gut forever slowing down all other digestion and making you uncomfortable. There's a reason for this.
Two of my favorite podcasts, Stronger by Science and Iron Culture, was in the former case and is in the latter hosted by one of the researchers who works in Herman Pontzer's lab, and he is constantly expressing frustration over how the findings and model get misrepresented by the time they telephone down to pop science communicators and diet influencers. The model simply says that expending X calories per day in exercise will not result in a net difference of X calories expended in total. It'll be some percentage less than 100. But it won't be 0%. Exercise and activity don't make no difference at all.
I'd never heard of this Kurzgesagt thing, but it appears to be a group of animators that make cartoon explainer videos of basically everything? That might be entertaining but is probably not the best way to learn about the frontiers of contemporary nutrition and exercise science.
The video discussed is this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPrjP4A_X4s
I enjoy your perspective on this topic!
Natural selection is for reproductive fitness. Before antibiotics, dying after child bearing years didn't have enough effect on fitness to overcome the value of preventing death from infection at younger ages.
Human bodies did not evolve for high macro diets, the high levels of sugar (among other molecules) in our diet glycosylate proteins they touch, warping their folding shape and causing inflammation as the body mistake itself for foreign invaders.
Probably a reason why fasting has become so popular, people are walking around with high levels of damage from dense caloric food, a fast allows your body to go through a cycle of catabolism/autophagy. Clearing our the misfolded/damaged proteins lowers inflammation.
- cannot heal when injured
- cannot fight back against pathogens and die from random infections easily
- develop cancer faster and more often
Generally, the opposite of one bad idea is usually another bad idea. Too much is bad, too little is bad - the middle ground is ideal.
For example - Too much water is drowning, doesn't mean we should advocate against water.
https://www.livescience.com/health/immune-system/if-you-dont...
Keto has been shown to be helpful with a huge number of health issues, and from my understanding humans spent most of the year in ketosis (or all year during the ice ages?).
the answer is always "it doesn't kill or sterilize you before you reproduce"
I don't understand the point of the retroactive why's. some mutant nutted in a bunch of folks, the end.
If as few as 1 in 10,000 reproductions were prevented by a trait then we should expect that trait to be gone in a million years. And our last common ancestor with mice was likely 65 of those past.
Harmful traits can linger if they confer some other benefit. Other's have already worked through this and are rightfully asking, "If this is so harmful it should be have been selected against, what does it do to help us get to successful reproduction in the environment it evolved in?"
what are armchair archeologists going to say, “thats because it enabled strong community ties and the humans with long telomeres didn't value life as strongly” as opposed to being a total freak accident that had nothing to do with anything
They don't kill us before we procreate. Evolution checks out at childbirth so you get "genetic drift".
QED
If current conditions (whether for lab mice, or humans) have removed ~99% of the deadly diseases from the equation - then it's kinda like someone who's heterozygous for sickle cell being stuck in a malaria-free region.
Eg: Rest your twisted ankle through pain and inflammation instead of keeping to use it.
Even though it increases recovery time, better be on the safe side of decreased usage to avoid further damage.
Which is why in modern times RICE speeds up recovery (rest, ice, compression, elevation) in twisted ankles.
But we have ratio- which mammels didn’t have for millions of years.
Next time you think about consuming a product that claims to boost your immune system, ask yourself if you really want to increase your chances of inflammation or not. they are two sides of the same system.
We have entire classes of drugs including OTC ones whose entire job is just reducing inflammation, its indicated in tons of diseases and conditions, lots of health industry people (and snake oil salesmen) tell me that x and y and z cause it, but I dont really know what it is.
Edit: To add, much of our medicine treats symptoms, not causes.
If you get a splinter in your finger and it goes red and swollen that's inflammation. It's like the first line general response before things like the immune system kick in.
Perhaps it is not that it is evolutionarily beneficial, but rather a byproduct of other evolutionarily beneficial processes? Such as sending larger amounts of blood to an affected region.
It (1) isolates the damaged tissue from the rest of the body (2) launches countermeasures against most probable threats