why do they call it a vaccine, its nothing like that...
there's probably a reason evolution didnt put the immune system on permanent "amber alert" as they call it in the article
there's probably a reason evolution didnt put the immune system on permanent "amber alert" as they call it in the article
Amber alert means something different than the author thinks ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Alert
This is just an idiom for denoting a high alert state.
So a macrophage on "red alert" would be reacting to an active infection or disease.
But I was edified to learn that Dr Edward Jenner was a vaccine pioneer even without the honors of knighthood.
It would just be temporary, but there is likely trade offs.
Until we find out why nature made it so some of us kill ourselves maybe we shouldn't fuck with it? Remember Chesterton's Fence.
"Sorry son, you can't get these glasses. It's for the betterment of humanity."
You just don't know sometimes.
Remember that cephalopod brains are donut shaped and their digestive tracts go right through the middle and if they eat something too big they'll have an anyeurism. Pandas and koalas evolved special diets that serve no evolutionary purpose and both would be extinct if humans didn't find them cute. Sloths have to climb down from trees to take a shit. Female hyenas give birth through a pseudopenis that often ruptures and kils them. Horses can't vomit and if they swallow something toxic, their stomach ruptures. Also their hooves and ankles are extremely weak and not well designed to support their weight. Numerous species like the fiddler crab and peacock have evolved sexual displays that are actively harmful to their survival.
And as for humans, our spines are not well adapted for walking upright, our retinas are wired backwards, and we still have a useless appendix and wisdom teeth. The recurrent laryngeal nerve has an unnecessarily long and complex route branching off the vagus and travelling around the aorta before running back up to the larynx.
Evolution is not smart. Evolution isn't even stupid. It isn't trying to keep you alive and it isn't even capable of caring if you die. Yes we should absolutely fuck with it, because we don't want to live in a world where we still die of sepsis and parasites and plagues because "we don't want to mess with evolution."
Sometimes things get trapped in a local minima. Particularly when a seemingly inconsequential detail at a much much earlier stage becomes a dependency of lots of downstream stuff, but then it turns out that this just so happens to conflict with a better option in the here and now.
More commonly, the "perfect" solution is extremely brittle while the (supposedly) "good enough" solution is incredibly robust to all sorts of environmentally inflicted bullshit. In other words, most of the time evolution is practical while the humans criticizing the outcome are ignorant idealists.
Anyway, the example I was thinking of is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusion-limited_enzyme where some enzymes have evolved to reach extremely close to the maximum rate of catalysis limited by diffusion rates (and some enzymes have clever tricks to get around that).
That's it: and it's separate from good enough because that can include things like "happened to live on the part of the island which didn't get obliterated by a volcanic eruption at the only point in history that volcano ever erupted".
In my defense, domestication is still technically an evolutionary process.
Koalas biggest problem is us? Like they seem perfectly adapted to their niche. Eat lots of leaves that nobody else is adapted to use as food, and once a year, run very fast to outpace the bushfire that your principle food source needs to reproduce.
This was believed in the 20th century, but we now believe the appendix is actually useful, and is basically a fail-safe in case the intestinal flora are wiped out; some will survive in the appendix and repopulate the intestine.
> gut fauna
May I be excused? My macrophages are full of slime molds!
It's called "gastrointestinal illness". From the article I linked:
"Research in 2012 reported that individuals without an appendix were twice as likely to have a recurrence of Clostridioides difficile colitis. The appendix, therefore, may act as a reservoir for beneficial bacteria. This reservoir could repopulate the gut flora following a bout of gastrointestinal illness."
Now, you could have restated this in a better way IMHO. I'd put it like this: are there any evolutionary advantages to having worse-than-average near or far vision? For example, we can imagine that people who had extremely good long range vision would be more successful in hunting, and perhaps- this is where I'm speculating heavily- having poor long vision is compensated by having better detail vision for fine tool work. However, what I've learned after many years is that attempting to perceive the true nature of the evolutionary fitness function is challenging.
As for your bit about suicide: please be a lot more thoughtful in speculating about suicide.
I remember that the effect in the tendency was more or less immediate.
I personally look forward to every innovation that potentially improves our baseline.
You can just stop taking antibiotics and vaccines.
Those are way more interesting odds.
You wouldn't want to get vaccinated for smallpox in the middle of a plague epidemic, because that would waste your immune system's resources on an extinct-in-the-wild disease, when it really needs to be gearing up to stop the plague killing you.
You do not somehow go into deficit by getting a vaccine.
Yes it's technically true, but it is also how walking functions regardless of circumstance.
They speculated that immune systems evolved to avoid being continuously on alert. And that's exactly right- our immune systems have an extremely complicated system for detecting foreign invaders that is tightly regulated. And a failure to regulate that is often associated with autoimmune disorders, which remain very poorly understood.
I've studied biology from the perspective of engineering better drugs for decades now and I can say with confidence that I simply don't understand how the immune system works, and I don't think anybody else really does either (compared to, say, the heart, or many biological systems like protein production). We have identified many players, and observed a great deal of actions, and have speculative models for many of the underlying processes, but we don't really have an "understanding" of the immune system. I skimmed this paper and frankly, it has a very long way to go before people are convinced to try this in human clinical trials.
I look forward to innovations, but to a first order approximation: evolution found model parameters that exceed the best human science and engineering.