Or worse. If it is so easy to activate, there must be an evolutionary reason why we don’t have it.
And bear in mind that most people don't have a problem surviving colds and the like long enough to reproduce even with no vaccines at all, and that was probably more true for much of our evolutionary history when we were living much more isolated lives, and not cohabiting with chickens and pigs.
While human evolution is not predictive, it has selected for a wide variety of survival-associated adaptations beyond the mere individual.
Humans had life expectancy even shorter than our fertility period until recently and they developed as social species hundreds of thousands years ago, for which living beyond fertility period is beneficial (grandparents were invented by evolution too).
> And bear in mind that most people don't have a problem surviving colds
That’s modern people with access to antibiotics etc.
> that was probably more true for much of our evolutionary history when we were living much more isolated lives, and not cohabiting with chickens and pigs
For much of our evolutionary history people were eating animals, getting viruses with them.
Antibiotics don't help against viruses like colds. And we live a life that is has a higher degree of social connectivity than our ancestors, allowing for faster spreading of disease, so we're arguably worse off.
Yes. But they help fighting secondary infections, which are common.
That's largely due to infant/child mortality. Once you reached reproductive age, life expectancy was roughly 50, plenty of time to have plenty of kids.
I don't think you understand evolution. Neither needs to be "better" for anything other than survival to reproduction. Evolution isn't min-maxing in a video game.
This doesn't mean anything.
> Chances for survival to reproduce of some individuals are greatly influenced by survival of their relatives in the same group. The traits that help whole group to survive will win in natural selection, including those that extend survival beyond what’s necessary to reproduce to what’s beneficial for the group.
Which, of course, has absolutely nothing to do with whether current traits are optimized for perfection, or simply sufficient for continued reproduction. Again, evolution isn't min-maxing your video game character. I'm not clear why you have such strident opinions on something you don't understand very well.
Inflamation uses up resources. When we were hunter-gatherers and had to survive ice ages - it wasn't a good idea to waste calories and vitamins just in case.
Better for 3 people out of 30 to die of flu than for all 30 to starve.
Nowadays the optimal trade-off might be completely different.
Well sure, but "not an improbable thing to develop" is doing a lot of work there. Again, everything complex is "improbable to develop," in the sense that evolution takes a lot of time and is very path dependent.
We could have paper shredders, blenders, toasters, water taps, and so on that just ran all the time, but our utility bills would be ginormous. Same thing for our bodies.