No, you don’t “build up your immunity” by getting sick

BTW, you do not “build up your immunity” by getting sick. Neither do your kids; getting sick a lot in daycare as a kid will not make you get sick less often as an adult. You can develop immunity to specific diseases, but there are too many diseases out there and they mutate too rapidly to develop immunity to enough diseases to end up generally less prone to disease.

Getting sick actually makes you more likely to get sick, not less. Take measles:

“A new epidemiological study suggests that [people who’ve had the measles] remain susceptible to other infections for more than 2 years, much longer than researchers anticipated. The results bolster a hypothesis that the measles virus undermines the immune system’s memory—and indicate that the measles vaccine protects against other deadly diseases as well.

Researchers have long known that measles inhibits the immune system, but they generally thought this effect wore off after a few months at the most. However, studies of children in developing countries, where most cases occur, found that measles vaccination reduces the overall death rate from infections for up to 5 years, suggesting that preventing the disease somehow provides protection against other illnesses.” —Mitch Leslie, Science/AAAS News

Not so marvelous now, are they?

Honestly, if getting sick made you less likely to get sick afterwards, everyone who got Smallpox would have had the immune system of doom and never died of anything; malaria would have rendered sub-Saharan Africa a disease-free zone.

Long term, populations get less prone to getting specific diseases just because the most susceptible people have died and people with mutations or behaviors that make them more resistant have survived.

 

I have been reading a lot about AIDS.

The Past Makes ISIS Look Good

“The April 20, 1859 edition of the Macon Messenger [1] carried a short obituary notice for King Gezo stating, “…His majesty, the King of Dahomey, the great negro seller of Africa, has departed this life. He was in the habit of ransacking all the neighboring African kingdoms, for the purpose of making captives, whom he sold to the slavers. At his funeral obsequies, his loving subjects manifested their sorrow by sacrificing eight hundred negroes to his memory. He is succeeded by his son, King Gezo II.”1. Marriages and Obituaries From the Macon Messenger; Willard R. Rocker 1988King Gezo’s soldiers also did a lot of beheading. Oh, yes, many of them were women, members of the “Dahomey Amazons,” so I guess they’re the sorts of folks that academics like to hold up as shining examples of how gender egalitarianism dominated the world before evil Europeans stepped in and changed everything.

Of course, many of those women soldiers were foreign captives or child soldiers forced into the army by their families, so I find it difficult to get too excited about female empowerment that’s basically jut slavery.

Things that Hurt my Soul

Any version of “Scientists say XYZ, but science is changing all the time and they keep coming out with things they thought they knew that turned out to be wrong, so you never know!” just makes me want to scream. In this case, it was interjected into an explanation to a small child that you use your brain to think and control your bodily movements. Yes, yes, tell me some more about how someday we are totally going to discover that this whole “brain” thing was incorrect and we actually think with some other organ! Go on! No wait please don’t; it hurts my soul.

I wish people could tell the difference between “quantum entanglement implies that Einstein’s opinion on the EPR paradox might have been wrong,” and “we know nothing because scientists are dumbshits.”

BTW, every article ever written that starts out “Einstein wrong!” or “Scientists question Einstein’s legacy: legendary scientists might have been wrong!” is fucking shit and should be ashamed of itself. It’s like being all “LoL Newton was dumb and didn’t figure out relativity, so Newtonian dynamics is wrong and we shouldn’t teach it. Also, Evilution is fake!”

“Ancestral Microbes”

Since misconceptions bug me, I figure a reasonable way to fix them is to point them out when I see them. Most of these are probably misconceptions I once held, which explains why I am sensitive to them.

Today, “ancestral” microbes. From Hawks:

“Yong also includes a nice discussion of the misconception of “ancestral” or “more ancient” as applied to microbial diversity:

“”Hold on, though. The Hadza and the Matses are not ancient people, and their microbes are not “ancient bacteria”, as one headline stated. They are modern people, carrying modern microbes, living in today’s world, and practicing traditional lifestyles. It would be misleading to romanticise them and to automatically assume that their microbiomes are healthier ones.””

Hawk also notes, “A naive prediction from community ecology would be that a harmful element disrupting the microbiome should restrict its diversity, not increase it. But from the view of the microbes, the parasites add nutrients to the gut system by extracting more energy from the host, creating opportunities for microbial niches that may not be there in a healthy gut. Your microbiome is not all about you, after all.”

You Probably Aren’t Adapted to the Paleo Diet

Sorry, guys.

Look, I like the Paleo Diet as much as you do–maybe even more than you do. After all, I didn’t name this blog Evolutionist X because I haven’t been reading about paleolithic peoples.

The basic idea of the Paleo Diet–in case you’ve been living under a rock–is that you will be healthier if you eat only veggies, fruit, and meat (no grains or milk products,)–the diet your Paleolithic ancestors evolved to eat.

The problem with the Paleo Diet is that evolution did not stop 10,000 years ago. Evolution is constant. It doesn’t stop. You are not a caveman in a suit. You are a modern person. Unless your grandparents were hunter-gatherers, chances are good that your ancestors have been under significant evolutionary pressure to adapt to agriculture for thousands of years.

For example, Lactase Persistence evolved in dairying populations entirely within the last 10,000 years. Today, 80% of Europeans and European-descended people have the gene for lactase persistence. Outside of traditionally dairying areas, this trait is rare. It has spread entirely in response to the development of dairying–which means that if your ancestors have been raising animals for their milk for the past few thousand years, there is a very good chance that you are adapted to drinking milk well after infancy.

Of course, you’re probably not going to hurt yourself drinking water instead.

Likewise for wheat; if your ancestors have been eating wheat for thousands of years, you can probably digest it okay. If your ancestors haven’t been eating wheat for thousands of years, then you might want to avoid it–a Vietnamese friend of mine gets stomach aches from eating wheat (especially whole wheat, which contains more of the irritating chemicals from the external part of of the grain, designed to inspire your stomach to pass out the seed within without digesting it). Their ancestors ate rice, not wheat, so this is hardly surprising. (They also are lactose intolerant, since their ancestors did not keep dairy cows.) However, they have no difficulties digesting rice–a food they are adapted to eat.

If you aren’t adapted to wheat, wheat will give you a stomach ache. If wheat gives you a stomach ache, avoid it! But if your ancestors ate wheat and it doesn’t give you a stomach ache, you’ll probably be safe eating it.

It is reasonable to ask whether there are long-term bad effects from eating wheat or drinking milk–some disease that doesn’t kick in until you’re in your 70s, for example, would be difficult to develop adaptations to combat because it kills you after you’ve already had all of your kids. On this count, I would love to see more research.

Also, there may be some people who, like the 20% or so of Europeans who lack lactase persistence, are particularly sensitive to various foods. People with the ApoE4 gene (the “Alzheimer’s Gene”) may benefit from specific dietary modifications.

However, there’s no particular reason to believe that you are all that well-adapted to eating a diet your ancestors haven’t eaten in thousands of years.