Medicine as Evolutionary Expansion
Jan 23, 2014, 12:46p - Science
We've all heard about "survival of the fittest." This saying explains why certain species thrive and others go extinct, and it captures the core of Darwin's idea of evolution by natural selection. People also use it colloquially to explain why certain individuals are successful and rich and others are weak and poor - some people are more "fit" than others. ... more »
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Christoph
- Feb 7, 2014, 7:33a
Hey!
I really enjoyed your post. It's a thought process I've been going over a few times and have been trying to tie together; but didn't quite finish. I like your full circle approach. I also conceptually agree with the notion of "evolutionary space" as a property of a population or society that is to be expanded. You can even popularize the concept by calling it specialization and pulling in the economic theory related to that? That would be saying that more diversity, genetically, can potentially lead to more diversity at the phenotypic level, which allows more specific ability -- as one boundary phenomenon.
On the exact point of how medicine comes into this, I think you have touched on something very technical, but profoundly important for the role of science (and medicine / "health" ) in the future of society -- my thought for a long time has been along those lines as well, which is a controversial way of phrasing this thought because it's binary for most people: affected by disease makes it a huge emotional experience, not affected leads largely to denial of personal connection - in my experience - so putting the idea of medicine and associated scientific inquiry into the context of the larger fitness picture of a population is a fabulous full-circle.
In short, thank you for this post!
nikhil
- Feb 7, 2014, 7:34a
Cool, glad you read it and liked it. I've been thinking about it for maybe a year and finally wanted to write it down, so I could move on. My next post will be about food!
One thing I'm not convinced about is whether more combinations makes for a fitter population. One could argue that keeping "weak" genes in the mix (1) seems bad because they persist, and (2) allows their weakness to be exposed in the future, e.g. more likely to lead to a dead end, i.e. you're just delaying the inevitable. I think those arguments are weakened if there is a lot of pleiotropy, esp. tissue-specific pleiotropy. And not just any pleiotropy - pleiotropy where the same gene has a negative effect in one tissue (e.g. heart) but meanwhile has a positive effect in another tissues (e.g. brain). For example, maybe a specific allele of a fat-storing enzyme causes heart disease in the heart, but in the brain it provides nutrients that enable dramatic growth and increased intelligence. So solving heart disease would keep such people around, benefiting the population as a whole. If one could find some examples like this, I would be pretty much convinced that greater combinations might be a net win.
nikhil
- Feb 25, 2014, 7:16p
Dengke pointed out today that there is a related area of research called "evolvability", or the capacity for an organism to evolve.
The Wikipedia page is one place to start, thought I didn't find it very clear: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolvability
This review paper has some good points: http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v9/n1/abs/nrg2278.html
Sunburn
Jan 14, 2014, 1:31p - Fiction
In the end, the sun burns out.
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It's 2012. But humans have roamed this planet for 200,000 years, so I suppose it's actually something closer to 202,012. If you estimate 20 years per generation, humans have persisted for 10,101 generations. In the days of our great10,098-grandparents, there were no farms, no roads, and no cities. They had ... more »
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