Newsworthy Science

NP :).
In the NY times article there is the link, and it clarifies that this only concerns a specific subset of colorectal cancer. For this specific type I'm a bit less surprised, but the results are still astonishing.
 
At the time of writing the top two stories on the nature homepage are about collaborations between scientists and indigenous groups:

Indigenous knowledge reveals history of fire-prone California forest

Indigenous oral accounts have helped scientists to reconstruct a 3,000-year history of a large fire-prone forest in California. The results suggest that parts of the forest are denser than ever before, and are at risk of severe wildfires. The research is part of a growing effort to combine Indigenous knowledge with other scientific data to improve understanding of ecosystem histories.
​
One tree or two? Genes confirm Iban traditional knowledge in Borneo

New species can hide in plain sight. A popular Asian fruit tree given the scientific name Artocarpus odoratissimus has been considered a single species by Western science for almost two centuries, despite some Indigenous peoples of Asia applying two names to the tree. But a genetic study now confirms that the evergreens that researchers have been lumping together as A. odoratissimus actually belong to two species — as reflected in their Indigenous names, each of which refers to a distinct variety of the tree.​
 
How Much Coffee Should You Drink to Improve Longevity?
Health professionals have been arguing for decades about how much coffee you should drink. Some say none. Others say coffee boosts longevity.

Americans like their morning coffee. In some cities it seems as if there is a coffee shop on every corner. And yet our coffee consumption is paltry compared to many other countries. Not surprisingly, Scandinavia far outpaces the U.S. in per capita coffee drinking. The people of Finland, Norway, Denmark and Sweden drink two to three times as much coffee as citizens of the U.S. We rank 25th after Lebanon, Estonia, Spain and Portugal. New research suggests that coffee drinkers live longer than abstainers. That is the conclusion from a large study of half a million people in the UK Biobank. Now the scientists analyzing these data answer the question: How much coffee should you drink for longer life?

The UK Biobank Data:
British researchers have been collecting data from 9.2 million people between 2006 and 2016. In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine (July 2, 2018), the investigators reported on nearly 500,000 participants. These people answered detailed questionnaires about diet, including coffee consumption, provided samples and had physical examinations. About 110,000 of these individuals did not drink coffee, while about 200,000 usually drank instant and 74,000 generally drank decaf.

How Much Coffee Should You Drink?
During 10 years of follow-up, just over 14,000 of the participants died. Those who usually consumed at least 2 cups of coffee daily were about 12 percent less likely to die from cancer or cardiovascular disease during that time. The association was strongest for coffee made using grounds rather than instant and for regular coffee rather than decaf. Nonetheless, even decaf coffee drinkers were less likely than non-coffee drinkers to die during the follow-up period.

In their own words, the researchers reported:
“In this large study of nearly 500000 people in the United Kingdom, coffee drinking was inversely associated with all-cause mortality, with statistically significant inverse associations observed in participants drinking 1 to 8 or more cups per day.”

Interestingly, there was hardly any difference in mortality stats between casual coffee drinkers (one cup a day) and heavy coffee drinkers (eight or more cups daily). So the answer to the question: how much coffee should you drink? might be whatever amount feels right for you.

The researchers checked to see if there were any differences in protection based on people’s genetically determined ability to metabolize caffeine. They found none: fast and slow caffeine metabolizers appeared to get the same benefits from drinking coffee. The bottom line appears to be that drinking coffee has unexpected health benefits.

How Much Coffee Should You Drink If You Add Sugar?
A more recent analysis published in the Annals of Internal Medicine brings this question up to date. Researchers analyzed data from more than 170,000 participants in the UK Biobank between 2009 and 2018. (We don’t know how many of them were included in the analysis for the first study reported above.) People who drank any amount of coffee regularly, even those who added sugar, were 16 to 20 percent less likely to die during the study than those who didn’t drink it (Annals of Internal Medicine, May 30, 2022). Researchers expected that adding sugar might counteract the benefits of drinking coffee, but they discovered it did not.

One Teaspoon per Cup, About Two Cups per Day:
Those who sweetened their coffee added about a teaspoon of sugar, on average. If they drank between 1.5 and 3.5 cups daily, as many did, they were about 30 percent less likely to die during the follow-up than those who avoided coffee. Not enough people used artificial sweetener to draw any firm conclusions about its health effects. Instant, ground and decaf coffee provided similar statistics. This was an observational study, so it doesn’t show cause and effect relationships. But the numbers are large enough to be compelling. The researchers are not encouraging people to start drinking coffee for health reasons.

Nonetheless, they conclude that
“Moderate consumption of unsweetened and sugar-sweetened coffee was associated with lower risk for death.”

The Annals of Internal Medicine offers a simple summary of this study for patients. Here is the link.

Coffee Drinking and Longevity Is Not New News:
The British researchers who did the first analysis point out that:
“Our findings are consistent with prior, large, prospective investigations of coffee drinking and all-cause mortality conducted in the United States, Europe, and Asia, as well as the most recent meta-analyses and the 2015 US Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee report, which concluded that moderate coffee consumption can be a part of a healthy diet.”

The Naysayers Tell You to Quit Drinking Coffee:
No matter how many studies are published, there are experts who will insist that you should quit drinking coffee. For them, the answer to the question how much coffee should you drink is zero. They maintain that coffee raises your stress level, increases heart rate and blood pressure and raises lipids like triglycerides and cholesterol. They throw in complications like heartburn and GERD (gastroesophageal reflux disease) for good measure.

Oh, and let’s not forget the addiction argument. Some of the cynics maintain that coffee drinkers are drug addicts who can’t quit because of withdrawal symptoms such as headaches, fatigue and fuzzy brain.

People’s Pharmacy Perspective:
We will not engage in a debate with the anti-coffee crusaders. And we would never encourage anyone who doesn’t like coffee to start drinking it. Some people with heart problems may also need to avoid the jolt from java.

But for people who love their morning cup of coffee, we say hooray! There is now enough solid scientific evidence to suggest that coffee, even decaffeinated coffee, could prolong your life. And if you can handle several cups a day without developing heartburn or insomnia, good on you.

If you would like to read some other articles we have written about coffee, here are some links:

Coffee Drinkers Lower Their Chances of Heart Failure
Are Coffee and Alcohol the Fountain of Youth?
Why Should You Put Cocoa in Your Coffee?
Comments welcome below. Are you a coffee person? What do you make of the latest research? Do you prefer tea? We would love to hear from you as well.

https://www.peoplespharmacy.com/articles/how-much-coffee-should-you-drink-to-improve-longevity
 
Coffee tastes disgusting. I do like my caffeine tho. About 150-200mg daily seems to be a good amount. It's good to quit for a couple weeks every few months to reset tolerance & just on principle ('have to haves' make you weak).
 
Hold the coffee, I prefer drinking tea. Never really liked drinking coffee.
 
there was hardly any difference in mortality stats between casual coffee drinkers (one cup a day) and heavy coffee drinkers (eight or more cups daily). So the answer to the question: how much coffee should you drink? might be whatever amount feels right for you.
Click to expand...

thank god, I cant drink it all day
 
It's still pretty amazing China has a rover on another planet:

Chinese rover finds evidence that water was present on Mars more recently than thought
by Bob Yirka , Phys.org

Zhurong rover looking back at the lander. A view of landing area, the wheel tracks, and a small sand dune. Credit: China National Space Administration (CNSA)
A team of researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, working with a colleague from the University of Copenhagen, has found evidence that water was present on Mars more recently than has been thought. In their paper published in the journal Science Advances, the group describes their analysis of data from China's Zhurong rover and what it showed them about ice in hydrated minerals.


Prior research has suggested that parts of the Martian surface were covered with water up until approximately 3 billion years ago. The time since the water dried up on Mars is known as the Amazonia period. In this new effort, data from the Chinese rover Zhurong has shown the researchers evidence that water on Mars might have persisted longer than has been thought.

Rover Zhurong has been traveling around in an impact crater on the Mars surface for approximately one year. During that time, it has used its two spectrometers to analyze rocks. It also takes pictures of the rocks using its microimaging camera. The rover also blasts them with a laser to create smoke that can be analyzed. The researchers compared the signatures they found in the rocks on Mars with rocks on Earth, finding that some of the rocks are hydrated minerals, which are minerals containing water. They also found instances of layers of duricrust, the formation of which they note would have required a large amount of water either rising from below the surface or from a large quantity of melting ice.

A look at the landing area and the heat shield. Credit: China National Space Administration (CNSA)
The researchers suggest that water must have persisted on Mars longer than has been thought to account for the hydrated minerals on its surface—perhaps much longer. They also suggest that the existence of such rocks on the surface hints at the possibility of ground ice. If that is the case, future astronauts could use it for a wide variety of purposes.

The findings back up evidence from other research efforts that have suggested Mars not only had water on its surface in more recent times, but that it also flowed, creating sculpted rock features.

https://phys.org/news/2022-05-chinese-rover-evidence-mars-thought.html
 
Some things must be remembered.

The 1977 White House climate memo that should have changed the world
Years before the climate crisis was part of national discourse, this memo to the president predicted catastrophe

Spoiler :
In 1977 Star Wars hit movie theaters, New York City had a blackout that lasted 25 hours, and the Apple II personal computer went up for sale. It was also the year that a remarkable one-page memo was circulated at the very highest levels of US government.

Years before the climate crisis was part of national discourse, this memo outlined what was known – and feared – about the crisis at the time. It was prescient in many ways. Did anyone listen?

By July 1977, President Jimmy Carter had only been in office for seven months, but he had already built a reputation for being focused on environmental issues. For one, by installing solar panels on the White House. He had also announced a national renewable energy plan .

“We must start now to develop the new, unconventional sources of energy we will rely on in the next century,” he said in an address to the nation outlining its main goals.

The climate memo arrived on his desk a few days after the Independence Day celebrations on July 4. It has the ominous title “Release of Fossil CO2 and the Possibility of a Catastrophic Climate Change.”

One of the first thing that stands out is the stamp at the top, partially elided, saying THE PRESIDENT HAS SEEN.

The memo’s author was Frank Press, Carter’s chief science adviser and director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Press was a tall, serious, geophysicist who had grown up poor in a Jewish family in Brooklyn, and was described as “brilliant” by his colleagues. Before working with the Carter administration, he had been director of the Seismological Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, and had consulted for federal agencies including the Navy and NASA.

“Carter had a great respect for Frank [Press] and for science,” said Stu Eizenstat, who served as Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser from 1977 to 1981.

Press starts the memo by laying out the science of the climate crisis as it was understood at the time.

Fossil fuel combustion has increased at an exponential rate over the last 100 years. As a result, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 is now 12 percent above the pre-industrial revolution level and may grow to 1.5 to 2.0 times that level within 60 years. Because of the “greenhouse effect” of atmospheric CO2 the increased concentration will induce a global climatic warming of anywhere from 0.5 to 5°C.​

These far-sighted assertions were in line with the climate science that originated the previous decade, when the US government funded major science agencies focused on space, atmospheric and ocean science. Research produced for President Lyndon B Johnson in 1965 found that billions of tons of “carbon dioxide is being added to the earth’s atmosphere by the burning of coal, oil, and natural gas”.

Press’s memo was on the mark. In 2021, for the first time ever, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 reached 420PPM, the halfway point to the doubling of pre-industrial CO2 levels that Press posited.

The potential effect on the environment of a climatic fluctuation of such rapidity could be catastrophic and calls for an impact assessment of unprecedented importance and difficulty. A rapid climatic change may result in large scale crop failures at a time when an increased world population taxes agriculture to the limits of productivity.​

Press was right. We have indeed seen the catastrophic effects of a climatic fluctuation, in the form of increasingly severe weather events including droughts, heatwaves, and hurricanes of greater intensity. Meanwhile, in many parts of the world heating has already stemmed increases in agricultural productivity, and large-scale food production crises are thought to be possible.

The urgency of the problem derives from our inability to shift rapidly to non-fossil fuel sources once the climatic effects become evident not long after the year 2000; the situation could grow out of control before alternate energy sources and other remedial actions become effective.​

This is correct. By the 2000s, the effects of the climate crisis had become apparent in some regions in the form of more deadly heat waves and stronger floods and droughts.

Natural dissipation of C02 would not occur for a millennium after fossil fuel combustion was markedly reduced.​

This prediction by Press was actually debunked at least a decade ago. Scientists used to believe that some warming was “baked in”, but scientists have since found that as soon as CO2 emissions stop rising, the atmospheric concentration of CO2 levels off and slowly falls.

As you know this is not a new issue. What is new is the growing weight of scientific support which raises the CO2-climate impact from speculation to a serious hypothesis worthy of a response that is neither complacent nor panicky.​

But there were other currents mitigating against the sort of response Press calls for. “The story of climate policy in the US, generally, is one missed opportunities and unjustifiable delay,” said Jack Lienke, author of the book Struggling for Air: Power Plants and the “War on Coal.”

Many other issues may have seemed more pressing, or simply better understood. As Lienke writes in Struggling for Air, “At a time when Americans were still dying somewhat regularly in acute, inversion-related pollution episodes, it is unsurprising that legislators were more concerned with the known harms of sulfur dioxide and carbon monoxide than the uncertain, seemingly distant threat of climate change.”

The authoritative National Academy of Sciences has just alerted us that it will issue a public statement along these lines in a few weeks.​

That public statement, released later that month, emphasized the importance of shifting away from fossil fuel energy and highlighted the urgency of starting to transition to new energy sources as soon as possible: “With the end of the oil age in sight, we must make long-term decisions as to future energy policies. One lesson we have been learning is that the time required for transition from one major source to another is several decades.”

So what happened? When Press’s memo made it to the president’s desk, Jim Schlesinger, America’s first secretary of energy, also attached his own note in response:

My view is that the policy implications of this issue are still too uncertain to warrant Presidential involvement and policy initiatives.​

Carter seems to have heeded this warning, and did not make much progress on climate crisis mitigation during his presidency. Yet he did sign some significant pieces of environmental legislation, including initiating the first federal toxic waste cleanups and creating the first fuel economy standards.

A significant challenge facing Carter was his own contradictory energy aims. Despite his goal of encouraging alternative energy, he also felt there was a national security interest in boosting US oil production in the wake of the 1973 oil crisis.

“We realized our dependence on foreign oil was dangerous and, very importantly, alternative energy was in its infancy,” Eizenstat said. “So Carter was both doing conservation and still encouraging more domestic oil and gas as a way of reducing dependence on foreign oil,” said Eizenstat. “As with all policy, you have conflicting goals.”

Still, it seems possible that if Carter had been re-elected, the world might have been in a better position regarding climate impacts today. One of the first things Reagan did after winning the election in 1981 was take down the White House solar panels. Meanwhile, the fossil fuel industry – whose scientists were already studying the ways that fossil fuels were changing the climate – started spending tens of millions of dollars sowing doubt about climate science.

Did the Press memo accomplish anything at all? For one person it was in fact a “transformational moment” – this was Eizenstat himself. He says it was instrumental in his own future work on the climate crisis, including his decision in 1997 to serve as the United States’s principal negotiator for the Kyoto global warming protocols.

Those protocols set the stage for the first international effort to tackle climate policy on a global level. So even if Press’s memo had a muted impact at the time, his warning wasn’t entirely ignored.

(picture of the full memo here)
 
Reagan removed the solar panels to own the libs.
 
The OU Health Stephenson Cancer Center on Wednesday announced a first for the state: a cancer drug, developed entirely in Oklahoma and without the help of a pharmaceutical company, is set to be tested in humans for the first time.

The drug, dubbed OK-1, is more than 25 years in the making and was created by Dr. Doris Benbrook, a professor in the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the OU College of Medicine.

Now, a clinical trial is set to begin at the Stephenson Cancer Center, which involves giving the drug to women with advanced-stage ovarian, endometrial and cervical cancer.

"This drug is not available anywhere else in the world right now," Benbrook said. "We believe it has tremendous potential for treating cancer without causing toxic side effects.”

https://www.oklahoman.com/story/new...et-begin-stephenson-cancer-center/7635231001/

"The drug works to kill cancer cells by taking away one of the defense mechanisms the cells use to survive."
 
Strictly speaking not science, but it may have practical implications. A proof of a conjecture of Erdos, by a young mathematician, about primitive sets (members of the set are mutually prime). The Erdos conjecture is about sums, and that the largest such sum of primitive sets is of the primes themselves.

 
We have all (?) heard that cancer is not one disease, it is hundreds of different diseases. This is true, but we are also finding more commonality between them at the genetic level than we may have thought, and these common features can be drug targets that may work across many forms of cancer.

A pan-cancer compendium of chromosomal instability

Chromosomal instability (CIN) results in the accumulation of large-scale losses, gains and rearrangements of DNA. The broad genomic complexity caused by CIN is a hallmark of cancer; however, there is no systematic framework to measure different types of CIN and their effect on clinical phenotypes pan-cancer. Here we evaluate the extent, diversity and origin of CIN across 7,880 tumours representing 33 cancer types. We present a compendium of 17 copy number signatures that characterize specific types of CIN, with putative aetiologies supported by multiple independent data sources. The signatures predict drug response and identify new drug targets. Our framework refines the understanding of impaired homologous recombination, which is one of the most therapeutically targetable types of CIN. Our results illuminate a fundamental structure underlying genomic complexity in human cancers and provide a resource to guide future CIN research.
​

This schematic summarizes our robust analysis framework, which uses copy number to derive pan-cancer copy number signatures and provide insights. On the left and right are lists of the datasets used to support the signature aetiologies and insights. CCLE, Cancer Cell Line Encyclopedia; DBS, doublet-base substitution; ecDNA, extrachromosomal DNA; RS, rearrangement signature; TCGA, The Cancer Genome Atlas; HR, homologous recombination (I think).

We can use it to predict features, like platinum sensitivity:

Spoiler Predicting platinum sensitivity using IHR signatures :
Spoiler Legend :
a, A proposed model of increasing CIN complexity for IHR signatures based on the signature aetiologies. b, Results for each IHR signature after training a Cox proportional hazards model to predict overall survival across 545 ovarian cancers treated with platinum-based chemotherapy. Hazard ratios, their 95% confidence interval and Wald test significance are reported. The dashed line indicates a hazard ratio of 1. c, A schematic of the clinical classifier built on CX3 and CX2 activities of ovarian cancer samples with germline BRCA1 mutations. d, Results of survival analyses after applying the classifier from c to assign patients into predicted sensitive (plus symbol) or predicted resistant (minus symbol) groups. Each row displays results for each of the four cancer cohorts from the TCGA and PCAWG projects. Differences in median survival are indicated by the arrow, with P values from a log-rank test appearing below (Kaplan–Meier survival analysis). Hazard ratios and their 95% confidence interval of the predicted sensitive group compared to the predicted resistant group are obtained from Cox proportional hazards models correcting for stage and age of patients. The P value represents the corresponding Wald test. AU, Australian Project at the ICGC/PCAWG consortium; OV, ovarian cancer; ESAD, oesophageal cancer; UK, British project at the ICGC/PCAWG consortium.


There are indications that it can be useful in finding new drugs
Spoiler Signatures as biomarkers for drug response and discovery of novel drug targets :
Spoiler Legend :

a, A schematic showing how response biomarkers and novel drug targets were found by correlating signature activities with gene essentiality determined by CRISPR–Cas9 or RNAi screens, and with response to drug perturbations measured as the area under the dose response curve, across 297 cell lines. The Venn diagram shows the overlap of significant correlations for each of the signature to target gene associations. The colour of the circles in the Venn diagram matches the schematic above, and the shaded areas indicate which results relate to b and c. b, A summary of the significant associations between copy number signatures and drug response to 44 therapies. Each signature on the right is linked to a therapy on the left if the signature is predictive of response to CRISPR and/or RNAi perturbation of a target gene, and treatment with a therapy that targets that gene. HDAC, histone deacetylase; PR, progesterone receptor; sGC, soluble guanylate cyclase. c, A summary of the significant associations between copy number signatures and target gene perturbation. Each signature on the left is linked to a target gene on the right if the signature is predictive of response to CRISPR and RNAi perturbation of the target gene. The listed targets were filtered for druggability according to their structure or by ligand-based approaches (n = 104) and their previous known association with CIN (n = 49). ROS, reactive oxygen species; IHR, impaired homologous recombination.
 
I have held that "exercise in a pill" is THE way to make money. I am not so convinced it is the path to good health, but it may be. Note this is very early work, and also that the intervention is largely in mice, and there is not a great record of drugs going from mice to humans. I am convinced some people will get very rich from this technology in the near/medium future.

An exercise-inducible metabolite that suppresses feeding and obesity

Exercise confers protection against obesity, type 2 diabetes and other cardiometabolic diseases. However, the molecular and cellular mechanisms that mediate the metabolic benefits of physical activity remain unclear. Here we show that exercise stimulates the production of N-lactoyl-phenylalanine (Lac-Phe), a blood-borne signalling metabolite that suppresses feeding and obesity. The biosynthesis of Lac-Phe from lactate and phenylalanine occurs in CNDP2+ cells, including macrophages, monocytes and other immune and epithelial cells localized to diverse organs. In diet-induced obese mice, pharmacological-mediated increases in Lac-Phe reduces food intake without affecting movement or energy expenditure. Chronic administration of Lac-Phe decreases adiposity and body weight and improves glucose homeostasis. Conversely, genetic ablation of Lac-Phe biosynthesis in mice increases food intake and obesity following exercise training. Last, large activity-inducible increases in circulating Lac-Phe are also observed in humans and racehorses, establishing this metabolite as a molecular effector associated with physical activity across multiple activity modalities and mammalian species. These data define a conserved exercise-inducible metabolite that controls food intake and influences systemic energy balance.​
 
Samson said:
I have held that "exercise in a pill" is THE way to make money. I am not so convinced it is the path to good health, but it may be. Note this is very early work, and also that the intervention is largely in mice, and there is not a great record of drugs going from mice to humans. I am convinced some people will get very rich from this technology in the near/medium future.

An exercise-inducible metabolite that suppresses feeding and obesity

Exercise confers protection against obesity, type 2 diabetes and other cardiometabolic diseases. However, the molecular and cellular mechanisms that mediate the metabolic benefits of physical activity remain unclear. Here we show that exercise stimulates the production of N-lactoyl-phenylalanine (Lac-Phe), a blood-borne signalling metabolite that suppresses feeding and obesity. The biosynthesis of Lac-Phe from lactate and phenylalanine occurs in CNDP2+ cells, including macrophages, monocytes and other immune and epithelial cells localized to diverse organs. In diet-induced obese mice, pharmacological-mediated increases in Lac-Phe reduces food intake without affecting movement or energy expenditure. Chronic administration of Lac-Phe decreases adiposity and body weight and improves glucose homeostasis. Conversely, genetic ablation of Lac-Phe biosynthesis in mice increases food intake and obesity following exercise training. Last, large activity-inducible increases in circulating Lac-Phe are also observed in humans and racehorses, establishing this metabolite as a molecular effector associated with physical activity across multiple activity modalities and mammalian species. These data define a conserved exercise-inducible metabolite that controls food intake and influences systemic energy balance.​
Click to expand...

One thing I don't like about this is that it sort of implies that from the (theoretical) pov of your own body, what matters is not you (let alone what you consciously want) but a trigger which primitively tells "it" that you will be beneficial (to stuff) if you do x.
Not that it is some new implication. It's just anti-egocentric, so imo quite anti-personal.

I think that, if humanity stays around long enough (and for those that stay around with it), we will have pills for every somatic issue. Which will definitely be a very good thing, despite any internal artifacts.
 
Kyriakos said:
One thing I don't like about this is that it sort of implies that from the (theoretical) pov of your own body, what matters is not you (let alone what you consciously want) but a trigger which primitively tells "it" that you will be beneficial (to stuff) if you do x.
Not that it is some new implication. It's just anti-egocentric, so imo quite anti-personal.
Click to expand...
Either I do not understand this at all, or it could be said about almost any drug. Things like statins, steriods, beta blockers, and just about anything other than treatments for infectious diseases could be described as "a trigger which primitively tells "it" that you will be beneficial (to stuff) if you do x".
 
Samson said:
Either I do not understand this at all, or it could be said about almost any drug. Things like statins, steriods, beta blockers, and just about anything other than treatments for infectious diseases could be described as "a trigger which primitively tells "it" that you will be beneficial (to stuff) if you do x".
Click to expand...

By "you will be beneficial" I mean "the human", as juxtaposed to "it" ("it" being a hypothetical, summed-up calculator for such triggers). The paradoxical situation here being that "it" will die along with the human, too persistent in only helping if the human primitively "shows" ability to be of use to something external (neither himself nor it).
So while in some things there seems to exist such a seeker of a trigger (as in your example with pill-induced metabolism, if we suspect that exercise-induced is tied to "the human has stuff to do in the world" or similar), it seems a bit uneconomical to have your own body retain the ability to help "you" but hold back and only help if it registers you are of use to something external. It's why I called this "primitive".

The use, in the abyss of prehistory, of such "primitive" triggers, of course, is far more evident. Back then there was no language, and so the immediate group of humans was more important to survival. Probably a lot of artifacts from there remain - some also are still very useful; when a human has no language (is an infant). How else would an infant make you realize he/she is hungry, if they don't get to cry out of feeling pain/discomfort?
But what was useful once, can be really detrimental in future periods.
 
Last edited:
Kyriakos said:
By "you will be beneficial" I mean "the human", as juxtaposed to "it" ("it" being a hypothetical, summed-up calculator for such triggers). The paradoxical situation here being that "it" will die along with the human.
So while in some things there seems to exist such a seeker of a trigger (as in your example with pill-induced metabolism, if we suspect that exercise-induced is tied to "the human has stuff to do in the world" or similar), it seems a bit uneconomical to have your own body retain the ability to help "you" but hold back and only help if it registers you are of use to something external. It's why I called this "primitive".
Click to expand...
Again, I could be getting the wrong end of your stick, but my understanding of the "evolutionary logic" is that exercise tells the body where it should invest its calories. In the evolutionary environment we (almost) never had excess calories without a requirement for exercise to gather them, so we did not evolve to spend calories maintaining our cardiovascular system in the absence of demand on it. Since we do this lots these days, it can be in our interest to "fool" our body into thinking we do more exercise than we really do, so it spends more of the calories available in maintaining our heart etc. rather than storing them for a rainy day as fat.

This is probably very similar to statins, and a similar argument could be made for steroids in that we know we can depress the immune system and reduce our susceptibility to auto-immune damage with increasing our susceptibility to infectious disease.

So I would say this is the "advanced" way of managing our bodies, rather than the primitive way of actually doing what the body is used to responding to.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Similar threads

Omni314
Pokemon Explained
2
Replies
27
Views
6K
bestrfcplayer
B
Top Bottom