This is part of a chapter of my Div III, so in a way I'm kind of cheating and recycling my own material. But then again, no one other than my committee will probably ever read my Div III, so in reality I'm just broadcasting my thesis to a larger (albeit both anonymous and perhaps non-existent) audience.
A note about Div III: Div III Hampshire students are a lot like annoyingly proud parents who just had their first kids.
Have you ever met one of those obsessive new parents, who just has to relate everything back to their new baby? They'll regale you with late-night bottle feeding stories about each coo and burp until you want to claw your ears out. Since, of course, no one has EVER had a baby before, this must all be fascinating, since obviously they're a veritable pioneer in the field of reproduction.
And as such, every moment of her child's development must be of paramount importance to you, because who doesn't want to hear a two hour detailed retelling of baby Cindy's new reluctant acceptance of peas?
Of course, it wouldn't matter if you were talking about rocket science or drink mixers -- suddenly it has somehow all related back to babies again and "speaking of babies, you'll never guess what baby Harry did yesterday..." and you're left standing there thinking "Wait. How did we get back here? I would've sworn I successfully steered the conversation far away from this."
Div III students are eerily similar: You get to listen to their incessant rambling about this and such inconsequential realization they've had about the whole process, and life, and academia, and this new idea which amazingly occurred to them at 3am, after a bottle of Jack Daniels. And you get to hear about each turn and twist of their writing process, and every change in direction and new concept revealing itself to them like all the wondrous workings of the universe. Of course they assume that everyone wants to hear about all their mental crap, which turns into verbal diarrhea, pouring out of their mouths at every opportunity.
Sorry, do I sound jaded? Pff.
Anyhow, I shouldn't even be talking, since I *am* a Div III student, and since I'm already so immodest that I think everyone wants to hear my ruminations on each topic which crosses my brain. (Note: this blog.) Luckily, you can navigate away from here with merely a click, and I can assume that since this is a one-sided conversation, that you're in rapt attention.
"'Why, in a body of such exquisite design, are there a thousand flaws and frailties that make us vulnerable to disease.'
'The great mystery of medicine is the presence, in a machine of exquisite design, of what seems to be flaws, frailties, and makeshift mechanisms that give rise to most disease.'
My question in all of this has slowly but forcefully become: Why DO we get sick?
According to Randolph Nesse, a professor of Darwinian Medicine, the causes of all disease extend far beyond our complex bodies as they exist now.
Instead of asking why a person gets sick, he asks instead why sickness exists at all. Not in an existential "why are we here and what are we for" way, but in terms of evolution and human history. Medicine looks at a single body in a vacuum, as a self-sufficient machine which malfunctions and breaks down by nature of its design. Yet every human body is not only the product of two other bodies which created it, it is the product of thousands of years of biology and evolution. Much like a finely tuned machine, each piece and part was designed and placed there for a reason. To understand disorder, you must also understand how harmoniously the entire body works together in the context of its creation.
Now, this is not to say that the causes of all ailments boils down to evolution. Rather, many other determinants, like the toxins we are exposed to every day, random accidents, stress, diet, parental DNA, affect our health. To ignore any set of factors, be they the proximal or evolutionary set, is to ignore information about the body which would help us to better understand disease and the body as a whole.
The Darwinian Causes of Disease are described as 6 distinct categories: Defenses, Infection, Novel Environments, Genes, Design Compromises, and Evolutionary Legacies.
1. DEFENSES. Defenses are those mechanisms our body has to protect ourselves, like a cough. A cough, which is bothersome and can lead to other problems, is not actually the problem at all. The problem is that there is something in your lungs that needs to be expelled. A cough is the response of the body to a problem. (Stopping the cough, of course, wouldn't solve the problem. The problem is fluid in the lungs, or mucous, of infection, etc.)
2. INFECTION. Self-explanatory.
3. NOVEL ENVIRONMENTS. Evolutionarily, we were created and bred and molded for certain environments. Counter that with human migration, fatty diets, drugs, air-conditioning, cars, pollution. etc., and there you are. Imagine putting a turtle in the Sahara. He wouldn't last very long, either.
4. GENES. This is a big one.
All things considered, the number of harmless genetic mutations which occur, versus the number of harmful ones, is fairly equal.
Picture flipping a coin. You only want to get heads every time. Of course, you will eventually be disappointed when the penny lands head-up, which will eventually happen. That's just how probability and chance work. But now picture a million coins. If you still want them all to land with Abraham's shiny face staring up at you, you're about to be seriously disappointed. The fact is, the more times you're flipping, and the more coins you have, the more times tails is going to appear.
Now, human genetics and evolution is a little more complicated than flipping a coin. So what happens when you do land tails up?
Here is a mutation. Your genes have mutated, so something in the normal process has gone awry, and unfortunately, that part of your body is "defective". Evolutions solution is that, most likely, you will:
1. Not reproduce, since you are (logically) a) not a good mate and b) might not even live long enough to reproduce, depending on the severity of the mutation.
2. Simply die.
This is the unfortunate mechanism of evolution.
Ok, now lets say you have a beneficial gene. How does "evolution" know that this gene is beneficial?
Answer:
It doesn't.
Mutations (whether we consider them harmful or harmless), in the eyes of natural selection and evolution, are neither positive nor negative, unless they improve your ability to mate, or effectively nix you from the mating tract entirely. Then they become positive or negative, but only in that they have affected your ability to make more copies of yourself and pass on your genetic material.
Every mutation has a context which dictates its value. If you're a naked mole rat born with superman strength eyesight, you may pass that mutation on, and you may not. The superman eyesight isn't hindering, nor is it helping, your daily moleish life. Your value within the species isn't changed in any way -- you live underground, and eyesight is worthless there.
Now, if you are a lion, and your mutation is superhero eyesight, this mutation can become of value. Your role as a hunter is greatly aided -- thus making you a better hunter because of the mutation, and because of that, a better candidate for some lady lioness who is looking for an effective provider to mate with.
Now the mutation becomes beneficial. This mutation, in some secondary way, helps you make more offspring; you pass on more genes.
This doesn't always happen. Nature wants to keep the status quo. Like all things, we are perpetually trying to achieve homeostasis. There very well may have been genetic mutations, which by chance, causes the bearer to be able to breathe in outer space. Fantastic!
Only... no one would ever know, because here on earth, that mutation didn't benefit the person in any way. Your environment, again, dictates the value of a mutation. And what we as humans might see as valuable, is not always agreed with by natural selection and evolution.
5. DESIGN COMPROMISES.
Some "design flaws", or illnesses, things we think of as problems, are actually indications of evolution's compromises.
We have back problems, but of course, our species can also walk upright. If you'd like to give up walking upright to eliminate your back problems, by all means. You have permission to crawl.
6. EVOLUTIONARY LEGACIES.
A.k.a. - You gotta work with what you got.
Sometimes, what you got happens to be so convoluted and complexly designed that you're kind of screwed. So, you make due with what you've been given.
I'm sure all this theory is of little comfort to someone diagnosed with brain cancer.
But there it is. The most important part, however, is understanding that Darwinism is N-O-T eugenics. Eugenics is a reaction to Darwinism.
The idea of Darwinian Medicine is simply a system.
Humans, by our nature, are constantly trying to rise above our humble animal beginnings.
We read and write, we think and feel, we build useless and useful systems and structures which we argue about. We create words and names for emotions which we can't even point to or locate. We create new systems of communicating about our lack of communication. We murder and reproduce with and without reason. We have art, blenders, music, Christmas lights and libraries.
And we are all wild little Icaruses -- smart enough to build the wings, but not smart enough to stay away from the sun. We create our own problems by our very humanity, by our very existence as what we are. You might say we are too smart for our own good.
But lest we forget where we came from... we are still subject, in the end, to the same system we were built in. As self-aware and somewhat intelligent creatures, we desire to be healthy, to live longer, and we fear our own mortality and defects. Disease is almost a reminder of where we're from. In that framework, Darwinian medicine is not malicious, nor embedded with any sort of meaning at all, other than what it is -- it is where we came from. Its the rules we must play by.
And if we can: by our uniqueness in our comprehension that we exist at all, and might exist further -- its a set of rules we might learn to bend, right or wrong, to try and better our chances in the game.
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