Genes and Diseases
An article was published in The Conversation — Your genes could determine whether the coronavirus puts you in the hospital — and we’re starting to unravel which ones matter. It just says that how bad of a case you get of Covid 19 may depend on certain genetic variations you carry in your human leukocyte antigen system (HLA) that respond to the presence of particular diseases. This quite likely doesn’t surprise you so how about something new? Or maybe it’s old and just forgotten.
I’ve studied diseases like this for many years. In a much younger day I was in an AP biology class when the instructor mentioned offhand in a conversation “oh yes, there are lots of tropical diseases that we have never encountered and know nothing about”. That really caught my attention. I was curious and I seem to have a knack for biology so my first thought was to look at that in terms of evolution and natural selection. Medicine and vaccines were a huge thing because so many people used to die of disease. Also, diseases like this are quite natural so it was bound to happen, and being just something that was produced by natural evolution, it’s going to happen again.
In biology, there is actually some question about why sex even occurs. It is a very resource demanding strategy. It is accepted that it allows for genetic diversity and adaptation. That adaptation may primarily be about disease. The battle between the bugs and our immune system is ancient. The genes for our immune system are unlike the rest. They don’t follow the same rules. We’ve heard of “survival of the fittest” but a lot of times when disease is involved, it’s just about survival of the luckiest that have the right immunological combinations. We then call them the fittest. According to Biologist Robert Trivers, sex may be about “adapting to cyclically changing conditions”. What he is saying is that humans genetically cycle back and forth between genetic states just to keep ahead of the diseases. It’s sort of like sitting on a rock until the mosquitos find you, then moving across a meadow to another rock until they find you again. (I did that one afternoon repeatedly.) Suffice to say that disease is a very dominant factor in evolution, perhaps the dominant factor. Research suggests that we can smell things about each other’s immune system and may make mating choices with that in mind.
As natural selection effects, disease is unique. It is harder to avoid than predators or accidents. Then once you’ve got a disease it is a uniquely general selective effect that can cause a fatality by breaking any weak link in a person. It could be physical or even psychological. Your body heats up to fight the disease and if there is a weak link, it will likely fail then. Sometimes though it may be a unique physical or mental strength that gets you through a disease that you otherwise wouldn’t.
Disease is important but I quickly quit studying disease because it leads to something else more important. Instead, I started studying the effect of reduced natural selection on humans, such as removing disease. We do it in many ways and we call it “human progress” but natural selection is nature’s mechanism for keeping our genes healthy. It was commonly known that this “progress” would lead to an unhealthy “genetic load” of broken or dysfunctional genes as natural selection failed to play its role in keeping the genes healthy in the species. Consider the high incidence of hemophilia in the royal families of Europe. If they had been less wealthy and didn’t have the best medical care of the time, natural selection would have killed many more of them off. Medicine has rapidly advanced though and the effect of vaccination at stymying natural selection is huge. Often in the past, a third of the children in a family might succumb to disease before maturity. This all led me to what I studied for over five decades and what I learned might be the story of human destiny. It looks like a good one, so I hope so.
I studied the topic as I had been taught. I looked at it in an ecological context. Ecology is a great tool because it is made to organize a large amount of information about a species “energetic and reproductive strategies”. Basically it covered everything about an animal and plant from where it lived to how it got its food, to how it reproduced to what it became food for. It had room for everything. What it immediately shows is from an ecological perspective those changes we all feel are larger than they look. When we created the farms and cities of civilization, we were entering a completely new ecology and leaving behind the tribal ecology we were most adapted to. Not only that, but it was an ecology we had to create since it didn’t exist in nature. I’ve been trying to systematically work out how we could genetically and strategically adapt to the ecology that follows the tribal one. Disease and other changes in natural selection become shown as just a small part of this, even if quite important. In one way, disease might though be the most important driver. Besides the problem of genetic load, we need to do some serious genetic and strategic adapting to this new ecology. I wrote one book called Genetics For A New Human Ecology to describe how to ethically and economically solve the genetic problem. I’ve been working on the Strategy For A New Human Ecology one for a few years. Now those are great books, but the best ideas don’t always catch people’s attention. What will, I suspect, is that genetic research already shows the rise of de novo mutations. They accumulate like compound interest. At some point not far off, women are going to figure out that a growing percentage of their children are going to be born with genetic defects. They will not tolerate that. Then what I have to say about the genes might be of interest because there is an ethical economical way to solve the problem. It would also open some valuable potentials of our genetic wealth. For a video explaining all of this, you might want to look at Genetics For A New Human Ecology. For the larger story of how we can create and adapt to a new ecology were we can survive and develop long term you might want to check out my current work at Zagwap. You might find a story about humans you never saw before that describes great dangers but also potentials as great as our aspirations. Also, it tells what diseases are really all about and what we ultimately have to do to deal with them.
