Studying Diet, Immunization, and Infection of Our Ancestors

It is said that farming is "the worst mistake in the history of the human race."(2). In An Edible History of Humanity, chapter two, Tom Standage explained the reasoning behind this statement. The explanation is, farming took longer, created health issues and changed the structure of our bodies.

With all of the technology improvements and advances we are able to fight and protect more effectively against ermiging diseases.

People of the Old World had domesticated pigs, horses, sheep, and cattle(1), which had acted as pathogens to infect the Europeans with diseases. In addition, diseases were constantly circulated with centuries of war, exploration, and city building. During the process of natural selection, disease-intolerant

Viruses, Plagues, and History, written by Michael Oldstone, is an insightful and highly educational book that details the history of, that’s right, viruses and plagues. Through typically dry, yet engaging prose, Oldstone recounts what seems like all of it while simultaneously bringing to light the contributions of those brave scientists who asked themselves, “why.” He focuses his attention on some of the most notable viruses such as smallpox, yellow fever, measles, polio, and later he focuses on more contemporary battles against disease.

Your Inner Fish, by Neil Shubin, is a journey into the 3.5- billion- year history of the human body. It is filled with many interesting topics covering the subject. The four topics I liked from it were: Getting a Grip, Handy Genes, Teeth Everywhere, and Adventures in Body Building. I feel these topics gave key information about our past.

As the second part of this reflection paper, I selected a book ‘A Short History of Disease’ by Sean Martin. He is a writer and filmmaker also known for his other famous books like The Knights Templar, Alchemy and alchemists, the Gnostics. His films include Lanterna Magicka: Bill Douglas & the secret history of cinema. The most alluring thing which conceives me to cull this book is a history of the disease, as a medical professional, it's always tantalizing to know from where all these begins and this book reaches up to my expectations as it started from the first ever recorded disease in the history of mankind. He isn’t lying when he say this a history of the disease. He starts from the earliest bacteria to evolve on the earth, long before there was anything around to infect. This book is divided into seven chapters, each chapter describes the history of diseases in a particular era. Chapter One: Prehistory, Chapter Two: Antiquity, Chapter Three: The Dark and Middle Ages, Chapter Four: The New World, Chapter

Dr. Sharon Moalem, the author of Survival of the Sickest, provides a fascinating glimpse into the idea that modern human diseases that afflict us actually have a significant role in the selection and the existence of our ancestors. Before reading this book, I was used to thinking of diseases as disorders that adversely affect a person. While this may be the case for most individuals, Moalem explained in his book that that there’s an underlying connection between various diseases and longevity of a species. He explained how these diseases helped fight against more life threatening situations such as the Bubonic Plague, malaria, and the ice age. Most importantly, I learned that evolution did not necessarily favor adaptations that make us better, but those that help us survive, even if these adaptations would kill us in the long run.

Before, biologists assumed all microbes are bad for the human body (automatically thought of pathogens), caused many diseases and harm our body fundamental systems. In addition, the biologists think that our body is already built which had all the functions required to maintain our health. However, the attitude has changed over the last decade. The biologists characterized the most prevalent species of microbes in the body, and found out that these collective microbes do not threaten us, and they also are important part of human bodies.

Dr. Sharon Moalem has conquered the scientific arts of diseases, neurogenetics, and biotechnology. In ‘Survival of the Sickest: The Surprising Connections Between Disease and Longevity’ Moalem shares with us the importance of biological change and relationship between lifeforms of all sizes as he unravels the astounding connections between evolution, disease, and human health.. Moalem attempts to tackle the questions that drive the biological world’s exploration of evolutionary disease. Is the human relationship with disease not a simple case of parasitism, but a that of commensalism or as far as mutualism? Does the way the scientific community view desease change our knowledge of history and evolution? Could disease itself be what fuels change in not only our past but our future? In Moalem efforts to

Ever since life first appeared on the planet we call home, these organisms have been changing in a process called evolution. Evolution favors genetic traits that helps a species thrive and reproduce and tries to weed out the traits that threaten a species’ chance of survival. Genes that give a survival or reproductive advantage spread through the gene pool faster while genes that do not help a species get less common. This key mechanism of evolution is called natural selection. But even with evolution and natural selection, genetic diseases that make people sick are still in the gene pool after hundreds of thousands of years. So why would this happen? In Dr. Sharon Moalem’s Survival of the Sickest, he proposes that many of today’s deadly genetic

The main question presented and answered in the book is why we continue to carry the genes for harmful inherited diseases instead of weeding them out through evolution. The book looks are few different diseases that affect a large number of people and tie them back to some historical event that because of this disease they were able to survive and live longer than their healthy counterparts. The author described this theory in a simple quote:

Chapter 10 of Disease and Human Evolution discusses leprosy. What initially stood out to me is that leprosy isn’t actually the official name of the disease. It was renamed Hansen’s Disease after Dr. Hansen, who discovered the real cause of leprosy. This is where I saw the first evolutionary mechanism. The mycobacterium that causes leprosy, Mycobacterium leprae, can shed its cell wall. This allows it to adapt to a variety of environments, including our body, allowing it to infect as many individuals as possible. I think this is a great example of part of the evolutionary synthesis, that heritable variation will be systematically biased. This says that variation will be biased towards adaptive and well-integrated variants. This mycobacterium certainly did that in evolving the mechanism to shed its cell wall so it can integrate into any organism’s system. I also found it incredibly interesting that this bacteria can also infect armadillos of all animals. While Barnes also discussed that chimpanzees and monkeys can be infected, it stood out to me that armadillos specifically can be infected, as we typically just learn about livestock and non-human primates can be infected with the disease.

The type of study conducted was a pilot study. It was also a controlled and randomized blind experiment that used a sample of thirty-four Dutch women and men from the Netherlands. The study is a correlation study. The question the author asked was “Whether, independent of weight loss, a Palaeolithic-type diet alters characteristics of the metabolic syndrome.” The article was not published in a peer-reviewed journal. The author’s hypothesis was that a Paleolithic diet would alter characteristics of metabolic syndrome.

Throughout the history of the entire world, things have constantly been changing. Societies have been created and flourished, humans evolved, new technologies have been created, and new theories discovered. However, with so many advancements in the human world, there are some things that cannot be stopped from happening or change. Organisms can get an illness at any moment in their lives from many different causes. Some illnesses cannot be cured, can cause unbearable symptoms or pain, and can cause you to lose your life, such as cancer. If a person is terminally ill, their illness will be the cause of their death no matter how much treatment is received.

Back in the 1200’s the human race had just discovered the circulation of blood. That shows how far we have come with modern medicine. Things like vaccines and even genetics such as DNA would never have been discovered if it was not for