In response to Dr. Darwin by Lori Oliwenstein
Lori Oliwenstein does a good analysis looking at natural selection and the reasons why we get sick and why, in the past, what we are sick of now helped save our ancestors before. She notes, diseases happen randomly and pop up, but before you know it they will smolder and then the outbreak will end on its own. Example of this is the Ebola outbreak. However, during one such outbreak, there are certain individuals who are not affected by the fatal disease. For one reason or another, their genes, whither they mutated before the outbreak occurred or during we do not know, but are different in the way it prevents the bad disease that is affecting everyone around them. Later on in life, however, historical evidence of documenting what our ancestors have had, tells us other problems may occur later on in life, or in our line. Lori points out the classic case of sickle cell anemia. “Some years ago, researchers discovered that people with one copy of the sickle-cell gene are better able to resist the protozoans that cause malaria than people wiuth no copies of the gene. People with two copies of the gene may die, but in the malaria-plagued regions such as tropical Africa, their numbers will be more than make up for by the offspring left by the disease-resistant kin.” Further studies have show that in present day, those whose ancestors obtained this gene, their offspring are prone to have hypertension. There are many factors that may have caused such to occur, however the drastic difference in lifestyle; what once was a mutation that helped save lives of those in the past, is now affecting their children’s children. My speculation would be because their lifestyles and way of living are so extremely different today compared to what their relations had to go through in the past. Not only are we not living in a malaria prone society, but we are less active than we were not hundreds of years, but decades ago. Our lack of physical exerction is relatively new to our gene pools and because of this, problems are bound to arise. Our ancestors were most defiantly more active than we are today. They fought and worked hard for what they needed to survive. Today, we sit on our butts and earn money for food to survive. Instead of making fresh foods, we go to fast food restaurants and eat food that only stresses our body because it holds no nutritional value. No wonder so many people today are dying of heart disease, diabetes and being overweight. Though we may be finding new research to ‘fix’ problems in our life, maybe the one thing we need to fix is the way we live our lives. Maybe the best answer, instead of looking for the next pill or surgery, is to eat right and exercise.
