Friend of mine who's a group ride leader has a minimal turn-by-turn in a wireless earpiece paired to his phone, which sits in his pocket and runs a navigation app.
Means he can lead rides confidently and fluidly while also being completely present and aware.
Which is in itself odd, as there's no obvious mechanism (at least in a developed nation inhabitant who typically have considerable fat reserves and ready availability of food) for the immune system to need resources which would be otherwise used by the muscles.
Like we can all feel the lack of "energy", but that energy isn't the same thing as actual calories, glycogen, blood O2 and so on. Presumably a lot of CFS conditions are relating to that biological switch - "you're ill, rest up!" - getting stuck in the "on" position, but AFAIK nobody has definitively found it despite a whole lot of looking.
They don't, as a rule, drink alcohol, which helps quite a bit for GI, breast and liver cancers.
Wear modest clothing, cover themselves up from the sun. Although that can lead to Vit D deficiency when they move to high latitude countries.
And they don't eat bacon, sausages, salami or other salt-cured pork products which are thought to promote some GI cancers due to the curing process forming nitrosamines.
>Why hasn't evolution turned the dial up another couple of notches?
Because evolution doesn't care about us beyond reproduction age (after which is when most cancers occur, especially considering that historically that age was between say 16 and 35).
Or even better phrased, because evolution doesn't care or plan at all, it's a blind mechanism.
If a local minimum is ok, we'll stay there for as long as some environmental or other evolutionary pressure gets to move us further.
Cancer wasn't a big issue for most of our existance as species, especially with lower life expectancies, more active lifestyles, zero obesity, zero pollutants, etc.
In evolutionary terms, modern lifestyles are not even a blip, especially post-industrial ones which don't even register.
That's a very late specimen, and in fact one which "led scientists to speculate that he was involved in copper smelting", hardly typical of revolutionary timescales.
In evolutionary timescales, agriculture and permanent houses are a dot in the timeline, there were no longhouse dwellers for 95% of homo sapiens' history, and none at all for hominids before homo sapiens. They were nomadic foragers.
> Because evolution doesn't care about us beyond reproduction age (after which is when most cancers occur, especially considering that historically that age was between say 16 and 35).
This is the lie that needs. to die. Elder people were very important in even the most primitive societies. "lifespan" was low in pre-history, not because no one lived long lives, it was because infant mortality was very high.
Lie implies conscious distortion of the truth, the word you were looking for is "falsehood".
Second, even if "elder people were very important in even the most primitive societies", their role is much much important from evolutionary perspective than the pressures based on reproduction. Which is why most close primates get by with zero roles for post-reproduction grandparents.
Also elder people being "very important in even the most primitive societies" is a cultural and recent in evolutionary timescale phenomenon, first and only secondarily an evolutionary one.
> "lifespan" was low in pre-history, not because no one lived long lives, it was because infant mortality was very high.
They also lived shorter lives to begin with. Even in later historical times (say a couple of millenia or so), people's life expectancy at 15 (meaning, with infant mortality excluded) was much shorter than today.
Nobody said that "no one lived long lives" however. Some did. It's an aggregate limitation, not an absolute one.
Not disagreeing at all that elders are and have been important, but if it’s a benefit after reproductive age where does the selection come in?
I’m open to ideas. The only one I’ve been able to come up with is more second-order: the genetic benefit could come from having your children also pass on your genes, if there was a higher probability of them doing that with their parent alive past reproductive age.
"Bitch" by Lucy Cooke has a chapter dedicated to this if you're interested. It's pop sci but a great read and offers some new perspectives.
Menopause seems to be a biological adaptation to this - most mammals don't have it, they'll keep on having young until they're totally exhausted, and die not long after. Humans seem to be adapted so that women have a wild-type generation's worth (15-20 years) of useful lifespan post fertility.
> Because evolution doesn't care about us beyond reproduction age
I wonder if that's true. There's bound to be some benefits or drawbacks to aggregate fitness when people age. Sure, the contribution is very indirect and so it'll happen yet slower. But imagine if people lived until they were 300 years old. Depending on how frail they are, that could be a drag on reproduction and resources.
>The benefits and drawbacks that appear after reproduction age can’t be passed on.
If we consider grandparents, they could.
E.g. more fit/older grandparents -> more help and experience sharing for raising the kids given to the parents, more infants survive. This would chose for lineages where grantparents are helpful && live more.
What I meant though is that the main evolutionary pressure of us in in reproduction. Sure some past-reproduction-age traits play a role, but hardly as big.
> Because evolution doesn't care about us beyond reproduction age (after which is when most cancers occur, especially considering that historically that age was between say 16 and 35).
True. If we can find a drug or gene therapy that extends the reproductive age of humans, evolution will take care of all diseases in a few million years, give or take.
Could be a cliff fitness function. Heard about this relativ typ schizophrenia here on HN a while back. The idea is that some phenotypes promote survival of the species overall, but due to random mutations are sometimes detrimental to individual members of that species
It could also be indirectly linked to other benefits. Humans have lost the CMAH gene, making us able to run long distances and hunt down large prey animals. But because of this we can no longer process specific sugars that you will still find in mammalian meat. That causes inflammation and arteriosclerosis. But those things only kill you after many decades, so there seems to have been a net positive effect on evolution.
This idea can generally work, but one should be careful of 'just-so' stories in evolutionary biology.
It appears this deletion happens in other animals and may be attributable to pathogen pressure. It's arisen multiple times, which makes it hard to claim that it has a specific role in primates (beyond its presumed antimicrobial benefit, which any animal should enjoy).
Evading pathogen pressure is just another benefit behind the scenes. The point is that I would be careful to attribute any of these things to such weird mechanisms when there are so many much more realistic explanations that we just haven't fully uncovered yet.
> Evading pathogen pressure is just another benefit behind the scenes.
I'm imagining that this relates to a specific pathogen that may no longer exist (like the presumed mechanism of the most common cystic fibrosis mutations and cholera).
I'm not sure how this would relate to humans running, however.
Perhaps, but AFAIK similar things show up in other metabolically "different" animals - sharks, naked mole rats - whereas rodents adapted to a "run hot and fast" kind of a lifeplan seem to be especially prone.
We know that the body has cancer suppressor mechanisms, because when they fail (due to HIV or genetic mutations) people suffer higher rates of the disease. So it's reasonable to guess that evolution has chosen not to dial them up further.
It feels like the immune/inflammatory system is something we understand about as well as the brain, which is to say pretty good at a gross anatomical level, and also at the fine molecular level, but with a heck of a lot of complex system dynamics in between remaining to be mapped out.
Interesting article challenging today's popular understanding of cancer genesis and development, and outlining the increasing understanding of the role inflammation plays in stimulating the growth of cancer cell populations.
Ask a dairy farmer. Inflammation-mediated carcinogenesis is certainly a thing for some specific types. How much it's true across the board is speculative, but a lot of inflammation-related conditions also have association with higher cancer risk for the given body part.
Four syllables and two or three words versus a single phoneme or kanji tells you something about relative priorities, though...
If a culture has a word for cat which is "owl face bat ear dog" or something, sure it's got cats, but we can intuit that they're a less central concept to that culture than bats, owls or dogs.
Even though I'm a touch sceptical as to how good LLMs are at coding, imagine developing world demand for LLMs via a cheap Android handset for $1/month.
There's a lot of use case for the information retrieval side, especially for people whose educational level and mindset means well-crafted search queries were never a thing for them.
But there's also the other side of the trade. How much are suppliers willing to pay for upranking? It's a dirty business model, Enshittification 3.0+, but when did that stop anyone?
I'm curious as to whether the consensus is that the observed behaviour of COVID waves was ever fully and satisfactorily explained - the tend to grow exponentially but then seemingly saturate at a much lower point than a naïve look at the curve might suggest?
To those interested in numbers it was explained early - even on TV. Anyone interested saw that it was going like a seasonal flue wave. Numbers were following strict mathematics. My area was early - the numbers peaked right before people started to go crazy - the rest was censorship - There was a lot of fakery going on by using very soft numbers. Very often they used reporting date instead of infection date.. and some numbers were delayed 9 months... So most curves out there were seriously flawed. But if you were really interested you could see real epidemiological curves - but you had to do real work to find the numbers. Strict mathematics of a seasonal virus was something people didn't want to see - and this is still the consensus...
Well, the shapes look very seasonal... Do you know something about epidemiological curves?!
The wave 2020 in Europe was often smaller than 2018. And the data was perfectly seasonal. If you know people working in nursing homes and hospitals, you can ask them what happened later in 2021...
I heard a lot of stories - from first hand... They parked old ladies in the cold in front of open windows for fresh air - until they were blue... They vaccinated old people right into an ongoing wave and of course they had more problems caused from a wrongly trained vulnerable immune system - sane doctors don't vaccinate into an ongoing wave. What was going on in hospitals and nursing homes was a crime for money. Just ask the people that were there. A combat medic I know that now works in a hospital called 2021 a crime.
And still - solid Epidemiological data - wherever you could find it - was still perfectly seasonal. You could see some perfect mathematical curves. Just very high because they actively killed people. Even pupils in school spent all day in front of open windows in the cold... To remain healthy... How stupid is that...
Not all places are equal, but I've taken a look at German all cause mortality. 2020 was not special. In 2021 it started rising synchronous with vaccinations.
This repeatedly confuses correlation and causation. The shape is seasonal - of what relevance is the shape? Why shouldn't we expect there to be a seasonal component of an airborne virus?
Similarly, to say "deaths increased when vaccines happened" is the most clear illustration. Why did the vaccines exist? Could that be related to the mortality increase? You can see charts here for Switzerland, US, UK: https://science.feedback.org/review/misleading-instagram-pos...
The shape is relevant if you want to evaluate measures.
If you can get your hands on some good data you'll find perfect mathematical seasonal functions. This is a serious criterion to exclude any measures from having any influence on the curve. It was just the seasonal thing happening. The data proves that measures were all useless - you could have worn any fancy hat for government measures instead. There are no trend changes in seasonal data you can corrolate to measures. The only trend changes you can find are in the reporting data. There's a decrease in reporting delay before a measure and there's a lot of reporting delay after the measure. Accidentally or intentionally reporting delay tried to make government measure look good.
For vaccines I know 3 cases where people died and 2 who have serious health problems after vaccines. There is a reason, why there's no good official data on vaccine efficency - and why all placebo groups were killed as soon as possible.
Why did vaccines exists? The answer is simpler: Because of Money!
It would probably be hard to do. The really huge factor may be easier to study, since we know where and when every vaccine dose was administered. The behavioral factors are likely to be harder to measure, and would have been masked by the larger effect of vaccination. We don't really know the extent of social isolation over geography, demographics, time, etc..
There's human behavioural factors yes, but I was kinda wondering about the virus itself, the R number seemed to fluctuate quite a bit, with waves peaking fast and early and then receding equally quickly.. I know there were some ideas around asymptomatic spread and superspreaders (both people with highly connected social graphs, and people shedding far more active virus than the median), I just wondered whether anyone had built a model that was considered to have accurately reproduced the observed behaviour of number of positive tests and symptomatic cases, and the way waves would seemingly saturate after infecting a few % of the population.
You'd think that boosters for a technology whose very foundations rely on the sigmoid and tanh functions used as neuron activation functions would intuitively get this...
When people want a smooth function so they can do calculus they often use something like gelu or the swish function rather than relu. And the swish function involves a sigmoid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swish_function
Means he can lead rides confidently and fluidly while also being completely present and aware.
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