Darwin Eats an American Dinner

I have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How NativeAmericans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It. I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book.

I have just posted a video on this topic.

As I explain in chapter 4 of the book, Native Americans depended largely on agriculture. Native Americans (mainly in Mexico) domesticated many important crop plants, such as maize (what we usually call corn), some kinds of beans, squashes, tomatoes, peppers, and chocolate. The impact on world agriculture has been significant: today, maize is grown not just in the Americas but Europe, Africa, and Asia as well.

In chapter 2 I explain that pre-Columbian Native Americans and their villages and cities were healthy. Largely this was because of a healthy diet. The meat was largely venison, turkey, and squab (from passenger pigeons). But also their diet, based on corn and beans, was healthy because of protein complementarity. Corn has protein, but you cannot live on corn protein, because an essential amino acid (lysine) is largely absent. Beans have protein, but you cannot live on bean protein, because an essential amino acid (methionine) is largely absent. But mix the two together, and you have a complete source of protein.

This is called protein complementarity and is found all over the world: corn and beans in America, lentils and wheat in the Middle East, and rice and soybeans in Asia. All of these traditional diets were healthy.

In addition, Native American diet had plenty of Vitamin C—as did the traditional diets of people on other continents, if the poor had access to fresh fruits and vegetables.

But in one important aspect, European peasants had an unhealthy diet and Native Americans did not. Many European peasants had to live off of rye bread. The ergot fungus (Claviceps purpurea) lives in rye plants, and when the rye grain is produced it is mixed with ergot spores. These spores have a toxin, lysergic acid diethylamide, that partially destroys blood circulation and results in fingers and toes being stubby and falling off, and in a generally crummy state of health. No such fungus or toxin grows in maize, the basis of Native American food.

Lysergic acid diethylamide is better known as LSD, and at larger doses can produce hallucinations.

Once in a while, outbreaks of ergotism occurred in European rye fields, especially after cold winters and wet springs. At these times, the peasants got a big dose of LSD and had hallucinations—acid trips, which they could not explain. This was the cause of witch hunts and werewolf crazes in the middle ages. Once again, this is something that never happened among Native Americans.

Native Americans, before Columbus, were healthy, and one reason was that they ate healthy food which, unlike European peasant food, never contained LSD.

Have a nice July 4 meal of corn, beans, squash, tomatoes, peppers, and of course chocolate! 

White Superiority? Not.

I recently posted an essay (July 4), just below about how the Founding Fathers thought they had found a natural basis for government: natural selection leads to democracy. This was a flawed idea, but an advance over all previous European thought about government.

Americans often  make the erroneous, and dangerous, assumption that America became strong because of the cultural, maybe even biological, superiority of immigrant white Europeans over Native Americans. The Europeans beat the Natives, and that is why America is mostly white, or the descendants of slaves or later immigrants, rather than mostly Native Americans.

But it is clear that there is no inherent cultural or biological superiority of Europeans. The reason that European immigrants (mostly from England, France, and Spain) beat the Natives was because the Europeans had guns, and used them to slaughter literally countless Natives. The Europeans also brought diseases.

The evidence for this is, in part, that an earlier European invasion of North America failed as miserably as the 1492 invasion succeeded. I refer to the Viking invasion.

Vikings invaded many places in Europe, and conquered those places, before eventually blending in. In stark contrast, the Vikings who invaded North America had only a foothold (Vinland, in what is now Newfoundland) and soon departed without leaving any descendants. Unlike later invaders, the Vikings had only spears, swords, and other weapons that were not too different from those that the Natives possessed. That is, they were more equally matched with their intended victims. Under these conditions, the Natives easily expelled the Vikings. Why did this happen?

It happened because the Vikings were small and sick. Against the strong, healthy Natives, they didn’t stand a chance.

As I was writing chapter 1 of my forthcoming Forgotten Landscapes (due out in 2025 from Rowman and Littlefield), I found that the evidence of Viking weakness and Native strength was mostly indirect. Direct evidence is hard to come by. I thought it would be easy to prove, from skeletal remains, that Natives were taller than Vikings. Frequently, a less well-nourished population has shorter people. But there is little skeletal evidence for this. It is undeniably true that some Native tribes, with an average height of five feet eight inches, had the tallest people in the world before European contact, based on skeletal remains. But the Vikings were almost as tall. Late medieval Europeans averaged five feet five inches tall. The difference is due mostly to nutrition and disease.

But, to me, the indirect evidence is convincing. Native American tribes had less poverty, therefore better nutrition. They also had better health. They had almost no plagues of disease. For example, they did not have the low-level ergotism, which created constant sickness among poor Europeans, resulting from a fungal toxin in rye bread

There is also the anecdotal evidence. Anecdotal it may be, but it is still a valid test of the hypothesis that Vikings were small and weak. When Richard Fleischer directed the 1958 movie The Vikings, starring Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis, he wanted to model the Viking ship after an actual archaeological specimen. The actors who played the warrior roles, however, could not fit into the ship. The set designers had to rebuild the ship, leaving more leg room for the actors. The actors were men of ordinary modern build, resulting from ordinary modern nutrition and exercise.

The Viking invasion, without guns and plagues, failed. The later European invasion, with guns and germs, succeeded. Clearly the Europeans were not superior to Native Americans, except for the guns and germs.

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Asymmetry and Fake LinkedIn Profiles

Researchers in human evolution, and writers who present their research to a popular readership, have long known that bodily asymmetry is an indicator of general genetic health. Mutations, toxins, and disease can lead to bodily asymmetry, especially facial asymmetry. In mate selection, one mate can assess the health of the other mate by seeing his or her facial symmetry. If the left side doesn’t line up with the right, that might mean something somewhere is wrong.

People with facial symmetry are esteemed as beautiful and healthy. And these are also the faces that corporations want to present as representatives to their customers. You are much more likely to respond positively to a sales rep with a symmetrical face.

Corporations have used this fact to generate thousands of fake profiles (for example, on LinkedIn). These fake beautiful people will make you want to consider doing business with the corporations that they represent.

How do you know that an online personality is a real person? You can’t. It’s as simple as that. But there are some things you can look for. Back when I used to answer robocalls (something I no longer do; nor do I decline them, since that would tell the spammer that the number they have reached is real) I would listen to the “person” for a few seconds. Then I would say, “You are a robot.” The voice would keep talking for a couple of seconds, then say “I am not a robot.” Of course, you can program a robot to say, “I am not a robot.” I just delete all these calls without even answering them.

It is much more difficult to create a fake online personality if a portrait is involved. But, at the moment, it is possible. Researchers have found that fake LinkedIn profiles have faces that are too perfect. The facial symmetry is utterly perfect. No real human being is utterly symmetrical (see this article).

Of course, corporations will quickly learn how to insert a one percent facial asymmetry generator into their fake personalities. In the near future, we will never be able to tell if the person in the profile is real or not.

Saving the World—For Whom?

There are numerous ways in which I try very hard to help save the world. Many of these ways have become habits I hardly think about. What are some of these ways, and why do I do them?

• I try to keep myself healthy. I eat healthy, and I exercise—no fancy diets or exercises, just healthy food and hiking. Why? It might seem obvious: I want to be healthy. But there is another reason. If I get sick, the insurance companies and, ultimately, the taxpayers will have to foot part of the bill. Insurance premiums go up for everybody, not just for me, if I get sick a lot.
• I am “environmentally responsible.” I drive a fuel-efficient car, I recycle almost everything, I do not waste energy and water. Why? Very little of it is for my own personal benefit, though I admit that I really, really like my Prius and enjoy paying less for gasoline. Most of my environmentally responsible actions, however, are for the good of society and the world.
• I have also been responsible during the ongoing (yes, folks, it’s ongoing) pandemic by doing what I can to prevent the transmission of the virus. The benefit should seem obvious: I am less likely to get sick. But the major reason is that I am less likely to transmit the virus, even if I do not have symptoms.

In all three cases above, the major beneficiaries of my actions are other people. Not only are they other people, but they are people I cannot choose. When animals, including humans, are good to their offspring, their own fitness is enhanced. And when animals, including humans, are good to other animals from whom they expect goodness in return (evolutionary scientists call this direct reciprocity), they can specify who the recipients are. But the three cases above are examples of, at best, indirect reciprocity: at most, the only benefit that I can receive is a good reputation. All of you out there can admire me for practicing a healthy, environmentally conscious lifestyle. But actually, this doesn’t matter a whole lot to me. While I want you all out there to like me, I will never know whether most of you do or not. I will have no opportunity to cash in on the financial and material benefits of a good reputation. Therefore, the major reason I do these things is to help other people. I’m not bragging; so, I gave away an old waffle iron to Goodwill? How hard was that? Certainly not a sacrifice. Some poor person may benefit; I will never know whether this happens, or who benefits.

The purpose of this essay is to point out that there is something different about indirect reciprocity. And that is: the altruist cannot choose the recipients.

• When I reduce my medical bills, thus reducing everyone’s insurance premiums, I cannot choose whose premiums will go down. I wish the premiums of only people who try to be healthy would decrease. But even if you are a smoker who sits in front of the television, you benefit, even if only a little, from my good health. You’re welcome.
• When I reduce my environmental impact, I cannot choose who will benefit. I wish that my reduction of greenhouse gas emissions, my reduction of the overall use of pesticides (by buying from a farmer’s market when possible) would benefit only my fellow environmentalists. But those of you who drive big pickups around, spewing pollutants from a huge vertical tailpipe, and throw hundreds of thousands of pieces of garbage onto Oklahoma highways (I’ve made numerical estimates of how much), and who viscerally hate environmentalists like me will also benefit. You’re welcome.
• When I do my part to reduce the spread of coronavirus, I wish that the only beneficiaries were others who, like me, restrain themselves from lurid contagious activities in public. But if you are one of those people who take your guns and occupy state capitols to protest against wearing face masks, people who hate responsible citizens such as myself, you will also benefit. You are also less likely to catch the virus, because of what I and people like me are doing. You’re welcome.

Oh, by the way, don’t try occupying federal land or state capitols unless you are white. Just sayin.’ Native Americans tried it in North Dakota a couple of years ago, and many black people are rioting right now in response to the death of...I think his name was George Floyd, but so many black people get killed by cops that I can’t keep them all straight. You have heard about the big riots, but there have been many peaceful protests, such as the one this past weekend in Tulsa. This, despite the fact that the majority of white cops are good people.

People like me, who use every opportunity to act against racism, contribute to a better society. Who benefits from this better society? Even people who hate everyone except their white buddies and who show us their guns will benefit from this better society. I wish I could round up all the racists and put them on a ranch in Nevada and let them shoot each other. But this will not happen. Even though I hate it when this happens, my good actions will benefit assholes. I wish I could snap my fingers and all the assholes would get beamed up to outer space and materialized inside a nebula, where they would burst open and their blood would spew out into the galaxies. But it doesn’t work this way. Once a good deed leaves my fingers, I lose all control over it. The good deed diffuses into the Giant Karma Machine only, unlike real karma, if there is any such thing, what goes around comes around to everybody.

And the same is true of all of you good people who are reading this, since assholes don’t read anything not written or spouted by other orange assholes, whether on certain networks, or in blogs, or via Facebook and Twitter. We all have to just get used to the fact that, by the laws of nature, all our good deeds will end up benefiting, if only a little, the people who least deserve any benefit from anybody. And all of us good people can collectively say, even to those who would rather die than thank us, you’re welcome.

I have one more essay about Loren Eiseley to post, but this essay is timely.

Thinking Back on René Dubos: Ecological and Evolutionary Medicine

For many years, I have been teaching a subject in general biology classes that I call the Ecology and Evolution of Disease. It includes the subject that is now called Evolutionary Medicine (it now even has its own journal). I continue to be amazed that no general biology textbooks seem to mention it.

I grew up thinking what most people still think about health and contagious disease. As Ogden Nash wrote, “A mighty creature is the germ, though smaller than the pachyderm...” It was all very simple. Germs caused contagious diseases. The solution was to kill the germs. Problem solved.

But it is not so simple, and the book that opened my eyes to the real complexity of health and disease was Man Adapting, a 1965 book by René Dubos. It was an old book when I first read it in the late 1980s. It was ahead of its time, and maybe still is.

Dubos’s main point was that health is a creative response. It is delimited by biology and evolution but it is highly personal. That is, a disease can take a different course in different individuals. Dubos said that, when we ask what man is, we should not be satisfied with the answer that he was an ape. Instead, we should think of ourselves as ecosystems in which health is the result of the proper balance of all of our physiological processes, as well as all the microbial species that call our bodies home.

Dubos wrote about how the human body is an integrated whole, and conditions of the body can alter the course of disease. For example, stress can affect the immune system, with the result that bacteria that are already present but unnoticed can flare up into disease. This is now well known. The stress of viral disease can make a person susceptible to bacterial infections such as sinusitis and pneumonia, caused by “germs” that were already present. The stress of allergies caused me recently to have severe sinusitis. We have all seen examples of people who, from stress and its related habits such as smoking, seem to always be sick. Also, Dubos may have been one of the first scientists to write extensively about how an upset to biological rhythms can result in disease, including infections.

And the effects of stress can pass on from one generation to another. A mother animal who experiences stress can have behaviorally abnormal offspring, and it might result in part from the effects of stress on the prenatal environment of the fetus.

Dubos also included a lot of information about how Old World diseases killed up to 90 percent of many Native American and Polynesian populations, because they had never evolved resistance to these germs. Why didn’t the Europeans die of New World diseases? Because there weren’t very many. America was populated by immigrants from Siberia, and Polynesia by people sailing long distances in boats. Only healthy people could have made those journeys. This opened my eyes to a whole new understanding of some parts of human history. After Dubos, many historians have written about this.

An important, and still often ignored, aspect of our body ecosystem is its microbial inhabitants. Gnotobiotic animals (born, raised, and maintained in totally sterile conditions) are abnormal. Their organs develop abnormally, and so do their immune systems. They heal more slowly from injuries.

Many parts of our bodies, especially the skin and digestive tract, harbor trillions of bacteria, most of which are harmless, and some of which are beneficial. Some of the beneficial ones produce molecules which, to them, are wastes, but to us are vitamins, especially B vitamins. In our intestines, the lactobacilli and bacteroides are beneficial, while bacteria such as the famous E. coli are usually harmless. E. coli just seem to be along for the ride. In rodent colonies with normal intestinal bacteria, kept in total isolation from the outside environment and other rodents, the E. coli gradually disappear, leaving the lactobacilli and bacteroides to dominate. But even the merely non-harmful bacteria can do us some favors by crowding out the pathogenic bacteria.

This is the ecology of disease within a human body. (There is also the ecology whereby bacteria spread from one host to another.) But evolution also plays a role. This was the book where I first read about how many disease organisms have evolved to become less virulent. For example, many diseases, such as smallpox, leprosy, and (a disease Dubos and his wife studied) tuberculosis became less and less deadly over the course of many decades even before the introduction of antibiotics and antiviral therapy. Some infectious diseases have pretty much evolved themselves out of existence. One example is the English sweating sickness, which was a severe plague from 1485 to 1551. Its main symptom was profuse sweating. Then it vanished. Perhaps, Dubos speculated, it evolved into such a mild form that nobody noticed it after 1551.

I knew he was right as soon as I read his book, because I could think of my own stories. I had read many gruesome stories about smallpox. But my own grandmother had smallpox. For her, it was a severe but not deadly disease, and did not leave pock marks when she recovered. She had become infected with a relatively mild strain of smallpox. Before the WHO began its campaign of worldwide vaccination to eradicate it, smallpox was already on its way out. I also knew this from direct experience. I grew up in Tulare County, California, after which the disease tularemia is named. It is endemic to the area, and probably everyone who lived there had gotten it. Only, for us in the twentieth century, it was a mild disease that we mistook for the flu. I did not know I had had it until I tested positive for tularemia antibodies when I was a teenager.

How can a disease evolve to become milder? The simplest explanation is that a horrible germ that quickly kills its host cannot easily spread to a new host after it kills the first host. The first host is too sick to get up and spread germs around, and everybody stays away from him if he tries. Also, some people are naturally immune to the disease, and they are the ones who survive the most often. But the main reason is that the mild germs are the ones that are successful at spreading to new hosts.

This is the evolutionary process of balanced pathogenicity. It was scientifically demonstrated by a study on a rabbit virus, myxomatosis, in Australia in the 1960s. The rabbit populations evolved resistance to the virus, and the virus populations evolved into a milder form.

I got the impression from reading Man Adapting that balanced pathogenicity was true of all infectious diseases. Of course, it is not. Cholera has not evolved into milder form, because you get it from drinking contaminated water—water that has been contaminated by very sick, or by mildly sick, people. You cannot avoid the bad germs of the very sick people, mixed in as they are with the mild germs of the mildly sick people. Also, malaria may evolve to become worse, because mosquitoes like to bite sick people who cannot shoo them away, rather than alert people who are busy. (However, Dubos pointed out, a person who is very sick from malaria will die sooner, such that the mosquitoes might bite the mildly sick people more often simply because there are more of them.)

It was this book, Man Adapting, that changed many of my views of science, making them less linear and more holistic.

Welcome to a Peaceful New Year!

Well, that may be too much to expect. No matter how much peace and goodwill we create in our lives and among our family, friends, and associates, external forces (such as corporations and politicians) do their best to disrupt us. Because those forces keep us desperate, we will buy whatever the corporations want to sell and go along with whatever the politicians want to foist on us. The classic example is the family with two breadwinners and three jobs that does not have enough time to eat healthy or to work for social and economic change. Corporations, and governments that support those corporations with tax dollars, are happy to supply the unhealthy food.

But the more peace we can have in our own lives, (1) the happier and healthier we will be despite our circumstances, and (2) the more independent we will be of the dominant forces of society as well. To find inner peace, we do not have to subscribe to a specific spiritual doctrine or purchase a special kind of health food. All we have to do, as much as possible, is to find a regular balance in all the things we do in life, all of them in moderation. If we can, that is.

By balance I refer mainly to keeping a regular schedule with your biological clock. More or less regular times for getting up and going to sleep, for eating, and seeking mindful relaxation. One of the worst things we can do—I say from the experience of having done them and then quit—is to let other people control our minds and create tension, mostly from television. Unsubscribe, folks, and save yourselves a lot of money. I quit cable in 2002 and since that time I have saved $10,000. Not sure where that money went, but it didn’t go to cable. Learn to cherish silence. Worked for me. Instead of watching TV, I read and write. Usually in silence.

We become most aware of the disruption of our biological clocks when we experience jet lag. Everything seems to go out of balance, not just our cycles of sleep and wakefulness. But it is not just jet lag but poor daily time management that can disrupt our biological clocks.

Medical assistance may be necessary. If you have sleep apnea, as I did, surgery or a ventilation device may be helpful. Get rid of apnea and you will get your life back. At least I did. I also have sleep onset myoclonus, which is a kind of torture that even Dick Cheney never thought of: at the moment of sleep onset, my muscles contract just enough to wake me up. Maybe just a little muscle, maybe a lot of big ones. Over and over and over and over several times a minute. Medication brought this under control. There is heavy-duty medication, but hemp oil may work just as well. I used to take regular naps; now, I nap maybe three times a year.

An article was published in the November 25 issue of Science in 2016: “Circadian physiology of metabolism,” by Satchidananda Panda of the Salk Institute in La Jolla (Volume 354, pages 1008-1015) This link takes you to the summary; full articles are available only to AAAS members. In this article, the author summarized the many different disorders that can result from disruption of the biological clock:

• Obesity
• Insulin resistance
• Disruption of gut microbes
• Cardiovascular problems
• Chronic inflammation
• Liver disease
• Increased cancer risk
• High cholesterol
• Sleep disorders
• Compromised muscle function

What a list! All of these physiological effects are interrelated, and related to the biological clock. Disrupted sleep can make you fat, give you diabetes, make your intestines sick, and increase the risk of other problems. I was astonished to see this list. I have some of these problems in small measure; what a walking sicko I would be if I did not seek to live in harmony with my biological clock.

I have found that, by mindfully seeking inner peace and following a regular schedule, I am seldom tired. For this, I must also thank certain medications. But we must enable such medications to work by seeking regularity and balance. Even when I have no work to do, I find myself reading and writing—I am on vacation right now—because they are not, for me, stressful. I rest the way the heart muscle rests: between each beat.

Was Ben Franklin right? Early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise. Seems too simple. But if Franklin read that Science article, he would have claimed vindication.

My Green, Green Happy Place

Sometimes I like to go to my happy place. This time, it was so that I could relax and enjoy my happiness at being a new grandfather. For some people, their happy place is a fantasy inside their minds. But for me, it is an actual place: the forest. In particular, the forest on Turkey Mountain outside of Tulsa.

The forest is a place with layers upon layers of stories. It is a palimpsest, that is, a document with layer upon layer of writing. On this particular like, I already knew almost all of the stories. One story was the geological history of the landscape. As I looked down from the mountain onto the Arkansas River, I remembered that this mile-wide river was once ten miles wide, as the glaciers up north melted. Another story was about human impact. The forest all around me grew in just the last century, since the time when this mountain was covered with oil derricks. Each species of tree, and each tree, had its own story: an evolutionary story of adaptation, and a developmental story of how each individual tree adjusted to its immediate environment of shade and sun, of deep soil or rock outcrop. The story is written from moment to moment. When I hiked, a drought was underway, and many leaves were wilted. Wilting is not completely a bad thing; by drooping down, a leaf has less of a heat load from the sunlight and avoids some of the damage it would otherwise experience. There are also many stories of food webs, whether it is of insects that have eaten the tender leaf tissue between the veins, or fungi eating dead branches. There is the story of the hard, green, inedible persimmon fruits that keep animals away until the seeds are ready to disperse, and only then do the fruits become ripe and delicious. There is the story of stumps sprouting back to life.

I knew all of these stories, but I just wanted to see them again on this hike. But I kept my eyes open, just in case there was a new story. And I found one—just one. A mimosa sampling was hit hard by the drought. Mimosas have lots of little leaflets which, after being held horizontally to face the sunlight in the day, close upward at night for reasons that nobody knows for sure. The leaflets also close upward during moderate drought, thus reducing their solar heat load. The leaflet movements are caused by bags of water called pulvini (singular pulvinus). When the bags of water exert pressure, they push the leaflets; when the bags lose pressure, the leaflets return to their original position.

But what I did not know was, are the pulvini on the top of the leaf or the bottom? If they are on top, then the water pressure pushes the leaflets open; their nocturnal closure represents only a loss of pressure, a relaxation, going to sleep. If this is the case, then the closure of the leaflets at night does not need an explanation. The plant is saving energy by letting the leaves relax. But if the pulvini are on the bottom, then the nocturnal closure demands an explanation: why would the mimosa leaf deliberately close its leaflets at night? This requires the expenditure of energy. The same is true for leaflet closure during moderate drought. If the pulvini are on the top, leaflet closure is merely the result of drought; but if they are on the bottom, then leaflet closure is a deliberate act to prevent drought damage. Of course, the pulvini are too small for me to see.

But I saw one leaf that was so stressed by heat and drought that the leaflets were starting to curl up and die. And in this leaf, the leaflets were horizontal. This tells me that the pulvini are on the bottom. I know this because, when severe drought causes the pulvini to stop working, the leaflets are horizontal, not vertical. In the photo, the drought-damaged leaflets are on top, the leaflets that are actively responding to drought are on the bottom. The damanged leaflets are horizontal, and the responsive leaflets are almost vertical.

To me, this was a new story that I learned on my hike. But I enjoyed re-experiencing the thousand other stories in the forest that I already knew.

We Can Do It but We Won't

I am talking about lifting the masses of the world’s poor out of desperation and into a decent life. We can do it. It is autocatalytic: once some people have begun to rise, they can assist us in lifting others. This is already happening in some places where it has been encouraged, places in which the rich overlords have not prevented it. Humankind can rise if it is not oppressed. The Old Testament prophets railed against those who would grind the face of the poor into the dust. This is why they are poor: it is not because they are lazy, but because rich people oppress them. (There are, of course, a few lazy ones, but this is not usually the case.)

One of the most pressing needs is to control diseases such as malaria and intestinal diseases. These diseases thrive in, and reinforce, a spiral of poverty. Poor people with diseases cannot afford medical care, not even in America, and this only allows the diseases to spread more. The economic burden is multidimensional.

• First, there is the cost of the medical care itself.
• Second, there is the cost of people not being able to work. This is a cost to all of society, not just to the direct victim.
• Third, the parasites themselves, living in people with chronic diseases, consume a lot of the nutrients in the food that the people eat. If someone is full of worms, like the dissident who escaped from North Korea a couple of weeks ago, the worms are using up calories and nutrients.
• Fourth, and this is one I never thought of until I read about it in something that Lewis Thomas wrote, is that the food that feeds the parasites represents a substantial portion of the agricultural output of any nation that has a lot of poor sick people. Lewis Thomas said that fully twenty percent of the food produced by countries with chronic malaria goes to feed the malaria parasites.

The spiral of sickness in poor societies is reinforced by all four of the above forces. To help poor people escape from sickness, especially the mild chronic sicknesses that do not kill them but keep them torpid all of their lives, will help their lives not only directly, but indirectly by improving the entire economy of their nations.

For nations as for individuals, health is a good investment. Will we help poor countries to achieve this investment?

Lewis Thomas said, “The idea that all men and women are brothers and sisters is not a transient cultural notion, not a slogan made up to make us feel warm and comfortable inside. It is a biological imperative.”

Another Reason to be Healthy

We can all think of lots of reasons to pursue a healthy lifestyle. This includes precautions to avoid being exposed to germs, as well as to keep ourselves from being susceptible to them. Rest, exercise, good food, and avoidance of stress (if only partially) help to keep us from being susceptible. Of course, flu shots help (this year, only a little).

But there is another reason, one that involves altruism, and doing something for the benefit of the whole society (and ourselves as well). The overuse of antibiotics has led to the evolution of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including some of them (superbugs) resistant to more than one class of antibiotics. Most people who read this blog know that this is evolution, not just a metaphor of it.

Doctors are supposed to do their part by prescribing antibiotics only to patients with some clear indication of bacterial infection, as antibiotics are ineffective against viruses. That is, it is their job to reduce the total number of unnecessary antibiotic prescriptions. But they have to prescribe antibiotics for bacterial infections. And here is where we can do our part. If we reduce the total number of bacterial infections that we get, through lifestyle, then we are reducing the total number of necessary antibiotic prescriptions. The result is less evolution of resistance, which means the antibiotics that we have will be more effective for the people who need them.

Time to go home and eat some broccoli.