The age of glyphosate, an antibiotic that has been sprayed so much that it’s testable in the rain and in sources of groundwater at this point. The effects of long-term antibiotic exposure are up still being learned. But it clear means a gut biome disruption.
Thanks Monsanto. Err... Bayer (same people who sold Heroin over the counter 100 years ago)
Did you actually read the article you linked? It is actually arguing that logic doesn't work.
> Overall, a scrutiny of the method used in these commentaries by Samsel and Seneff reveals a major flaw. These authors employ a deductive reasoning approach based on syllogism, which is formed by two or more propositions used to generate a conclusion. The first proposition is generally related to glyphosate’s properties (e.g., glyphosate is a chelator of Mn) and the second proposition is related to human physiology (e.g., sperm motility depends on Mn). From each of these pairs of propositions, Samsel and Seneff conclude a causative link of glyphosate with the etiology of different diseases. For instance, since glyphosate is a metal chelator (proposition 1), and since sperm motility depends on Mn (proposition 2), they conclude that glyphosate may partially explain increased rates of infertility and birth defects (13). They extend this reasoning to multiple body functions to propose that the dysregulation of Mn utilization in the body due to glyphosate’s metal chelating properties explains autism, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, anxiety disorder, osteoporosis, inflammatory bowel disease, renal lithiasis, osteomalacia, cholestasis, thyroid dysfunction, and infertility. More recently, Beecham and Seneff have used the same reasoning to conclude on a causative link between glyphosate chelation of Mn and the large rise in the incidence of autism spectrum disorders in children within the US (35). However, there are no scientific studies establishing a causative link between glyphosate and the described chronic diseases.
They are literally saying that syllogism cannot possibly work because there aren't "scientific studies". What is syllogism? It's literally logic. If you then read the actual article they are criticizing, there is literally graph after graph establishing a strong correlation between disease and glysophate use. Not only do they find correlations, they reason through several causative mechanisms, in extremely detail, based on chemistry, and then somehow that doesn't count? That paper is absolutely choc full of evidence. What more are they holding out for? It's like their brain doesn't work.
I'm sorry, I don't see what you see in that article and I don't think you understand it either.
Graphs showing increased cancer risk since glyphosate was introduced is almost zero evidence that it does anything. Lot of other things have happened in that same time period such as increases in obesity, etc. The real way to study it is to give an animal glyphosate and see if it does anything to cancer rates.
You seem motivated to push a particular narrative and are cherry picking papers to support it, so I really don't want to go back and forth anymore about this, but here's a even larger meta-study that has a completely different conclusion.
> The strongest evidence shows that glyphosate causes hemangiosarcomas, kidney tumors and malignant lymphomas in male CD-1 mice, hemangiomas and malignant lymphomas in female CD-1 mice, hemangiomas in female Swiss albino mice, kidney adenomas, liver adenomas, skin keratoacanthomas and skin basal cell tumors in male Sprague-Dawley rats, adrenal cortical carcinomas in female Sprague-Dawley rats and hepatocellular adenomas and skin keratocanthomas in male Wistar rats.
In fact, this paper links to some of the same studies that the paper you linked to also does, with different conclusions. In particular, it seems your paper was extremely selective about which cancers could be caused by glysophate, e.g. ignoring several types.
> Graphs showing increased cancer risk since glyphosate was introduced is almost zero evidence that it does anything.
That's just an absurd statement, so I'll disengage now.
up to 14% of deaths 400 years ago in the UK were cancer according to the new research. It's currently 29% in the UK, and 17% in the world. 29% is much higher than 14% but according to the article people used to believe it used to be just 1%. How much of that increase to 29% is because of new problems or just because we live longer so cancers get the chance to kill us more vs all the things that used to kill us earlier
Excerise and especially walking and running does a lot for back health but at the same time they probably did a lot heavy lifting and handicraft (weaving, shoe making, etc) in bad ergonomic positions.
Poor ergonomics are almost non-existent in traditional cultures. This makes some intuitive sense as only in a wealthy industrialized society is poor posture and back/leg weakness de-correlated from surival. This is one starting point to research it: https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2015/06/08/4123147...
Chiropractors are charlatans so it was the same as any other healing elixir scam that was being run (which are notable and commonplace throughout history).
My brother is a chiropractor who mostly agrees with you. He thinks that most chiropractors do about as much harm as good, or more.
Of course, he believes otherwise about his own particular school of chiropractic, the Gonstead Technique. As a long time beneficiary of that method I've come to agree with him. It has helped me quite a bit, and the long list of his vastly improved patients (many or most who are refugees from other chiropractors) is impressive and convincing to me.
Some healers are quacks; in some disciplines, most are. But that doesn't make them all quacks.
I've done some research on this and it seems there is some evidence that what chiropractors do, Spinal Manipulation Therapy, is effective when combined with traditional medicine and physical therapy at reducing chronic back pain (and can help some people manage it with reduced pain management medication which is a plus!) However if a chiropractor tells you they can fix your stomach or headaches or anxiety by cracking your back they're a quack.
I have hEDS hypermobile Ehlers Danlos Syndrome (so does possibly 2% of the population.) The vast majority don’t who have it don’t know it. My stomach issues and headaches are caused by joint problems with a likely vagus nerve link. It’s entirely possible that the kind of people the go to chiropractors could benefit in this way.
They may be on to something without knowing exactly what.
We've always had charlatans pretending to have solutions to our problems before chiropracty and homeopathy, we had traveling salesmen peddling fish oil as a cure-all and of course the power of prayer.
Not sure if it speaks to the gullibility of humanity or craftiness of private enterprise.
Chiropractors don’t actually help with back pain or any of the other problems they claims to help. The practice is based on “re-aligning” subtle subluxations in the spine. Two problems: there is no evidence that these subtle subluxations exist, and there is no evidence that spine alignment even extreme ones cause any ailments other than pinched nerves. Here is a good summary about the history of this pseudo-science:
https://theoutline.com/post/1617/chiropractors-are-bullshit
All of the answers you've received seem rather unsatisfactory. Here is my take on it: Chiropracy is a complex nonsensical system of commercializing a simple principle: cracking your back feels nice. What did people do before chiropractors? They cracked their own backs. I can crack my spine from my tailbone up to my skull. From this, I experience temporary relief from general back discomfort (which is the most chiropractors are capable of.)
To the commenters calling it quackery; you're never going to convince somebody who experiences relief from cracking their back that their experience of relief is fraudulent crackery. Subjectively, it's as real as it gets. Skeptics handicap themselves with this sort of over the top rhetoric.
One thing which I always thought of, but which the article doesn't mention, is age. Especially older people seem more prone to cancer, so in my mind a lower life expectancy will naturally lead to a lower cancer rate, as people die before cancer "is able to get them". Or am I missing something?
Yes, age and life expectancy is a huge part of it. In the book "Rebel Cell: Cancer, Evolution, and the New Science of Life's Oldest Betrayal", Kat Arney touches upon this exact question and reaches the conclusion that cancer was as prevalent in ancient times as it is now (perhaps accounting for surges like smoking-related cancers), and also mentions age as a big factor in the archaeological discrepancy.
Reminds me of the actuarial sims which excluded all deaths from disease, old age, and traffic accidents. Stairs were one of the top killers but population tapered off even as "cannot die of disease or old age" immortals although some outliers could make it a bit past a millennia.
This is a common misconception. Life expectancy hasn't changed much. It's children dying that bright down the average in earlier years. If you lived to your 20s your life expectancy was pretty much the same as it is now.
I have heard this multiple times and I would love some citations because although most of the reduction in life expectancy may come from death at child birth, for obvious mathematical reasons, I cannot believe wars, famine and disease don't account for anything
[1] shows pretty convincingly that probability of a dearth due to violence or war has not changed during the last 2000 years. What we perceive as peace is a consequence of extremely violent WWII and to lesser extent WWI that killed vastly more people even after accounting for population increase than wars in the 19th century.
According the the US Social Security Administration actuarial tables, the life expectancy of male Americans aged 65 years has gone from 12 to 21 years in the last century. This has massive demographic implications.
I agree, but cancer rates rise sharply as you age.
So, your claim (that life expectancy hasn't changed much) doesn't contradict the parent's claim (that a lot more people are dying of age-related cancers).
In Victorian England (1840) if you made it to adulthood (20) your life expectancy was ~ 60.
It's 82 today.
The effects are not as dramatic as when infant mortality is included but our life expectancy has absolutely increased.
It's a compelling theory, too, because the average age of a cancer is 66 today. But it really addresses the idea of cancer being less prevalent than less likely.
This is most emphatically not true and it is one of the reasons why contemporary pension systems are nearing bankruptcy and healthcare providers struggle with not having enough geriatric professionals.
Living into your 80s was uncommon prior to, well, even 1950. Nowadays, many developed countries have significant cohorts of people 80+ and even 90+. Unfortunately, while those people are alive, they are not particularly healthy. We haven't yet learnt how to expand average "healthspan" as much as average "lifespan".
A lot of the lower life expectancy was sky-high infant mortality, and if you made it to 10 in 1850 (hardly preindustrial, but preindustrial stats are harder to find) you could expect to live to 60 or so. Presumably you'd compare the cancer rates of your study's skeletons with the cancer rates of today's 60 year olds.
It’s amazing how precarious being born is. I think I read that about 200 years ago around 40% of people didn’t make it past 5 years old or something like that. Antibiotics have helped a lot in modern times, especially for mothers giving birth.
The improvement in child survival is attributed to many things, but it may be a mix of vaccinations, less indoor air pollution, much better hygiene, better nutrition, and perhaps just better parenting. (People have had some very peculiar ideas on how to care for and raise children; I wouldn't be surprised if in hindsight our distant descendants consider us woefully inadequate in that regard too.)
Most of the progress, in absolute terms, with reducing maternal mortality and the infant/toddler death rate in the industrialized countries was actually made before antibiotics were developed, in the late 19th / early 20th centuries. In England in 1851 about 26% of children died before the age of 5, falling to 23% in 1891, 19% in 1911, 11% in 1921, 9% in 1931, and 7% in 1941 (and then we're in the antibiotics era).
From a pair that has been undergoing IVF treatment since November 2019: it is very precarious. There are a lot of opportunities to die before someone draws their first breath.
I would make the last two consequences of the microbe theory of infectious disease, which also led to sanitary water supplies and waste disposal.
Why is the theory an accomplishment? Hooke's and van Leeuwenhoek's first observations of micro-organisms in water drops were treated as a meaningless curiosity for about 150 years, and essentially ignored.
Finally it was realised that here was an alternative to prevailing ideas about infectious disease that had great explanatory power. The war of ideas lasted until the early twentieth century, when the last doctors clinging to the "miasma" theory and its ilk finally gave up.
The theory made vaccines and antibiotics conceptually possible.
> A lot of the lower life expectancy was sky-high infant mortality
If that was true, then age composition would be roughly the same as is now, except for larger number of infants.
You could even argue that if you had weaker infants die, you should end up with statistically stronger adults than now and you should see people live to older age than now.
I don't want to say infant mortality rate wasn't high, I just want to say that it has nothing to do with the topic of the discussion.
The weakness in that argument is that it presupposes childhood health indicators and adult health indicators are linear, which we know to not be the case.
For example, the introduction and "ramping up" of testosterone and estrogen at puberty has a significant impact on the human condition that simply cannot apply to the prepubescent state, as does their subsequent decline in menopause and old age in general.
Each stage of life comes with its own signals that can be serious health conditions if present in other stages of life, but completely normal and healthy at the appropriate stage. A tween with acne is rarely something to call the doctor about. But a 3 year old with acne certainly is. A colicky baby needs a soother or some other placation. But a colicky adult certainly needs medical intervention.
So the idea that weak babies make weak adults and strong babies make strong adults doesn't work out as cleanly as this comment suggests.
I think evolution plays a part in why older people are more prone. A debilitating illness in your teens is likely to stop you reproducing and is more likely to vanish. But a genetic trait for cancer later in life can get past on.
Amongst the ""hallmarks of cancer" (there's a pair of papers with that title) is tissue invasion, angiogenesis and immunosuppression - and there are genes for that because the placenta needs those so the fetus can survive and reach term.
What I'd really like to know is incidence of cancer in marsupials, birds and fishes, one would predict it to be markedly lower.
And in very large animals there are adaptations that keep cancer in check, even though they have many more cells. IIRC, elephants have many copies of genes that induce suicide in aberrant cells.
Not entirely on point here, but you should look at that the other way around: mutations are retained unless they cause adverse consequences that result in them being selected out.
Also, even if the low average life expectancy was due to excessive mortality among children with chances to live up to 70 once one reached 40 not much different than today, it still does not imply that cancer rates were lower.
It could be very well that it is those people who would die as newborn or children without modern medicine and access to clean water have bigger chances of getting cancer with age.
Life expectancy is a tricky number to compare across long spans of time because it's heavily influenced by people dying young which was much more common in the past than it is now, people did die earlier but it's not as bad as a say 40 year life expectancy would make it seem because that number is dragged down by lots of early childhood deaths.
Yes, in 1800, even in more developed countries at the time, about 30% of kids died by age 5. And being pregnant was frequently fatal as well, with nearly 1 in 10 pregnancies killing the mom.
Not only that, but I imagine in pre-industrial times, those who got currently-curable forms of cancer didn't get cured during those times, and Darwinian forces stopped them from reproducing.
There isn't a necessarily good or bad here but those Darwinian forces did eliminate a lot of genetic defects from the population before modern medicine.
In the future though we might be able to yet again eliminate defects not by natural selection but by gene editing while still allowing those individuals to carry on a normal life.
Not a biologist, but been around them long enough.
I been cultivating a theory that mammals strategy
is more or less "go fast; break things".
That is, asteroid or not, we were on track to out evolve
everything that came before by extending and exploiting
explosive cell growth. No animal converts matter & energy
to body-mass faster than young mammals, the cold blooded
do not stand a chance. The competition would get larger
eventually only if some adolescent mammal did not
eat them first as peers.
consider how you would bet on
a 1 year old raccoon
vs
a 1 year old alligator
then again with
a 5 year old raccoon
vs
a 5 year old alligator
The mammal strategy traded the long game for the quick win.
We have all sorts of (genetic) machinery who's function is to grow fast
but then STOP as we can't support gigantic sizes.
(Maybe in part because of the quick and dirty foundations
but thermodynamics have scaling issues too)
So we need to shut of all those machines before we get too big.
And so here we happily sit in our bodies, our mammal factory
and everything is great; just don't push that big red button
over there, or pull that lever or that one or that one or ...
eventually if you live long enough some of those buttons will be pushed
and the mammal machinery will do what it evolved to do.
grow fast and break things.
A final observation on humans in particular, recently bipedal,
have not gotten all the bugs worked out on that.
Deployed a monkey patch for dimorphic gender singling
requires cron job flipping on a subset of growth machinery
some years after the main global shutdown but only flip them on
for a season or so;
still seeing evidence of switch bounce issues, see ticket BCRA1.
We humans are very unique though on how much care and dependency babes need.
From an evolutionary perspective natur might have just stoped after we gave birth but for humans you need to be still very healthy for much longer.
We have a second evolution which we as a species gained due to our more generic and bigger brain and therefore being able to retain and learn more even through generations.
Whenever nature stoped we continued (glasses, cancer treatment etc.)
I personally would not subscribe to your idea that cancer is our basis and we just let loose.
Cancer is just one sickness of a highly complex system.
And after all why would longevity even be a goal for evolution? It's a wishful human idea of lifing forever. I myself I'm looking forward to NOT life forever and still today the thought of not being able to end my life for good is my worst nightmare next to loosing my mind.
I think it is a cute hypothesis, but I don't believe it is fully functional, how would this explain megafauna? An I am not talking of moose, but of ice age gigantic mammals, which were just gigantic
They are extinct, so supporting his hypothesis ? It's not like evolution is a design process in which something gets "traded off" - random shit happens, something sticks.
They are extinct because in the game of size vs brains they lost. So this still supports their argument. Humans and human activity is part of the environment the same way as anything else. Humans were also here with cockroaches or horses but those are still around.
Yes if you live long enough eventually some kind of cancer will kill you. This is inevitable due to accumulating cellular damage. Someday it might be possible to repair that damage but it's not clear how.
Your objection is correct, and none of the responses you've received so far seem to have understood your point. I went ahead and read the actual published paper (https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002...) and it is just as statistically naive as the NatGeo article made it sound.
Let's cartoonishly oversimplify cancer so that we can see how life expectancy would affect observed statistics. Let's say cancer occurrence is 0% for people up to age 40, and then starting on the 40th birthday, cancer occurrence is 10% per year. Everyone who gets cancer dies immediately.
Then, imagine that life expectancy in 1500 was 25 years old, standard deviation 10 years (yeah lognormal blah blah just go with it). So, most people don't live to 40, but the ones who do sometimes get cancer.
But then, after 1500, life expectancy mean increases by 0.1 years per year. By the year 2000, life expectancy is 75 years old! Much more cancer is going to happen! Many more of the deaths will be from cancer!
Cancer itself didn't change.
So, these researchers see a lower cancer rate in the bones they're looking at, but they need to do some MATH on the ages these bones and of modern humans to know how to compare cancer rates then to cancer rates now.
If you just make up numbers to create a hypothetical model to explain an observation that's fine. But then it's just a theory.
Sebb suggested that lower life expectancy leads to less cancer. Dsjoerg defined a hypothetical model that would lead to that happening, and then said that proves Sebb was correct.
That's just circular reasoning. And when the hypothetical doesn't match observed reality it's a sign it might be broken.
There were plenty of old people. Life expectancy was skewed by childhood death and urban poor and wasn’t as grim as we think. (Most people lived outside of urban areas)
One big thing to consider is how would an 18th century person know they had leukemia? Cancers that don’t have a physical manifestation were probably classified as some other mysterious malady.
The modern age has possibly removed some carcinogens like inhaling smoke from (bon)fires, mycotoxins from spoilt food, nutritional illiteracy and unsanitary conditions.
But the modern age has introduced a lot of new ones like tobacco, food additives, sugar, gluten, radiation, asbestos, industrial processing of food, pesticides, sedentary lifestyle.
Wow. That’s mind-blowing. I knew it was a huge economic driver in the early American colonies, but I always imagined it pre-dated [in Europe] the colonization.
The entire Colombian Exchange is eye-opening. Try to imagine Italian food without tomatoes, Indian food without chili peppers, or a Britain with no chips to accompany their fried fish.
Calling a lot of these things carcinogens is a little odd. It's not synonymous with harmful, and even harm isn't obvious for all of these. Food additives and processing in general? Gluten for people who tolerate it?
During the last 120 years wheat was optimized for machines making its gluten content higher that could explain higher gluten intolerance among people presently.
It was not done on purpose. As an unintended consequence of selection for easy to harvest mechanically, easier to bake, better to respond to fertilizers modern wheat varieties contain more specific proteins of gluten type that cause allergic reactions.
Main role of gluten in bread is to keep gas, usually CO_2 from yeasts, bacteria or baking powder, inside dough - so dought raises and when heated gas expands giving even more volume to (not only) bakery products.
Gluten do this by forming gluten net during dought mixing. Or even by mixing flour with water and waiting. So gluten is super good and almoust magical ingradient.
Real problem is that Western World started to abuse wheat flour after yeasts were discovered. You know, in older times "white bread" was mainly for rich peoples and poor peoples used flour with more chaff. But in last years chaff costs almoust same as flour :)
Celiac disease is only 1-2% population, and non-celiac gluten sensitivity is 5-6%. So that "harmful gluten" is a myth. But if you have some intolerance then gluten is very very toxic. And nothing wrong with skipping it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten
Rye flour contains some form of gluten but it do not form gluten net. But still can be toxic for ill peoples.
So, using wheat flour/gluten is simplest way to have bread that have nice volume. Other flours are good for pies or require to use cake mold.
As for why gluten is better for machines: when dought contain formed gluten net it make it elastic, a bit like gum. So it can be nicely formed. Dought also can be to strong with too much gluten - that require much more force for shaping.
Also with good gluten net dought can sustain longer period after forming and before baking, making it less time sensitive - bread do not get flat before there is free place in the stove/oven.
For context: the molecular shape of gluten causes dough to hold better. Wheat with more gluten gives softer bread which rises better. Hence why gluten is so prevalent in domesticated wheat.
We’ve been optimizing stuff for palatability and processing since we started domesticating wheat. I am going to need a better argument about why gluten is special.
IMO above all is abundant food (overeating). No food is 100% perfect, so if you eat way too much you are more likely to expose yourself to something toxic or inflammatory.
Our bodies aren't designed to be topped-off 3 times a day.
And with the ideas of 1) less food promoting better cell health (especially factory made food being altered for sales) 2) more exercise ensuring better health, I have a solid belief that past life did well for our health on many fronts. (sure they were lacking antibiotics and a lot of useful medicine)
Perhaps of some interest is the book The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer:
> The book weaves together Mukherjee's experiences as a hematology/oncology fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital as well as the history of cancer treatment and research.[3][5] Mukherjee gives the history of cancer from its first identification 4,600 years ago by the Egyptian physician Imhotep. The Greeks had no understanding of cells, but they were familiar with hydraulics. Hippocrates thus considered illness to be an imbalance of four cardinal fluids: blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm. Galen applied this idea to cancer, believing it to be an imbalance of black bile. In 440 BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus recorded the first breast tumor excision of Atossa, the queen of Persia and the daughter of Cyrus, by a Greek slave named Democedes. The procedure was believed to have been successful temporarily. Galen's theory was later challenged by the work of Andreas Vaselius and Matthew Baille, whose dissections of human bodies failed to reveal black bile.
sv40 is a cancer causing virus that contaminated 1/3rd of all polio vaccines.
From wikipedia:
The discovery of SV40 revealed that between 1955 and 1963 around 90% of children and 60% of adults in the U.S. were inoculated with SV40-contaminated polio vaccines.
Quick rule of thumb, the reason we associate it with cancer is because the only ppl we systemically tested for it had cancer. If you tested everybody you'd probably find it in everybody since it was in a mandatory vaccine
I think a quick google search has steered you wrong. I don't think this is a huge story (I've never heard of SV40 before reading this thread), but just a little deeper...reading the executive summary, the story seems less clear cut.
"The committee concludes that the biological evidence is moderate that SV40 exposure could lead to cancer in humans under natural conditions."
And there's more. SV40's probably also transformative (observed in both mammals and humans) and the vaccine has moderate evidence of causality.
I am wondering if microplastic is a factor in addition to air and water pollution, processed/pre-packaged food.
Another factor maybe humankind beating/cancelling natural selection due to modern medicine. So people who would normally perish in olden days are living longer only to be later killed by cancer.
There’s another factor of total population. More people means more diversity and more DNA copying errors? Can someone expert in this field comment on this?
This presentation[1] from two years ago says two monomers used in different microplastics are known to be carcinogenic (ethylene oxide and vinyl chloride) - other monomers might be, and the polymers themselves weren't known to be carcinogenic. Do you have some more up-to-date sources ?
I thought it was accepted by the medical community every major ailment occurred at much higher rates “back in the day”. That it’s a case of having lacked sophisticated detection methods the numbers are so low.
When I saw a great^n grandmother's 1870 census entry, which said she had 7 children, 1 of which was still alive (at 55), the reality of life back then hit me hard.
This a meaningless question for most people, if it helps save lives in the future, great.
I think you should also pay attention to Bret Weinstein's work on telomeres and cancer. If the environmental pressures are for a low age, you end up with long telomeres to allow more dividing of cells to replace those damaged, however those same long telomeres make you more susceptible to cancer should you live longer.
Are our telomeres long enough to allow for the development of cancer, or is it necessary for the system to be overridden, thus allowing cells to replicate indefinitely? My layman's understanding was that benign moles were benign, and not cancerous, because the telomere system was functioning normally and limiting growth. Am I wrong?
Moles don't stop growing primarily because of telomere length but because the human genome has effective methods of controlling cancer. You get cancer something like 4 times a day but the cells are terminated. (It is possible telomeres play some part in this, but I have never seen it proposed.)
What you are likely trying to broach is the question "do organisms evolve to die?" the answer to which is "yes." This was originally studied in pea plants. The maturation of the seed pods sends a chemical signal back to the main plant which induces death. It dies so that its progeny have more space; this is incentivized over generations because a changing genome is more advantageous to a static one.
Same logic can be applied to animals. It is not just that there may be no pressure to evolve telomere repair, it may be that telomere repair is markedly disadvantageous.
I had the same question reading Tolkien. The Elves don't age. They live amogst deities and have first hand knowledge of the creator of the universe. More so, they even know beyond doubt the fate that awaits those who die from other means: awaiting the end of the world in the comparatively boresome Halls of Mandos. Why would any Elf go to war as often as they do in Tolkien's universe seemed unexplicable.
Tolkien's elves were also supposed to be morally pure to a greater degree than most of the world. That this would entail risking one's own longer lifespan for the greater good seems internally consistent. I think the Silmarillion also indicated that elves reincarnate, which would mean death wouldn't even be the end for them.
Elves can get reincarnated from the Halls of Mandos and it is not entirely clear how often that happened, but it definitely did happen. Glorfindel of LOTR was a reincarnation of a First Age Noldo.
To cite Tolkien: Elves were destined to be 'immortal', that is not to die within the unknown limits decreed by the One, which at the most could be until the end of the life of the Earth as a habitable realm. Their death - by any injury to their bodies so severe that it could not be healed - and the disembodiment of their spirits was an 'unnatural' and grievous matter. It was therefore the duty of the Valar, by command of the One, to restore them to incarnate life, if they desired it. But this 'restoration' could be delayed by Manwe, if the fea while alive had done evil deeds and refused to repent of them, or still harboured any malice against any other person among the living. [0]
Of course, most of the reincarnated Elves probably stayed in Aman, so they had little influence on the development of Middle-earth. But that is not a bad consequence of getting killed in a war.
It would be interesting to see how humanity would react if that were true. If people had to worry about their actions now causing consequences later for themselves and not just other people's children, I'd imagine we wouldn't be polluting our planet so much. Maybe it would also cause us to take expanding civilisation beyond earth a lot more seriously. Or maybe it would just make wars more vicious. It wouldn't be enough to control other countries, the goal would be extermination to make room for children.
Crossing a road might become way safer in the future with self driving cars, or at least safety systems like automated break assistants becoming more commonplace. As for construction sites, robotics might replace many jobs in construction in the future.
As for the far future, maybe we will lie in a tank somewhere, have a cord attached to our brain and control robots that are in the dangerous environments for us. At least the people who can afford such a life style. It would also mean that we don't have to do shorter trips to visit someone or some place as you could just use avatars that are already present. Only for larger distances will ping delays become significant (thousands of km). It also means that we don't need breathable atmospheres or livable temperatures any more. Terraforming Mars would be a waste of time, as would be living down a gravity well. Maybe even the robots would be a waste if we can just live in simulated worlds instead. Already now there is a large gamer population. If you extrapolate the growing segment, we might end in a world where people spend their entire lives in simulated environments.
This kind of thinking makes a nice sci-fi flick but not a good predictor of reality. Just the pandemic should've given you a hint that people at large don't like being confined to their homes and living in a virtual world.
You'd have to override millions of years of evolution to do that, and I'd argue a society like this would collapse due to its general non-viability, even before our psychological health ruins us.
Also no matter if you live in a virtual system or a real one, your body needs are real, and tied to an ecosystem. Taking a brain and putting in a jar works in Robocop, but again, not in reality. It's not a matter of technology. everything is interconnected.
I'm not entirely sure about thinking in absolutes.
> Just the pandemic should've given you a hint that people at large don't like being confined to their homes and living in a virtual world.
This might be true for the majority of the society, but not everyone. Personally, i enjoy isolation from others for the most part due to my personality being rather introverted. This is also why i'm okay with remote work and prefer it to being in the office. There are certainly other people who wouldn't mind doing their jobs remotely and even if not everyone needs to do that, the technologies that would be developed around this concept would most certainly be useful in some way, like remote surgery: https://fortune.com/2020/02/11/tele-robotics-surgery-5g-heal...
Even if the things above are somewhat feasonable (with technologies like VRChat becoming an interesting way of socializing for some, as well as communities on Discord and Reddit, as well as social media in general), as for the "brain jar" scenario, i think you are mostly correct. I doubt that we'd be able to tackle the more "sci-fi" topics that concern our biology. For example, even if one could maintain a brain within some sort of a container, we know way too little about what exactly it'd need to remain healthy, as well as how we'd connect all of the nerve endings. Essentially, i think that we need to study our bodies more, since there's probably a link even between our gut bacteria and the functioning of our brains, as well as all of the hormones etc.: https://www.daimanuel.com/2020/11/17/how-your-gut-health-aff...
That's not to say that we shouldn't explore new possibilities and research longetivity or even the mechanisms that control the functioning of our bodies, though. That sort of research would at the very least decrease the health spending in the elderly and would help them enjoy their later years more fully. I think it's worth pursuing without going into either of the two extremes - full trans humanism or total denial.
What's true about the majority of society... shapes society. I also think it's ridiculous spectator sports exist, and right next to so-called next we get sports news.
Is anyone asking me? No. I'm in the minority.
Sorry to be direct, but for most people who enjoy VR environments, but not actual environment, the issue is often in self-perception, confidence and so on. The VR is an artificial SUBSTITUTE for social engagement. But it's to actual engagement like porn is to having an actual relationship (i.e. not good at all).
There's place for VR and so on, but it'll never become the dominant form of existence, unless we hook our brains to the network at a very very low level the kind which is not on the horizon yet (and no, Neuralink isn't it).
I definitely agree, that these things can't replace those experiences in their full fidelity and therefore are to be considered substitutes.
Yet the technology existing in of itself and these methods of communication and self expression existing expand the options that are available to people, which can be useful! Would the ICT industry be able to adapt to the challenges posed by the current pandemic and remote working conditions, if progress hadn't been made in regards to asynchronous communication methods previously (Slack, Teams, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, Zulip etc.)? Probably, but the end result could be less enjoyable than it is now.
That's not to say that anyone should be forced to replace their preferred means of communication in the long term (except for maybe temporarily in the face of situations like the current one in the world), or be forced to live to 150 years of age, or even be a brain in a jar if we're discussing sci-fi.
Yet, in my mind, having a bit of diversity in our approaches to seeing what's possible is definitely a good thing!
So, let people enjoy spectator sports, let them enjoy their sports news and enjoy all of the interesting things that result from the industry needing to achieve everything to support them, from high framerate cameras for slow motion replay, streaming games to large audiences in real time, technologies for cameras that track balls going across the field quickly, motion stabilization and any of the other thousands of neat things you wouldn't think about twice, but could find use in other industries.
To sum up:
> You'd have to override millions of years of evolution to do that, and I'd argue a society like this would collapse due to its general non-viability, even before our psychological health ruins us.
I think you're right here that all of society will not change, but that's not to say that it hurts to be optimistic about new possibilities.
> This kind of thinking makes a nice sci-fi flick but not a good predictor of reality. Just the pandemic should've given you a hint that people at large don't like being confined to their homes and living in a virtual world.
So you claim to know what future generations will be like? Not a good idea. OP is quite right that many kids today spend a great deal of time in front of screens. This is even more noticeable in Asia, the most populated continent on Earth, where online gaming is huge.
I would not be so fast to waive this as a sci-fi flick. It's the classic misalignment of generation's values mistake. We should not assume that we'll be able to understand what our children and grandchildren's values will be.
Technically no one dies of old age. Old age is a contributive factor, and a significant one, but not a cause. Rather, we as a society, just give up on them at a certain age, and decide reasons don't matter.
Also, notice that famous and/or rich people never die of "old age". They got proper healthcare, an issue was identified, there was at least an attempt to treat it.
I’d imagine people would do many dangerous things, just things that wouldn’t involve death or irreparable damage. And I think if we suddenly were able to live for 1000+ years with 20 year old bodies, we’d figure out how to repair most maladies. After all, we don’t have to worry about all the medical effort we put into end of life and cancer treatment and so forth. Whole swaths of industry would be gone and likely replaced with how to grow you a new arm when it gets chopped off. (I’m sure it could be figured out, you got 1000+ years now to do it)
Even if we had a way to stop aging, I guess the brains would be the biggest problem. How likely is it that our brains can function for hundreds or thousands of years? Probably not likely at all. All these things within us of unimaginable complexity work, because they had to evolve in the past. Our brains evolved to work only a few decades.
Suppose we stop aging - this may be great, as we could live at our physical peak until death and the life would be much much longer on average. But at some point, maybe 100 - 200 y/o depending on individual, people's mind may just break.
To truly achieve immortality, we would have to probably reverse engineer the brain and gain complete understand of how it works. Even if we could copy brains atom by atom, or upload it to virtual world, without understanding of how to assemble a brain, this will be useless. A virtual brain, which would not be enhanced in some way, would age exactly like a real world one.
So probably the scenario where people can't die of old age is almost impossible, because that requires technology more advanced than even the ability to backup/restore a mind - which would allow people to die in accident and be restored - although most certainly there would be laws to regulate it, unless we have practically infinite space / land for people to live.
Sorry for going all Sci-Fi on this, I watched the 6th Day yesterday. The antagonist thought he could be immortal because he had a machine that could clone (or rather copy) a person including the brain. He had the ability to get himself resurrected if he died, but he probably wouldn't be able to live even a thousand years, unless he also had developed the technology to prevent data corruption in his brain.
Unless maybe I'm completely wrong and the brains are so flexible they would just work, but there's no way to test it, is it.
The main thing that stops bad cells from proliferating isn't telomeres, but our own immune system. NK cells (natural killers) are very efficient in terminating everything suspicious with extreme prejudice, so to say.
Successful cancer is the one that learns how to look innocently, at least to the immune cells patrolling the body.
Successful immunological treatment (actually using mRNA vaccines, that is what Moderna and BioNTech were originally about; Covid vaccines are only an adaptation) teaches the immune system to recognize the bad cells again based on their mutations. It will then jump into action and control the cancer growth.
>Are our telomeres long enough to allow for the development of cancer, or is it necessary for the system to be overridden, thus allowing cells to replicate indefinitely?
I'm not sure that it's actually telomere length itself that's the factor. I think it's more about telomerase.
Telomerase is the enzyme that lengthens telomeres. In cancer cells telomerase production is (usually) upregulated. This leads to cancer cells being able to continue dividing without telomere shortening being a problem.
However, this is just a guess. I'm not clear on the details of the processes.
One rusty nail - one splinter of wood could be your end. I tried to visualize once what can kill you, without anti-biotics - its incredible how many death traps are everywhere.Just one tool splintering into your hand with dirt on it and you were done for.
Which explains why manual labour was so feverishly avoided by anyone "upper class". Death roulette is not for the important people.
Those shovelling peasants were every day risking their life and were thus "expendable".
A few things, I assume that growing up in a tough manual labour world people would be 1) thicker 2) smarter at handling tools to avoid injuries[0].
That said it's impressive how easy it is to pierce your body with just about anything when just enough effort is involved and I doubt they had ergonomic tools and safety equipment too. Even gloves are a luxury.
It's a bit of a myth that humans have only had long life in modern times. This is partially due to the calculated "life expectancy" of many eras including infant mortality where perhaps 30% of the population died at age 0.
If a quarter or half of your population is dying at age 0, then another quarter or half must likely be living into their 70s for the mean age to end up 35.
The total life expectancy of a white male infant in 1850 in the US was 38; at age 10, 58; at age 20, 60. White female, 40, 57, and 60. In 2011, the male expectancies were 76, 77, and 77; female, 81, 82, and 82. (https://www.infoplease.com/us/health-statistics/life-expecta...)
Life expectancy of children and young adults has increased significantly in addition to the reduction in infant mortality.
I think it was mainly less likely because people were so much more likely to die of other causes, so they'd die before the cancer got a chance. Healthcare was at its most basic and out of reach for common people.
I'm sure some of our environmental issues make cancer more likely. But we shouldn't imagine that the pre-industrial world was super healthy. People were living in filth. This was in fact one of the reasons they died so soon.
It's also one of the few things we haven't really found a cure for. I think because each cancer is a different random genetic mutation that would benefit the most from a custom generated antibody or something. Whereas other major causes of death have been pretty much eradicated by things like antibiotics and vaccines. So I think this makes the numbers relatively higher.
And of course because healthcare was so poor, I'm sure there would also be many causes of death misattributed. Even in this day and age we can't seem to standardise it. Some countries attribute every death to coronavirus if the person was infected, others only if it was 100% certain to be the cause of death.
I’d hazard a guess that a lot more people also died of “natural causes“. Unless you cut someone open, the way cancer actually kills you (organs shutting down, trouble breathing, etc) would be described as “natural causes” or getting old and dying…
I would suspect bodily stressors like fasting reduce the chances of cancers taking hold because those cells are usually less resilient than normal cells (like the principles of chemotherapy). Having abundant food I would suspect is what gives most cancers a comfortable body to develop in.
Also, modern proliferation of toxic chemicals.
Furthermore, people living longer are inevitably going to go by either cardiovascular issues/stroke, pneumonia, or cancer.
I'm more interested in the pre-agricultural world, and the differences between that time and our own would be significantly greater than comparing to a mere couple hundred years.
The dismissive comments here are confusing to me. Of course this is a valuable thing to study, because without it we won't know if there are factors about our modern industrial society that could be altered to increase our lifespans even more. Or is 80 years just "good enough" and people don't want to live to 160? Also if we find that cancer was less prevalent before, that's a useful data point for how much cancer can be avoided in a hypothetical ideal situation that we should perhaps shoot for.
The methodology in this study seems really sketchy to me.
So we start with one indicator of bone cancer that is well-established: bone lesions. This indicator shows a significant rise from medieval to current times.
Now we use another, less established indicator (ct scan results) and find... a number consistent with the first result.
Finally, we make some "extrapolations" about the rate of undetectable cancer based on our observations and lots of assumptions.
In the end, we show that our extrapolated(!) cancer rate is higher than expected and does not show as much of a difference between medieval and modern times.
None of this explained the significant rise in the first indicator. Also, even if you liberally pad your data with extrapolations, wouldn't you have to apply the same formula to the indicators of cancer in modern-day individuals?
By the way, the modern-day cancer rate is still ~3x higher than even the extrapolated rate (15% vs 50%) - yet, the article goes one step further than the study and frames this as a finding that the cancer rate didn't grow at all.
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[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 225 ms ] threadThanks Monsanto. Err... Bayer (same people who sold Heroin over the counter 100 years ago)
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5705608/
I agree Monsanto is a horrible company, but for other reasons.
> Overall, a scrutiny of the method used in these commentaries by Samsel and Seneff reveals a major flaw. These authors employ a deductive reasoning approach based on syllogism, which is formed by two or more propositions used to generate a conclusion. The first proposition is generally related to glyphosate’s properties (e.g., glyphosate is a chelator of Mn) and the second proposition is related to human physiology (e.g., sperm motility depends on Mn). From each of these pairs of propositions, Samsel and Seneff conclude a causative link of glyphosate with the etiology of different diseases. For instance, since glyphosate is a metal chelator (proposition 1), and since sperm motility depends on Mn (proposition 2), they conclude that glyphosate may partially explain increased rates of infertility and birth defects (13). They extend this reasoning to multiple body functions to propose that the dysregulation of Mn utilization in the body due to glyphosate’s metal chelating properties explains autism, Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, anxiety disorder, osteoporosis, inflammatory bowel disease, renal lithiasis, osteomalacia, cholestasis, thyroid dysfunction, and infertility. More recently, Beecham and Seneff have used the same reasoning to conclude on a causative link between glyphosate chelation of Mn and the large rise in the incidence of autism spectrum disorders in children within the US (35). However, there are no scientific studies establishing a causative link between glyphosate and the described chronic diseases.
They are literally saying that syllogism cannot possibly work because there aren't "scientific studies". What is syllogism? It's literally logic. If you then read the actual article they are criticizing, there is literally graph after graph establishing a strong correlation between disease and glysophate use. Not only do they find correlations, they reason through several causative mechanisms, in extremely detail, based on chemistry, and then somehow that doesn't count? That paper is absolutely choc full of evidence. What more are they holding out for? It's like their brain doesn't work.
Graphs showing increased cancer risk since glyphosate was introduced is almost zero evidence that it does anything. Lot of other things have happened in that same time period such as increases in obesity, etc. The real way to study it is to give an animal glyphosate and see if it does anything to cancer rates.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4819582/
Evaluation of carcinogenic potential of the herbicide glyphosate, drawing on tumor incidence data from fourteen chronic/carcinogenicity rodent studies
"There was no evidence of a carcinogenic effect related to glyphosate treatment."
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7014589/
> The strongest evidence shows that glyphosate causes hemangiosarcomas, kidney tumors and malignant lymphomas in male CD-1 mice, hemangiomas and malignant lymphomas in female CD-1 mice, hemangiomas in female Swiss albino mice, kidney adenomas, liver adenomas, skin keratoacanthomas and skin basal cell tumors in male Sprague-Dawley rats, adrenal cortical carcinomas in female Sprague-Dawley rats and hepatocellular adenomas and skin keratocanthomas in male Wistar rats.
In fact, this paper links to some of the same studies that the paper you linked to also does, with different conclusions. In particular, it seems your paper was extremely selective about which cancers could be caused by glysophate, e.g. ignoring several types.
> Graphs showing increased cancer risk since glyphosate was introduced is almost zero evidence that it does anything.
That's just an absurd statement, so I'll disengage now.
And it ain't looking good for Bayer.
You say that like selling heroin over the counter is a bad thing.
up to 14% of deaths 400 years ago in the UK were cancer according to the new research. It's currently 29% in the UK, and 17% in the world. 29% is much higher than 14% but according to the article people used to believe it used to be just 1%. How much of that increase to 29% is because of new problems or just because we live longer so cancers get the chance to kill us more vs all the things that used to kill us earlier
I have often wondered if back pain was less likely in the past? How did they manage without chiropractors?
Of course, he believes otherwise about his own particular school of chiropractic, the Gonstead Technique. As a long time beneficiary of that method I've come to agree with him. It has helped me quite a bit, and the long list of his vastly improved patients (many or most who are refugees from other chiropractors) is impressive and convincing to me.
Some healers are quacks; in some disciplines, most are. But that doesn't make them all quacks.
They may be on to something without knowing exactly what.
We've always had charlatans pretending to have solutions to our problems before chiropracty and homeopathy, we had traveling salesmen peddling fish oil as a cure-all and of course the power of prayer.
Not sure if it speaks to the gullibility of humanity or craftiness of private enterprise.
Tough it out. You had to work/farm/hunt to survive.
To the commenters calling it quackery; you're never going to convince somebody who experiences relief from cracking their back that their experience of relief is fraudulent crackery. Subjectively, it's as real as it gets. Skeptics handicap themselves with this sort of over the top rhetoric.
These diseases are essentially dying of old age. Better treatment for heart disease will mechanically increase cancer deaths and/or Alzheimer.
[1] - https://www.fooledbyrandomness.com/violence.pdf
> If a medieval person was able to survive childhood, then he had about a 50% chance of living up to 50–55 years.
This is from wiki. Our life expectancy is much higher. In fact, contemporary medicine is saving a lot of adults.
So, your claim (that life expectancy hasn't changed much) doesn't contradict the parent's claim (that a lot more people are dying of age-related cancers).
It's 82 today.
The effects are not as dramatic as when infant mortality is included but our life expectancy has absolutely increased.
It's a compelling theory, too, because the average age of a cancer is 66 today. But it really addresses the idea of cancer being less prevalent than less likely.
Living into your 80s was uncommon prior to, well, even 1950. Nowadays, many developed countries have significant cohorts of people 80+ and even 90+. Unfortunately, while those people are alive, they are not particularly healthy. We haven't yet learnt how to expand average "healthspan" as much as average "lifespan".
A lot of the lower life expectancy was sky-high infant mortality, and if you made it to 10 in 1850 (hardly preindustrial, but preindustrial stats are harder to find) you could expect to live to 60 or so. Presumably you'd compare the cancer rates of your study's skeletons with the cancer rates of today's 60 year olds.
Most of the progress, in absolute terms, with reducing maternal mortality and the infant/toddler death rate in the industrialized countries was actually made before antibiotics were developed, in the late 19th / early 20th centuries. In England in 1851 about 26% of children died before the age of 5, falling to 23% in 1891, 19% in 1911, 11% in 1921, 9% in 1931, and 7% in 1941 (and then we're in the antibiotics era).
https://www.pbs.org/fmc/timeline/dmortality.htm
...I also like the link to play the video via Real player in the upper left corner :)
My top three favorite human accomplishments of all time are:
1. printing press 2. vaccines 3. antibiotics
And the order of the last two is debatable.
Why is the theory an accomplishment? Hooke's and van Leeuwenhoek's first observations of micro-organisms in water drops were treated as a meaningless curiosity for about 150 years, and essentially ignored.
Finally it was realised that here was an alternative to prevailing ideas about infectious disease that had great explanatory power. The war of ideas lasted until the early twentieth century, when the last doctors clinging to the "miasma" theory and its ilk finally gave up.
The theory made vaccines and antibiotics conceptually possible.
If that was true, then age composition would be roughly the same as is now, except for larger number of infants.
You could even argue that if you had weaker infants die, you should end up with statistically stronger adults than now and you should see people live to older age than now.
I don't want to say infant mortality rate wasn't high, I just want to say that it has nothing to do with the topic of the discussion.
For example, the introduction and "ramping up" of testosterone and estrogen at puberty has a significant impact on the human condition that simply cannot apply to the prepubescent state, as does their subsequent decline in menopause and old age in general.
Each stage of life comes with its own signals that can be serious health conditions if present in other stages of life, but completely normal and healthy at the appropriate stage. A tween with acne is rarely something to call the doctor about. But a 3 year old with acne certainly is. A colicky baby needs a soother or some other placation. But a colicky adult certainly needs medical intervention.
So the idea that weak babies make weak adults and strong babies make strong adults doesn't work out as cleanly as this comment suggests.
What I'd really like to know is incidence of cancer in marsupials, birds and fishes, one would predict it to be markedly lower.
It could be very well that it is those people who would die as newborn or children without modern medicine and access to clean water have bigger chances of getting cancer with age.
There isn't a necessarily good or bad here but those Darwinian forces did eliminate a lot of genetic defects from the population before modern medicine.
In the future though we might be able to yet again eliminate defects not by natural selection but by gene editing while still allowing those individuals to carry on a normal life.
The mammal strategy traded the long game for the quick win.
We have all sorts of (genetic) machinery who's function is to grow fast but then STOP as we can't support gigantic sizes. (Maybe in part because of the quick and dirty foundations but thermodynamics have scaling issues too)
So we need to shut of all those machines before we get too big.
And so here we happily sit in our bodies, our mammal factory and everything is great; just don't push that big red button over there, or pull that lever or that one or that one or ...
eventually if you live long enough some of those buttons will be pushed and the mammal machinery will do what it evolved to do. grow fast and break things.
A final observation on humans in particular, recently bipedal, have not gotten all the bugs worked out on that. Deployed a monkey patch for dimorphic gender singling requires cron job flipping on a subset of growth machinery some years after the main global shutdown but only flip them on for a season or so; still seeing evidence of switch bounce issues, see ticket BCRA1.
From an evolutionary perspective natur might have just stoped after we gave birth but for humans you need to be still very healthy for much longer.
We have a second evolution which we as a species gained due to our more generic and bigger brain and therefore being able to retain and learn more even through generations.
Whenever nature stoped we continued (glasses, cancer treatment etc.)
I personally would not subscribe to your idea that cancer is our basis and we just let loose.
Cancer is just one sickness of a highly complex system.
And after all why would longevity even be a goal for evolution? It's a wishful human idea of lifing forever. I myself I'm looking forward to NOT life forever and still today the thought of not being able to end my life for good is my worst nightmare next to loosing my mind.
The marsupials of Australia called and would like a word with you.
Or they were hunted to death by organised groups of early humans.
Wales are probably only surviving because their environment is so foreign to humans.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/701477
Feel like Argentinosaurus might have had something to say about that argument..
Let's cartoonishly oversimplify cancer so that we can see how life expectancy would affect observed statistics. Let's say cancer occurrence is 0% for people up to age 40, and then starting on the 40th birthday, cancer occurrence is 10% per year. Everyone who gets cancer dies immediately.
Then, imagine that life expectancy in 1500 was 25 years old, standard deviation 10 years (yeah lognormal blah blah just go with it). So, most people don't live to 40, but the ones who do sometimes get cancer.
But then, after 1500, life expectancy mean increases by 0.1 years per year. By the year 2000, life expectancy is 75 years old! Much more cancer is going to happen! Many more of the deaths will be from cancer!
Cancer itself didn't change.
So, these researchers see a lower cancer rate in the bones they're looking at, but they need to do some MATH on the ages these bones and of modern humans to know how to compare cancer rates then to cancer rates now.
Sebb suggested that lower life expectancy leads to less cancer. Dsjoerg defined a hypothetical model that would lead to that happening, and then said that proves Sebb was correct.
That's just circular reasoning. And when the hypothetical doesn't match observed reality it's a sign it might be broken.
One big thing to consider is how would an 18th century person know they had leukemia? Cancers that don’t have a physical manifestation were probably classified as some other mysterious malady.
Turns out it was curing the <something>, but the next thing the population would statistically die of was: heart attacks.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_tobacco
Thank you for my TIL!
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbian_exchange
Bunch of stuff happening in the Pacific as well, e.g., chilli peppers (capsicum):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chili_pepper#Distribution_to_A...
Good book:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1493:_Uncovering_the_New_World...
Gluten do this by forming gluten net during dought mixing. Or even by mixing flour with water and waiting. So gluten is super good and almoust magical ingradient.
Real problem is that Western World started to abuse wheat flour after yeasts were discovered. You know, in older times "white bread" was mainly for rich peoples and poor peoples used flour with more chaff. But in last years chaff costs almoust same as flour :)
Celiac disease is only 1-2% population, and non-celiac gluten sensitivity is 5-6%. So that "harmful gluten" is a myth. But if you have some intolerance then gluten is very very toxic. And nothing wrong with skipping it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gluten
Rye flour contains some form of gluten but it do not form gluten net. But still can be toxic for ill peoples.
So, using wheat flour/gluten is simplest way to have bread that have nice volume. Other flours are good for pies or require to use cake mold.
As for why gluten is better for machines: when dought contain formed gluten net it make it elastic, a bit like gum. So it can be nicely formed. Dought also can be to strong with too much gluten - that require much more force for shaping.
Also with good gluten net dought can sustain longer period after forming and before baking, making it less time sensitive - bread do not get flat before there is free place in the stove/oven.
Our bodies aren't designed to be topped-off 3 times a day.
> The book weaves together Mukherjee's experiences as a hematology/oncology fellow at Massachusetts General Hospital as well as the history of cancer treatment and research.[3][5] Mukherjee gives the history of cancer from its first identification 4,600 years ago by the Egyptian physician Imhotep. The Greeks had no understanding of cells, but they were familiar with hydraulics. Hippocrates thus considered illness to be an imbalance of four cardinal fluids: blood, black bile, yellow bile, phlegm. Galen applied this idea to cancer, believing it to be an imbalance of black bile. In 440 BCE, the Greek historian Herodotus recorded the first breast tumor excision of Atossa, the queen of Persia and the daughter of Cyrus, by a Greek slave named Democedes. The procedure was believed to have been successful temporarily. Galen's theory was later challenged by the work of Andreas Vaselius and Matthew Baille, whose dissections of human bodies failed to reveal black bile.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Emperor_of_All_Maladies
PBS made it into a documentary:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer_(film)
* https://www.pbs.org/show/story-cancer-emperor-all-maladies/
From wikipedia: The discovery of SV40 revealed that between 1955 and 1963 around 90% of children and 60% of adults in the U.S. were inoculated with SV40-contaminated polio vaccines.
Link to studies: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=sv40...
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25057632/
https://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/67/17/8065.short
"The committee concludes that the biological evidence is moderate that SV40 exposure could lead to cancer in humans under natural conditions."
And there's more. SV40's probably also transformative (observed in both mammals and humans) and the vaccine has moderate evidence of causality.
Then there's the strange disappearance of the CDC page awhile back - http://www.laleva.org/eng/2013/07/cdc_disappears_page_linkin...
And the papers correlating the virus to cancer:
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/10472327/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16966607/
etc
Mostly everything we consume these days has been touched by a form of plastic.
I am wondering if microplastic is a factor in addition to air and water pollution, processed/pre-packaged food.
Another factor maybe humankind beating/cancelling natural selection due to modern medicine. So people who would normally perish in olden days are living longer only to be later killed by cancer.
There’s another factor of total population. More people means more diversity and more DNA copying errors? Can someone expert in this field comment on this?
It's not a debated issue: it's well known.
[1]https://cues.rutgers.edu/2019-microplastics-conference/pdfs/...
The best I’ve seen is increase inflammation due to small plastic particles.
This a meaningless question for most people, if it helps save lives in the future, great.
I think you should also pay attention to Bret Weinstein's work on telomeres and cancer. If the environmental pressures are for a low age, you end up with long telomeres to allow more dividing of cells to replace those damaged, however those same long telomeres make you more susceptible to cancer should you live longer.
What you are likely trying to broach is the question "do organisms evolve to die?" the answer to which is "yes." This was originally studied in pea plants. The maturation of the seed pods sends a chemical signal back to the main plant which induces death. It dies so that its progeny have more space; this is incentivized over generations because a changing genome is more advantageous to a static one.
Same logic can be applied to animals. It is not just that there may be no pressure to evolve telomere repair, it may be that telomere repair is markedly disadvantageous.
Would you risk your life crossing a road? Working on a construction site?
To cite Tolkien: Elves were destined to be 'immortal', that is not to die within the unknown limits decreed by the One, which at the most could be until the end of the life of the Earth as a habitable realm. Their death - by any injury to their bodies so severe that it could not be healed - and the disembodiment of their spirits was an 'unnatural' and grievous matter. It was therefore the duty of the Valar, by command of the One, to restore them to incarnate life, if they desired it. But this 'restoration' could be delayed by Manwe, if the fea while alive had done evil deeds and refused to repent of them, or still harboured any malice against any other person among the living. [0]
Of course, most of the reincarnated Elves probably stayed in Aman, so they had little influence on the development of Middle-earth. But that is not a bad consequence of getting killed in a war.
[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/tolkienfans/comments/90vqkq/why_exa...
Presumably because the loss of a 1000 year old friend hurts a lot.
As for the far future, maybe we will lie in a tank somewhere, have a cord attached to our brain and control robots that are in the dangerous environments for us. At least the people who can afford such a life style. It would also mean that we don't have to do shorter trips to visit someone or some place as you could just use avatars that are already present. Only for larger distances will ping delays become significant (thousands of km). It also means that we don't need breathable atmospheres or livable temperatures any more. Terraforming Mars would be a waste of time, as would be living down a gravity well. Maybe even the robots would be a waste if we can just live in simulated worlds instead. Already now there is a large gamer population. If you extrapolate the growing segment, we might end in a world where people spend their entire lives in simulated environments.
You'd have to override millions of years of evolution to do that, and I'd argue a society like this would collapse due to its general non-viability, even before our psychological health ruins us.
Also no matter if you live in a virtual system or a real one, your body needs are real, and tied to an ecosystem. Taking a brain and putting in a jar works in Robocop, but again, not in reality. It's not a matter of technology. everything is interconnected.
Anyway.
> Just the pandemic should've given you a hint that people at large don't like being confined to their homes and living in a virtual world.
This might be true for the majority of the society, but not everyone. Personally, i enjoy isolation from others for the most part due to my personality being rather introverted. This is also why i'm okay with remote work and prefer it to being in the office. There are certainly other people who wouldn't mind doing their jobs remotely and even if not everyone needs to do that, the technologies that would be developed around this concept would most certainly be useful in some way, like remote surgery: https://fortune.com/2020/02/11/tele-robotics-surgery-5g-heal...
Even if the things above are somewhat feasonable (with technologies like VRChat becoming an interesting way of socializing for some, as well as communities on Discord and Reddit, as well as social media in general), as for the "brain jar" scenario, i think you are mostly correct. I doubt that we'd be able to tackle the more "sci-fi" topics that concern our biology. For example, even if one could maintain a brain within some sort of a container, we know way too little about what exactly it'd need to remain healthy, as well as how we'd connect all of the nerve endings. Essentially, i think that we need to study our bodies more, since there's probably a link even between our gut bacteria and the functioning of our brains, as well as all of the hormones etc.: https://www.daimanuel.com/2020/11/17/how-your-gut-health-aff...
That's not to say that we shouldn't explore new possibilities and research longetivity or even the mechanisms that control the functioning of our bodies, though. That sort of research would at the very least decrease the health spending in the elderly and would help them enjoy their later years more fully. I think it's worth pursuing without going into either of the two extremes - full trans humanism or total denial.
Is anyone asking me? No. I'm in the minority.
Sorry to be direct, but for most people who enjoy VR environments, but not actual environment, the issue is often in self-perception, confidence and so on. The VR is an artificial SUBSTITUTE for social engagement. But it's to actual engagement like porn is to having an actual relationship (i.e. not good at all).
There's place for VR and so on, but it'll never become the dominant form of existence, unless we hook our brains to the network at a very very low level the kind which is not on the horizon yet (and no, Neuralink isn't it).
Yet the technology existing in of itself and these methods of communication and self expression existing expand the options that are available to people, which can be useful! Would the ICT industry be able to adapt to the challenges posed by the current pandemic and remote working conditions, if progress hadn't been made in regards to asynchronous communication methods previously (Slack, Teams, Mattermost, Rocket.Chat, Zulip etc.)? Probably, but the end result could be less enjoyable than it is now.
That's not to say that anyone should be forced to replace their preferred means of communication in the long term (except for maybe temporarily in the face of situations like the current one in the world), or be forced to live to 150 years of age, or even be a brain in a jar if we're discussing sci-fi.
Yet, in my mind, having a bit of diversity in our approaches to seeing what's possible is definitely a good thing!
So, let people enjoy spectator sports, let them enjoy their sports news and enjoy all of the interesting things that result from the industry needing to achieve everything to support them, from high framerate cameras for slow motion replay, streaming games to large audiences in real time, technologies for cameras that track balls going across the field quickly, motion stabilization and any of the other thousands of neat things you wouldn't think about twice, but could find use in other industries.
To sum up:
> You'd have to override millions of years of evolution to do that, and I'd argue a society like this would collapse due to its general non-viability, even before our psychological health ruins us.
I think you're right here that all of society will not change, but that's not to say that it hurts to be optimistic about new possibilities.
So you claim to know what future generations will be like? Not a good idea. OP is quite right that many kids today spend a great deal of time in front of screens. This is even more noticeable in Asia, the most populated continent on Earth, where online gaming is huge.
I would not be so fast to waive this as a sci-fi flick. It's the classic misalignment of generation's values mistake. We should not assume that we'll be able to understand what our children and grandchildren's values will be.
But your average folks... eh, died of old age.
Suppose we stop aging - this may be great, as we could live at our physical peak until death and the life would be much much longer on average. But at some point, maybe 100 - 200 y/o depending on individual, people's mind may just break.
To truly achieve immortality, we would have to probably reverse engineer the brain and gain complete understand of how it works. Even if we could copy brains atom by atom, or upload it to virtual world, without understanding of how to assemble a brain, this will be useless. A virtual brain, which would not be enhanced in some way, would age exactly like a real world one.
So probably the scenario where people can't die of old age is almost impossible, because that requires technology more advanced than even the ability to backup/restore a mind - which would allow people to die in accident and be restored - although most certainly there would be laws to regulate it, unless we have practically infinite space / land for people to live.
Sorry for going all Sci-Fi on this, I watched the 6th Day yesterday. The antagonist thought he could be immortal because he had a machine that could clone (or rather copy) a person including the brain. He had the ability to get himself resurrected if he died, but he probably wouldn't be able to live even a thousand years, unless he also had developed the technology to prevent data corruption in his brain.
Unless maybe I'm completely wrong and the brains are so flexible they would just work, but there's no way to test it, is it.
Successful cancer is the one that learns how to look innocently, at least to the immune cells patrolling the body.
Successful immunological treatment (actually using mRNA vaccines, that is what Moderna and BioNTech were originally about; Covid vaccines are only an adaptation) teaches the immune system to recognize the bad cells again based on their mutations. It will then jump into action and control the cancer growth.
I'm not sure that it's actually telomere length itself that's the factor. I think it's more about telomerase.
Telomerase is the enzyme that lengthens telomeres. In cancer cells telomerase production is (usually) upregulated. This leads to cancer cells being able to continue dividing without telomere shortening being a problem.
However, this is just a guess. I'm not clear on the details of the processes.
I think infant mortality was high, and the likelihood of simple infection killing you was high.
Which explains why manual labour was so feverishly avoided by anyone "upper class". Death roulette is not for the important people.
Those shovelling peasants were every day risking their life and were thus "expendable".
Medical info, including infection deaths for former presidents and their families:
https://coolidgefoundation.org/blog/the-medical-context-of-c...
That said it's impressive how easy it is to pierce your body with just about anything when just enough effort is involved and I doubt they had ergonomic tools and safety equipment too. Even gloves are a luxury.
If a quarter or half of your population is dying at age 0, then another quarter or half must likely be living into their 70s for the mean age to end up 35.
Well not really age 0, rather between 0 and 5.
The rest of your point stands.
Life expectancy of children and young adults has increased significantly in addition to the reduction in infant mortality.
"After you save people from dying of cheap things, they start dying of expensive things."
I've seen countless stats that plots petro-chemical use over years, and cancer rates. The charts are identical.
I'm sure some of our environmental issues make cancer more likely. But we shouldn't imagine that the pre-industrial world was super healthy. People were living in filth. This was in fact one of the reasons they died so soon.
It's also one of the few things we haven't really found a cure for. I think because each cancer is a different random genetic mutation that would benefit the most from a custom generated antibody or something. Whereas other major causes of death have been pretty much eradicated by things like antibiotics and vaccines. So I think this makes the numbers relatively higher.
And of course because healthcare was so poor, I'm sure there would also be many causes of death misattributed. Even in this day and age we can't seem to standardise it. Some countries attribute every death to coronavirus if the person was infected, others only if it was 100% certain to be the cause of death.
Also, modern proliferation of toxic chemicals.
Furthermore, people living longer are inevitably going to go by either cardiovascular issues/stroke, pneumonia, or cancer.
So we start with one indicator of bone cancer that is well-established: bone lesions. This indicator shows a significant rise from medieval to current times.
Now we use another, less established indicator (ct scan results) and find... a number consistent with the first result.
Finally, we make some "extrapolations" about the rate of undetectable cancer based on our observations and lots of assumptions.
In the end, we show that our extrapolated(!) cancer rate is higher than expected and does not show as much of a difference between medieval and modern times.
None of this explained the significant rise in the first indicator. Also, even if you liberally pad your data with extrapolations, wouldn't you have to apply the same formula to the indicators of cancer in modern-day individuals?
By the way, the modern-day cancer rate is still ~3x higher than even the extrapolated rate (15% vs 50%) - yet, the article goes one step further than the study and frames this as a finding that the cancer rate didn't grow at all.