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Can cannibalism lead to disease resistance? (2018)
- whatshisface 7y agoThe title is a bit of a misphrasing, cannibalism didn't give anybody resistance, it just killed everyone that didn't have it.
- staticautomatic 7y agoThen the surviving population would be resistant. That's how evolution works.
- whatshisface 7y agoIf Bill Gates killed every person in New York that didn't have a bike, would it be accurate to say that he gave every New Yorker a bike?
- nwienert 7y agoYea, if Bill Gates was evolution. More seriously: the analogy is broken. Here’s it fixed: If Bill killed everyone without a bike and then the bikers naturally gave birth to kids who came with bikes from then on.
- staticautomatic 7y agoNo, but it would be accurate to say that he was exerting selective pressure on people to have bikes.
- reading-at-work 7y agoThe title implies cannibalism could give general disease resistance to an individual, but the article is about a population developing resistance to a cannibalism-induced disease due to individuals without the resistance dying off. That's the disconnect the parent comment was referring to.
- Theodores 7y agoI wonder if mad cow disease is the same? In the UK we burned the cows that had it and stopped feeding cows to cows. I wonder if somewhere someone is reading this article and thinking 'great, let's selectively breed cows that can eat cows'. This would be great for reducing waste. These breeds could also be made exempt from any animal welfare legislation and sold to customers that just want a burger and have no care for much else. Anything the meat eaters buy in fast food restaurants could be bio-engineered this way. The ones who have quaint ideas about 'ethical farming' and 'organic meat' would have the old breeds, sold at a premium. But would there be an elevated risk of CJD in this Brave New World?
- h2odragon 7y agoelevated CJD risk? when you built these things you wanted them big, for efficiency, and so the dug up the aurochs genes. Now we're boned. Giant feral carnivorous cows roaming the landscape. Add some bison genes and we can have thundering herds of them flattening cities, hoovering up the inhabitants on their way through.
- LifeLiverTransp 7y agoEh, cows already eat parts of cows. Cow mothers eat the placenta aftr birth. They also eat small animals when having a iron deficiency. So the actual news would be if cows could survive deformed protein.
- strainer 7y agoCows don't "already eat parts of cows" except in that most tenuous sense you made out of self reabsorbtion of placenta, which is common to mammals. Do I "eat parts of people" if I chew on my nails? In the same tenuous sense I do "eat parts of people", but really we both know - its just a stretched caveat to the rule that we dont really eat people, and cows dont really eat cows. And what kind of "small animals" do cows hunt ? Slugs, beetles perhaps... never mind.
- Mikeb85 7y agoCows will eat chickens, mice, baby birds; basically what they can get. Same goes for deer. Pretty much any animal will opportunistically eat any food that's more calorically dense than their typical diet.
- barkingcat 7y agoOf course that's the way to give the general surviving population resistance.
- mar77i 7y agoUrm, not to be nitpicking here, but I simply don't get the logic in this. Cannibalism itself isn't being resisted to by committing more cannibalism, because those who engage in it aren't those being eaten.
- scardine 7y agoAn honest title should be "Can cannibalism promote resistance to cannibalism-induced diseases?" - which most people would guess since evolution will promote survival of the disease-resistant lineages. The current click-bait title implies cannibalism could improve resistance to disease in general.
- owens99 7y agoYes, or "Can disease lead to disease resistance?"
- foobar_ 7y agoFar more efficient than burying people and wasting all the land.
- knicholes 7y agoMaybe burning the deceased is a better solution to your land wasting concern. I'd be wary of eating tertiary consumers, if for no other reason than prions. For example, there are risks in eating dolphins because of mercury concentrations that build up. Don't eat tertiary consumers.
- sosborn 7y ago> wasting all the land The waste exists only because we deem those locations as sacred. Otherwise, burying is the most efficient use of resources.
- foobar_ 7y agoHow? I don't think human bodies are mineral rich.