12 ms·

>Part of our immune defences - a white blood cell called a T-cell - can swoop in and destroy the spreading cancer as it tries to take root. >But the study show

>Part of our immune defences - a white blood cell called a T-cell - can swoop in and destroy the spreading cancer as it tries to take root. >But the study showed that another part of our blood - the platelets that normally stop bleeding - were suppressing the T-cells and making it harder for them to take out the cancer. >Aspirin disrupts the platelets and removes their influence over the T-cells so they can hunt out the cancer.

seanw444 2y ago
Helpful summary, thanks.
ericmcer 2y ago
Nice summary, this seems like another adaptation that was super useful 10,000 years ago and is less so today. It would be nice if our bodies could adapt to modernity quicker, like don't prioritize blood clotting over immune defenses, I can just get some more band-aids on the off chance I cut myself in our very safe world. Don't preserve calories in case we are starving in the future, just build muscles and heal injuries recklessly I can hit up the grocery store if we need more nutrients.
- Earw0rm 2y ago
  Something I've been wondering is to what extent we're gut-efficiency-limited rather than calorie-limited. There's plenty of research showing that brain development and food preparation went hand in hand (cooking allows humans to liberate more calories from food with the same sized gut, allowing us both to be pretty mobile and have more energy available to run our large and energy-hungry brains). If you look at the way guts are built, clearly nature/evolution is trying to pack as much intestine as possible into a limited space. Certainly increasing calorie availability beyond a certain point isn't a good thing - our brains can't burn more than a certain amount, and most of us, Michael Phelps excepted, don't like making our bodies do the same - but I wonder to what extent our design-constraints put limits on our ability to absorb non-calorie nutrients. On the one hand you have a supplement industry who will say anything to make a buck, and are infected with pseudoscience and woo, but on the other, the standard med-sci advice of "just eat a balance diet, it's impossible to improve on that" seems kind of glib and baseless.
- tunnuz 2y ago
  That’s a very interesting thought. Presumably stuff like CRISPR will make our meat code open source and we’ll be able to deploy hot fixes ourselves.
  - roncesvalles 2y ago
    In your future children, maybe. Chasing down and editing the DNA of live somatic cells in a meaningful way is basically impossible.
- tharkun__ 2y ago
  On a ~80 year scale you'd be correct for some of the world. But if you live in the "wrong" part of the world even in the last 80 years, just one "build muscle and heal injuries recklessly" may have resulted in more damage than good, coz the "grocery store" doesn't exist. The problem is also that if you "adapt fast" to "recklessness", then many people die fast before they would not be able to adapt back if necessary. Got wounded in a conflict zone cut off from supplies for months? Too bad, coz your body adapted to grocery store being close and unfortunately your body decided to just never put on weight in the first place, so now you have zero reserves to use up and ... you die. Watch "Alone". Some of the guys are adapted to never put on much weight and that's a real problem for them. They have a TV show safety net. If it was real, they'd be dead.
  - pests 2y ago
    I liked Alone until it devolved into whoever came in with the most extra body mass and who could hibernate and conserve energy the most. Those who tried to hunt, build shelters, anything fun to show on TV, all would lose or be out early due to injury.
    - tharkun__ 2y ago
      Which season was that? Asking because "my bow guy" from Youtube, that I learned bow making from was the winner of Alone season 8 and he's one of the guys that can't put on weight. He tried i.e. put on as much as he could but he knew he had a disadvantage against everyone else because he'd not just go in fat like most others. ----- stop reading here if you did not watch season 8 and want to not get spoiled ------ S P O I L E R ------- Clay Hayes if you want to google his channel. Does survival stuff, bow making and bow hunting / trad bow. He won, because he knows his stuff, so while the guys that had just put on weight had a weight advantage, he had a knowledge and "actually knows how to survive off the land and has nothing to prove" attitude. While some others had their bow strings chewed up by mice, he immediately hung his bow up. Unlike others that built elaborate shelters and used up all their calories, he built a very simple a-frame hut that he knew how to build. Even though he had no proper clay he built a proper tiny oven to keep himself warm and smoke free inside. He had absolutely super bad luck with fishing. Essentially got nothing for lots of effort. He was super lucky in that he actually found a deer and was able to shoot is with his trad bow, which is because he goes deer/elk hunting for real every single year with exactly that setup (see his youtube channel). He knew how to preserve said meat by smoking it and he knew how to protect it from the bear(s) in the area, which they weren't allowed to kill because this was filmed in BC Canada. He even had a super close encounter towards the end IIRC with a cougar but might have been the bear, not sure any more (not around his meat but out and about). He almost gave up. Basically he wanted to give up at the next med-checkin because he essentially had no food but the smoked deer and they told him he won!
- aeortiz 2y ago
  Natural selection only favors adaptations that help us create more surviving offspring to spread genes to the next generations.
edem 2y ago
are you saying that if i had cancer all i'd have to do is to take aspirin?
hsuduebc2 2y ago
Well we are not end products of evolution but we effectively stop it or at least slowed. I believe now it is on us to design human bodies to suit modern needs.
- pests 2y ago
  You don't think we're still evolving?
  - hsuduebc2 2y ago
    Well, we do evolve, but we've slowed the process with our ability to survive even when our bodies begin to fail us. In today's modern world, not reproducing is often a choice. However, evolution is no longer just about spreading genes—our advancements allow us to shape our own survival beyond natural selection. I believe we are still evolving, but at least for now, in this brief period, our most significant "evolution" has been our ability to extend life and enhance its comfort—whether by tweaking bodily mechanisms or treating diseases. I hope that gene editing will be our next step in evolution, allowing us to take control of our biological limitations in ways we never could before.
    - pests 2y ago
      I ponder a lot on grand topics like these, and this is the first I've come across that concept - evolving towards extended life and comfort. It's easy to break it down into a simple "survival of the fittest" analysis but like you say, we make choices beyond that.
  - yencabulator 2y ago
    All life evolves all the time, but there's less -- or practically no -- evolutionary pressure on humans anymore, so bigger changes don't happen as fast. It's still constant change, but now it's a random walk where all directions are just about as good, so no mutation has a significant edge on survival, so the little changes tend to cancel each other out.
- schnebbau 2y ago

seanw444 2y ago

Helpful summary, thanks.

ericmcer 2y ago

Nice summary, this seems like another adaptation that was super useful 10,000 years ago and is less so today. It would be nice if our bodies could adapt to modernity quicker, like don't prioritize blood clotting over immune defenses, I can just get some more band-aids on the off chance I cut myself in our very safe world. Don't preserve calories in case we are starving in the future, just build muscles and heal injuries recklessly I can hit up the grocery store if we need more nutrients.

Earw0rm 2y ago
Something I've been wondering is to what extent we're gut-efficiency-limited rather than calorie-limited. There's plenty of research showing that brain development and food preparation went hand in hand (cooking allows humans to liberate more calories from food with the same sized gut, allowing us both to be pretty mobile and have more energy available to run our large and energy-hungry brains). If you look at the way guts are built, clearly nature/evolution is trying to pack as much intestine as possible into a limited space. Certainly increasing calorie availability beyond a certain point isn't a good thing - our brains can't burn more than a certain amount, and most of us, Michael Phelps excepted, don't like making our bodies do the same - but I wonder to what extent our design-constraints put limits on our ability to absorb non-calorie nutrients. On the one hand you have a supplement industry who will say anything to make a buck, and are infected with pseudoscience and woo, but on the other, the standard med-sci advice of "just eat a balance diet, it's impossible to improve on that" seems kind of glib and baseless.
tunnuz 2y ago
That’s a very interesting thought. Presumably stuff like CRISPR will make our meat code open source and we’ll be able to deploy hot fixes ourselves.
- roncesvalles 2y ago
  In your future children, maybe. Chasing down and editing the DNA of live somatic cells in a meaningful way is basically impossible.
tharkun__ 2y ago
On a ~80 year scale you'd be correct for some of the world. But if you live in the "wrong" part of the world even in the last 80 years, just one "build muscle and heal injuries recklessly" may have resulted in more damage than good, coz the "grocery store" doesn't exist. The problem is also that if you "adapt fast" to "recklessness", then many people die fast before they would not be able to adapt back if necessary. Got wounded in a conflict zone cut off from supplies for months? Too bad, coz your body adapted to grocery store being close and unfortunately your body decided to just never put on weight in the first place, so now you have zero reserves to use up and ... you die. Watch "Alone". Some of the guys are adapted to never put on much weight and that's a real problem for them. They have a TV show safety net. If it was real, they'd be dead.
- pests 2y ago
  I liked Alone until it devolved into whoever came in with the most extra body mass and who could hibernate and conserve energy the most. Those who tried to hunt, build shelters, anything fun to show on TV, all would lose or be out early due to injury.
  - tharkun__ 2y ago
    Which season was that? Asking because "my bow guy" from Youtube, that I learned bow making from was the winner of Alone season 8 and he's one of the guys that can't put on weight. He tried i.e. put on as much as he could but he knew he had a disadvantage against everyone else because he'd not just go in fat like most others. ----- stop reading here if you did not watch season 8 and want to not get spoiled ------ S P O I L E R ------- Clay Hayes if you want to google his channel. Does survival stuff, bow making and bow hunting / trad bow. He won, because he knows his stuff, so while the guys that had just put on weight had a weight advantage, he had a knowledge and "actually knows how to survive off the land and has nothing to prove" attitude. While some others had their bow strings chewed up by mice, he immediately hung his bow up. Unlike others that built elaborate shelters and used up all their calories, he built a very simple a-frame hut that he knew how to build. Even though he had no proper clay he built a proper tiny oven to keep himself warm and smoke free inside. He had absolutely super bad luck with fishing. Essentially got nothing for lots of effort. He was super lucky in that he actually found a deer and was able to shoot is with his trad bow, which is because he goes deer/elk hunting for real every single year with exactly that setup (see his youtube channel). He knew how to preserve said meat by smoking it and he knew how to protect it from the bear(s) in the area, which they weren't allowed to kill because this was filmed in BC Canada. He even had a super close encounter towards the end IIRC with a cougar but might have been the bear, not sure any more (not around his meat but out and about). He almost gave up. Basically he wanted to give up at the next med-checkin because he essentially had no food but the smoked deer and they told him he won!
aeortiz 2y ago
Natural selection only favors adaptations that help us create more surviving offspring to spread genes to the next generations.

edem 2y ago

are you saying that if i had cancer all i'd have to do is to take aspirin?

hsuduebc2 2y ago

Well we are not end products of evolution but we effectively stop it or at least slowed. I believe now it is on us to design human bodies to suit modern needs.

pests 2y ago
You don't think we're still evolving?
- hsuduebc2 2y ago
  Well, we do evolve, but we've slowed the process with our ability to survive even when our bodies begin to fail us. In today's modern world, not reproducing is often a choice. However, evolution is no longer just about spreading genes—our advancements allow us to shape our own survival beyond natural selection. I believe we are still evolving, but at least for now, in this brief period, our most significant "evolution" has been our ability to extend life and enhance its comfort—whether by tweaking bodily mechanisms or treating diseases. I hope that gene editing will be our next step in evolution, allowing us to take control of our biological limitations in ways we never could before.
  - pests 2y ago
    I ponder a lot on grand topics like these, and this is the first I've come across that concept - evolving towards extended life and comfort. It's easy to break it down into a simple "survival of the fittest" analysis but like you say, we make choices beyond that.
- yencabulator 2y ago
  All life evolves all the time, but there's less -- or practically no -- evolutionary pressure on humans anymore, so bigger changes don't happen as fast. It's still constant change, but now it's a random walk where all directions are just about as good, so no mutation has a significant edge on survival, so the little changes tend to cancel each other out.
schnebbau 2y ago