Partial Review - Survival of the Sickest
This is a partial review because I am not through reading the book but, as it is nonfiction, I'm not worried about a sudden poor plot turn. The book is Survival of the Sickest by Dr. S. Moalem (medical researcher) and J. Prince (Clintonian speechwriter). Touting the admittedly controversial but also fascinating concept that many of the dread diseases we suffer now made evolutionary sense in the past, it's best described as Cold Case: MD, where Moalem starts with a disease and then backtracks along human evolution until he finds a circumstance where the trait could self-select for survival. (As he puts it, "Why would you take a drug that would kill you in 40 years? To keep you alive through tomorrow.")
It's charmingly written - not surprising when your ghostwriter was a speechwriter for the glibbest President in modern history - and thought-provoking. There are funnier bits, but this is the one that drove me to retype it, because it looks like it will be of the largest interest to the largest cross-section of the f-list.
"As humanity was evolving, we probably had pretty light skin too, underneath a similar coat of coarse, dark hair. As we lost hair, the increased exposure of our skin to ultraviolet rays from the strong African sun threatened the stores of folate we need to produce healthy babies. And that created an evolutionary preference for darker skin, full of light-absorbing, folate-protecting melanin.
As some population groups moved northward, where sunlight was less frequent and less strong, that dark skin - 'designed' to block UVB absorption - worked too well. Now, instead of protecting against loss of folate, it was preventing the creation of vitamin D. And so the need to maximize the use of available sunlight in order to create sufficient vitamin D created a new evolutionary pressure, this time for lighter skin. Recent scientific sleuthing reported in the prestigious journal Science goes so far as to say that white-skinned people are actually black-skinned mutants who lost the ability to produce significant amounts of eumelanin.
Redheads, with their characteristic milky white skin and freckles, may be a further mutation along the same lines. In order to survive in places with infrequent and weak sunlight, such as in parts of the UK, they may have evolved in a way that almost completely knocked out their body's ability to produce eumelanin, the brown or black pigment." (Survival of the Sickest, Moalem and Prince, Harper Collins, 2007, pp 54-55)
This isn't as sexy as tying diabetes back to ice wine and the ice age with a side stop at frogs (a better example than Cold Case would be calling the book Connections with a medical degree) but still, interesting.
Although not specifically about forensics, this'll tickle the forensics fans and historians alike, not to mention the bio majors.
It's charmingly written - not surprising when your ghostwriter was a speechwriter for the glibbest President in modern history - and thought-provoking. There are funnier bits, but this is the one that drove me to retype it, because it looks like it will be of the largest interest to the largest cross-section of the f-list.
"As humanity was evolving, we probably had pretty light skin too, underneath a similar coat of coarse, dark hair. As we lost hair, the increased exposure of our skin to ultraviolet rays from the strong African sun threatened the stores of folate we need to produce healthy babies. And that created an evolutionary preference for darker skin, full of light-absorbing, folate-protecting melanin.
As some population groups moved northward, where sunlight was less frequent and less strong, that dark skin - 'designed' to block UVB absorption - worked too well. Now, instead of protecting against loss of folate, it was preventing the creation of vitamin D. And so the need to maximize the use of available sunlight in order to create sufficient vitamin D created a new evolutionary pressure, this time for lighter skin. Recent scientific sleuthing reported in the prestigious journal Science goes so far as to say that white-skinned people are actually black-skinned mutants who lost the ability to produce significant amounts of eumelanin.
Redheads, with their characteristic milky white skin and freckles, may be a further mutation along the same lines. In order to survive in places with infrequent and weak sunlight, such as in parts of the UK, they may have evolved in a way that almost completely knocked out their body's ability to produce eumelanin, the brown or black pigment." (Survival of the Sickest, Moalem and Prince, Harper Collins, 2007, pp 54-55)
This isn't as sexy as tying diabetes back to ice wine and the ice age with a side stop at frogs (a better example than Cold Case would be calling the book Connections with a medical degree) but still, interesting.
Although not specifically about forensics, this'll tickle the forensics fans and historians alike, not to mention the bio majors.