Survival of the Sickest
Survival of the Sickest: The Surprising Connections Between Disease and Longevity is a 2007 New York Times Bestselling science book by Sharon Moalem, an evolutionary biologist and neurogeneticist, and Jonathan Prince, senior advisor and speechwriter for the Clinton administration. It was originally titled, Survival of the Sickest: A Medical Maverick Discovers Why We Need Disease.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2022–2024years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- There are many conditions that confer a narrow fitness advantage and have significant disadvantages too: sickle cell anemia (malaria resistance), diabetes (cold tolerance) are two I can think of off the top of my head.
Here's an interesting book on the topic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_Sickest_(book)
- 'Survival of the Sickest' by Sharon Moalem covers this and several other diseases that are related to survival at a cost as well. Fun read for the interested!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Survival_of_the_Sickest_(book)
- Probably 20 years ago now when I was reading about sugar and atkins diet some rando on the internet suggested that high intake of sugar told our bodies (or at least my scandanavian/scottish-genetics body) to start bulking up for the winter. Looks like rando might have been right.
There's also the theory in Survival of the Sickest by Moalem that the high blood sugar in diabetes acts like antifreeze and protects against frostbite in the winter. That was from 2007, I don't know what people think about that theory now. (EDIT: After looking it up it looks like Moalem was talking about type 1 Diabetes which makes no sense to me at all since historically T1 was a pretty immediate death sentence, and I can't find any decent scientific papers citing that book, its all garbage, oh well).
Those theories have always been intuitively compelling to me and stuck in my head.
