Why We Get Sick

by Randolph M. Nesse

  8 Information on the genetics of alcoholism is in M. A. Schickit’s article in Journal of the American Medical Association, (1985); in J. S. Searles’ in Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 97:153–67 (1988); and in M. Mullen’s in British Journal of Addictions, 84:1433–40 (1989).

  9 The quotations are from pp. 89–90 of Melvin Konner’s The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit (New York: Harper Colophon, 1983) and p. 215 of Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1976).

  Chapter 8. Aging as the Fountain of Youth

  1 The Irish ballad is on p. 103 of 100 Irish Ballads (Dublin: Walton’s, 1985). For the general reader, an excellent overview of the evolution of aging is provided by several articles in the February 1992 issue of Natural History and by R. Sapolsky and Caleb Finch on pp. 30–8 of the March-April 1991 issue of The Sciences. Excellent recent technical works are available in M. R. Rose’s article in Theoretical Population Biology, 28:342–58 (1984); in his Evolutionary Biology of Aging (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1991); and in Caleb Finch’s Longevity, Senescence, and the Genome (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991).

  2 Death rates in the United States are from Vital Statistics in the United States, 1989 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, 1992). The demographic aspects of aging are well reviewed by J. F. Fries and L. M. Crapo in Vitality and Aging (San Francisco: Freeman, 1981).

  3 Figure 8–1 is redrawn from Figure 3–2 in Vitality and Aging with permission.

  4 Figure 8–3 is redrawn from Figure 9.2 in Vitality and Aging with permission. We got the story about people fleeing a tiger from Helena Cronin’s The Ant and the Peacock (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1992).

  5 The lines about the “one-hoss shay” are from “The Deacon’s Masterpiece” on pp. 158–60 of The Complete Poetical Works of Oliver Wendell Holmes (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1908). The apparent coordination of aging effects is discussed by B. L. Strehler and A. S. Mildvan in Science, 132:14–21 (1960).

  6 The quotation is from August Weismann’s “The Duration of Life,” in A. Weismann: Essays upon Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems, edited by E. B. Poulton et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891–2). The article by G. C. Williams is in Evolution, 11:398–411 (1957).

  7 The J. B. S. Haldane reference is to New Paths in Genetics (New York: Harper, 1942). The P. B. Medawar quotation is from p. 38 of his article “Old Age and Natural Death,” reprinted on pp. 17–43 of his The Uniqueness of the Individual (London: Methuen, 1957). See also his An Unsolved Problem in Biology (London: M. K. Lewis, 1952). The classic theoretical treatment of the subject is W. D. Hamilton’s in Journal of Theoretical Biology, 12:12–45 (1968).

  8 For important recent comments on the evolution of menopause, see A. R. Rogers’ article in Evolutionary Ecology, 7:406–20, Kim Hill and A. M. Hurtado’s in Human Nature, 2:313–50 (1991), S. N. Austad in Experimental Gerontology, 29:255–63 (1994). Alex Comfort’s book is The Biology of Senescence, 3rd ed. (New York: Elsevier, 1979).

  9 Figure 8–4 is adapted from R. M. Nesse’s article in Experimental Gerontology, 23:445–53 (1988). R. L. Albin’s article is in Ethology and Sociobiology, 9:371–82 (1988). Hemochromatosis is reviewed by J. F. Desforges in the New England Journal of Medicine, 328:1616–20(1993).

  10 For recent findings on the genetics of Alzheimer’s disease, see the article by W. Strittmatter et al. in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (U.S.), 90:1977–81 (1993). S. I. Rapoport’s work is in Medical Hypotheses, 29:147–50.

  11 R. R. Sokal’s and other experimental studies of the role of pleiotropic genes in senescence are summarized in M. R. Rose’s book, cited for the beginning of the chapter. See especially his pp. 50–6 and 179–80.

  12 Work on dietary restriction is reviewed by J. P. Phelan and S. N. Austad in Growth, Development, and Aging, 53(1–2):4–6 (1989). For evidence on the beneficial effects of antioxidants and their mechanism of action, see R. G. Cutler’s article in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 53:373s-379s (1991). The quotation on gout is from p. 622 of Lubert Stryer’s Biochemistry, 3rd ed. (New York: Freeman, 1988). S. N. Austad’s reasons for believing that the aging process may be quite different in different species are presented in Aging, 5:259–67 (1994). His opossum work is in Journal of Zoology, 229:695–708 (1994).

  13 E. T. Whittaker’s discussion of postulates of impotence is mainly on pp. 58–60 of his From Euclid to Eddington. A Study of Conceptions of the External World (New York: Dover, 1958).

  Chapter 9. Legacies of Evolutionary History

  For authoritative and accessible overviews of human evolution, we suggest Roger Lewin’s in the Age of Mankind: A Smithsonian Book of Human Evolution (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Books, 1988) and Jared Diamond’s The Third Chimpanzee (New York: HarperCollins, 1992). For an engrossing biography of a contemporary hunter-gatherer woman, we recommend Marjorie Shostack’s Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman (New York: Vantage Books, 1983).

  1 The quotation from Charles Darwin is from p. 191 of the first edition of The Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859).

  2 A more dramatic account of the unfortunate effect of human speech adaptations on traffic control in the throat is provided in Chapter 10 of Elaine Morgan’s The Scars of Evolution (London: Penguin, 1990). More technically detailed information can be found in Philip Lieberman and Sheila E. Blumstein’s Speech Physiology, Speech Perception, and Acoustic Phonetics (Cambridge, England: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988).

  3 Our use of the book by George Estabrooks, Man, The Mechanical Misfit (New York: Macmillan, 1941), is at variance with its spirit. While it does describe many design flaws of the human body, its main message is the misfit between that design and the uses to which it is put in modern times. It is also a eugenicist tract.

  4 “Stone Agers in the Fast Lane” is the title of an article by S. B. Eaton et al. in The American Journal of Medicine, 84:739–49 (1988).

  5 Luigi Cavalli-Sforza et al. in Science, 259:639–46 (1993), estimate the current population at about a thousand times that of the Stone Age. The prevalence of human infanticide, and comparable behavior in other species, has recently gotten detailed attention. See Infanticide: Comparative and Evolutionary Perspectives, edited by G. Hausfater and S. B. Hrdy (New York: Aldine, 1984).

  6 For details of the symptoms of protozoan and helminth diseases, see Part XV (pp. 1714–78) of The Cecil Textbook of Medicine, edited by J. B. Wyngaarden and L. H. Smith (Philadelphia: Saunders, 1982). Many of the unpleasant effects of parasites are described, and some pictured, in the book by M. Katz et al. cited for p. 41. Richard Alexander’s quote is from p. 138 of the book cited for p. 17.

  7 A 15,000-year antiquity for domesticated dogs is suggested by Vitaly Shevoroshkin and John Woodward in their article on pp. 173–97 in Ways of Knowing. The Reality Club 3, edited by John Brockman (New York: Prentice Hall, 1991).

  8 The quotation about cave paintings is from p. 57 in Melvin Konnor’s The Tangled Wing: Biological Constraints on the Human Spirit (New York: Harper Colophon, 1983).

  Chapter 10, Diseases of Civilization

  1 For more on the origins of agriculture and husbandry, see Chapters 10 and 14 of Jared Diamond’s book, cited for the beginning of Chapter 9.

  2 Use of wild plant products to cure scurvy is discussed by Ingolfur Davidsson in Natturufraedingurinn, 42:140–4 (1972). Nutritional deficiencies and other problems evident in the 1500-year-old Amerind skeletons are documented by J. Lallo et al. on pp. 213–38 of Early Native Americans, edited by D. L. Browman (The Hague and New York: Moulton, 1980).

  3 The supernormal stimulus idea is discussed in many general works and textbooks, for instance, on pp. 27–9 of John Alcock’s book cited for pp. 16–17.

  4 For discussions of the role of dietary fat in modern medical problems, see H. B. Eaton’s article in Lipids, 27:814–20 (1992); Western Diseases, Their Emergence and Prevention, edited by H. C. Trowell and D. P. Burkitt (Cambridge, Mass.: Harv
ard Univ. Press, 1981), and H. B. Eaton et al.’s The Paleolithic Prescription (New York: Harper and Row, 1988). For a convincing work on the profound role of environment in public health and the relative unimportance of medicine, see Thomas McKeown’s The Role of Medicine: Dream, Mirage, or Nemesis? (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1979).

  5 The discussion of thrifty genotypes follows J. V. Neel’s article in Sorono Symposium, 47:281–93 (1982), and Gary Dowse and Paul Zimmet’s in British Medical Journal, 306:532–3 (1993). The effects of intermittent dieting are discussed in an article by J. O. Hill et al. in International Journal of Obesity, 12:547–55 (1988). The findings on artificial sweeteners are presented by D. Stellman and L. Garfinkel in Preventive Medicine, 15:195–202 (1986). Evidence for a long-term metabolic effect of intermittent food restriction is presented by G. L. Blackburn et al. in American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, 49:1105–9 (1989). Our conclusions and recommendations on diet and weight control summarize a detailed discussion published in a series of articles in The New York Times, November 22–5, 1992.

  6 The incidence of dental caries in prehistoric Georgia is discussed by C. S. Larsen et al. in Advances in Dental Anthropology, edited by M. A. Kelley and C. S. Larsen (New York: Wiley-Liss, 1991).

  7 For an example of a tribal society’s use of a psychotropic drug, see Napoleon Chagnon’s discussion of the use of ebene in Venezuela in Yanomamo: The Last Days of Eden (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1992).

  8 The inheritance of susceptibility to substance abuse is discussed by C. R. Cloninger in Archives of General Psychiatry, 38:961–8 (1981); by M. A. Schuckit in Journal of the American Medical Association, 254:2614–7 (1985); and by J. S. Sear les in Journal of Abnormal Psychiatry, 97:153–7 (1988). See also R. M. Nesse’s article in Ethology and Sociobiology (in press).

  9 Alan Weder and Nickolas Schork have published their theory in Hypertension, 24:145–56 (1994).

  10 Skin color in relation to rickets is discussed by W. M. S. Russell in Ecology of Disease, 2:95–106 (1983). The rapid evolutionary loss of pigment and eyes by animals living in caves is discussed by R. W. Mitchell and collaborators in “Mexican Eyeless Fishes, Genus Astyanax: Environment, Distribution and Evolution,” Special Publications. The Museum. Texas Tech University, 12:1–89 (1977). Evidence for the importance of introduced diseases in the destruction of New World peoples is summarized by F. L. Black in Science, 258:1/739–40. See also the work of M. Anderson and R. M. May cited for p. 52.

  Chapter 11. Allergy

  A good introduction to pollen allergies is N. Mygind’s Essential Allergy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). A more detailed review is in Allergic Diseases: Diagnosis and Management, edited by R. Patterson (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1993). A useful book on pollen is R. B. Knox’s Pollen and Allergy (Baltimore: University Park Press, 1978).

  1 For details on the IgE system, see O. L. Frick’s article on pp. 197–227 of Basic and Clinical Immunology, 6th ed., edited by D. P. Stites, J. D. Stobo, and J. V. Wells (Norwich, Conn.: Appleby and Lange, 1987), and C. R. Zeiss and J. J. Prusansky’s on pp. 33–46 of Allergic Diseases: Diagnosis and Management (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1993). Amos Bouskila and D. T. Blumstein provide a detailed discussion of what we call the smoke-detector principle in American Naturalist, 139:161–76 (1992).

  2 The New York Times quotation is from section 6, p. 52, March 28, 1993. The textbook quoted is E. S. Golub’s Immunology: A Synthesis (Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer, 1987).

  3 The history of ideas on the function of the ampullae of Lorenzini is discussed in a delightful article, “The Sense of Discovery and Vice Versa,” by K. S. Thomson in American Scientist, 71:522–5 (1983). More recent work is reviewed by H. Wissing et al. in Progress in Brain Research, 74:99–107 (1988).

  4 For discussions of IgE in relation to helminth infections, see A. Capron and J.-P. Dessaint’s work in Chemical Immunology, 49:236–44 (1990), and K. Q. Nguyen and O. G. Rodman’s in International Journal of Dermatology, 32:291–7 (1984).

  5 Profet’s article is in Quarterly Review of Biology, 66:23–62 (1991).

  6 For more information on the apparently increasing incidence of allergy, see works by L. Gamlin in the June 1990 issue of New Scientist and by Ronald Finn in Lancet, 340:1453–5 (1992). The genetics of atopy is reviewed by J. M. Hopkins in Journal of the Royal College of Physicians (London), 24:159–60 (1990). Evidence of the prevalence of genetic deficiencies in detoxification enzymes is reviewed by M. F. W. Festing in Critical Reviews in Toxicology, 18:1–26. Unfortunately, most of the research relates to variation in detoxification of drugs, not to routinely encountered toxins.

  7 The study of prevention of allergy is by S. H. Ar shad et al. and is published in Lancet, 339:1493–97 (1992).

  8 See citations for pp. 162–64 for indications of the increasing frequency of allergies. The redundancy and complexity of the immune system are well described in S. Ohno in Chemical Immunology, 49:21–34 (1990).

  Chapter 12. Cancer

  1 Our perspective on cancer derives from Leo Buss’s book The Evolution of Individuality (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1987). Liles’s article is in MBL Science, 3:9–13 (1988).

  2 Our account of the cellular, hormonal, and immunological mechanisms of cancer control is a greatly simplified retelling of that provided by two collections of articles in Science, 254:1131–73 (1991) and 259:616–38 (1993). The data on the p53 gene are from Elizabeth Culotta and D. E. Koshland’s article in Science, 262:1958–61 (1993). Many of our statements on genetic factors in cancer are supported by Chapter 5 of D. M. Prescott and A. S. Flexner’s Cancer. The Misguided Cell, 2nd ed. (Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer, 1986). Cosmides and Tooby’s observations were made in a talk presented to the 1994 meeting of the Human Behavior and Evolution Society.

  3 On sunshine as carcinogen and its effects on the immune system, we recommend David Concar’s easily readable account in the New Scientist, 134 (1821):23–8 (1992).

  4 Our discussion of women’s reproductive cancers summarizes that of W. B. Eaton et al. in Quarterly Review of Biology, 69:353–67 (1994). The reduction in uterine and ovarian cancer risk as a result of oral contraceptive use is documented by B. E. Henderson et al. in Science, 259:633–8 (1993).

  Chapter 13. Sex and Reproduction

  1 The current debate over the evolutionary origins of sex is well presented in Matt Ridley’s The Red Queen (New York: Macmillan, 1993). For a more technical discussion, see R. E. Michod and B. R. Levin, editors, The Evolution of Sex (Sunderland, Mass.: Sinauer, 1988). For the parasite theory of sexuality, see W. D. Hamilton, R. Axelrod, and R. Tanese’s article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 87:3566–73 (1990). For some origins of the current debate, see G. C. Williams’ Sex and Evolution (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975) and J. Maynard Smith’s The Evolution of Sex (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1978). A recent review by S. Sarkar appears in BioScience, 42(6):448–54 (1992). The evolution of genetic diversity is reviewed by Wayne K. Potts and Edward K. Wakeland in Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 5:181–7 (1990)

  2 For a discussion of why there are large eggs and small sperm, see pp. 151–5 of Maynard Smith’s The Evolution of Sex, cited above. Pp. 130–9 of the same work present the currently accepted view of why some organisms are hermaphrodites and others have separate sexes. A more detailed treatment is found in E. L. Charnov’s The Theory of Sex Allocation (Princeton N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1982).

  3 Current controversies on the theory of sexual selection, which deals with male-female differences in reproductive adaptations, are discussed in Sexual Selection: Testing the Alternatives, edited by J. W. Bradbury and M. B. Anderson (New York: Wiley-Inter-science, 1987). The historical development and current form of this theory are beautifully presented by Helena Cronin’s The Ant and the Peacock (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1991).

  4 The problems expected as a result of a female-biased sex ratio are discussed by P. Secord in Personality and Social Psychology Bullet
in, 9(4):525–43 (1983).

  5 The application of the theory of sexual selection to human sex differences is discussed in several eminently readable works: David Buss’s The Evolution of Desire (New York: Basic Books, 1994); Donald Symons’ The Evolution of Human Sexuality (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1979); and Sarah B. Hrdy’s The Woman That Never Evolved (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1981). Sex, Evolution and Behavior by Martin Daly and Margo Wilson (Boston: Willard Grant Press, 1983) offers an authoritative, yet clear and entertaining overview of animal and human sexuality. The same authors have a short, up-to-date chapter titled “The Man who Mistook His Wife for a Chattel,” pp. 289–322 in J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, editors, The Adapted Mind (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1992). For a series of detailed review articles, see L. Betzig, M. B. Mulder, and P. Turke, editors, Human Reproductive Behavior: A Darwinian Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988).

  6 For an authoritative report on male despotism and harems, see Laura L. Betzig’s Despotism and Differential Reproduction: A Darwinian View of History (New York: Aldine, 1986).

  7 The quotation from David Buss is from p. 249 in a chapter in The Adapted Mind (see above) on “Mate Preference Mechanisms.”

  8 David Buss’s data are in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12:1–49 (1989). See also Bruce J. Ellis’s “The Evolution of Sexual Attraction: Evaluative Mechanisms in Women” in The Adapted Mind, cited above.