arXiv subjects

Deborah Wallace

Publications and source records attributed to Deborah Wallace.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2003

Coronary heart disease, chronic inflammation, and pathogenic social hierarchy: a biological limit to possible reductions in morbidity and mortality

We suggest that a particular form of social hierarchy, which we characterize as 'pathogenic', can, from the earliest stages of life, exert a formal analog to evolutionary selection pressure, literally writing a permanent developmental image of itself upon immune function as chronic vascular inflammation and its consequences. The staged nature of resulting disease emerges 'naturally' as a rough analog to punctuated equilibrium in evolutionary theory, although selection pressure is a passive filter rather than an active agent like structured psychosocial stress. Exposure differs according to the social constructs of race, class, and ethnicity, accounting in large measure for observed population-level differences in rates of coronary heart disease across industrialized societies. American Apartheid, which enmeshes both majority and minority communities in a social construct of pathogenic hierarchy, appears to present a severe biological limit to continuing declines in coronary heart disease for powerful as well as subordinate subgroups: 'Culture', to use the words of the evolutionary anthropologist Robert Boyd, 'is as much a part of human biology as the enamel on our teeth'.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2003

Resilience reconsidered: Case histories from disease ecology

We expand the current understanding of ecological resilience to include the nested hierarchy of cognitive submodules that particularly, if not uniquely, delineates human ecosystems. These modules, ranging from the immune system to the local social network, are embedded in a cultural milieu which, to take the perspective of the evolutionary anthropologist Robert Boyd, ''is as much a part of human biology as the enamel on our teeth''. We begin by extending recent treatments of cognitive process as associated with characteristic information sources to a certain class of ecosystems through a generalization of coarse-graining. In the spirit of the Large Deviations Program, we then import renormalization formalism via the Asymptotic Equipartition Theorem to obtain punctuated response to parameters of increasing habitat degradation. A Legendre transform of an appropriate joint information permits analysis away from critical points, and generates the expected quasi-stability in a highly natural manner. We interweave the discussion with applications to the public health impacts of the massive deurbanization and deindustrialization presently afflicting the United States.

q-bio.NC↗

arXiv2003

Structured psychosocial stress and therapeutic failure

Generalized language-of-thought arguments appropriate to interacting cognitive modules permit exploration of how disease states interact with medical treatment. The interpenetrating feedback between treatment and response to it creates a kind of idiotypic hall-of-mirrors generating a synergistic pattern of efficacy, treatment failure, adverse reactions, and patient noncompliance which, from a Rate Distortion perspective, embodies a distorted image of externally-imposed structured psychosocial stress. For the US, accelerating spatial and social diffusion of such stress enmeshes both dominant and subordinate populations in a linked system which will express itself, not only in an increasingly unhealthy society, but in the diffusion of therapeutic failure, including, but not limited to, drug-based treatments.

q-bio.NC↗