Robert G. Wallace | Searcharxiv

arXiv2003

Do reductionist cures select for holistic diseases? Adaptive chronic infection, structured stress, and medical magic bullets

With a generalized language-of-thought argument for immune cognition, we model how population-directed structured psychosocial stress can impose an image of itself on the coevolutionary conflict between a highly adaptive chronic infection and the immune system. We raise the possibility that, for successful 'evolution machines' like HIV and malaria, simplistic individual-oriented magic bullet drug treatments, vaccines, behavior modification, or other interventions that do not address the fundamental living and working conditions underlying disease ecology will fail to control current epidemics and may select for holistic pathogenic life histories which increase disease virulence.

q-bio.NC↗

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↗