Bug bites on hairless skin probably had something to do with dying of disease, and the early homonids that had the gene seem to be the ones hit the hardest.
We also see evolutionary markers related to bed bugs, head lice and body lice. Maybe mosquitos and genes linked to a possible malaria pandemic offer more clues.
Edit: apparently it might be linked to a resistance to cholera.
Edit: I forgot the earlier work demonstrating Plasmodium specificity to NeuGc, so yeah maybe malaria!
Domestic cats are at risk, but that is more a result of domestication and improper feeding (carbohydrate) than evolution or genetics. Unless I am missing something, of course! Care to elaborate?
I feel that repeated inbreeding can (but does not have to) cause issues like sensitive kidneys in cats, but it probably also has to do with domestic cats growing relatively old. Things like faulty kidneys (or thyroid issues, or diabetes) bound to show up eventually if cancer does not get them before age 10.
Do you ever feel that way?
Maybe no other animal is just that stupid.
They very much are, many pets will way overfeed themselves if given the opportunity.
Though it might also be human-inflicted, I don't know if wild animals will do so if provided with effortless unlimited amounts of food.
I would expect so though, most evolutionary environments simply don't set up organisms for an unlimited glut of free energy-dense food, when there's a glut of resources it's usually followed by some sort of crash, so organisms stock up as fast as they can in order to out-compete their peers once resources crash. If the glut doesn't end (which is essentially what modern advanced economies arrived at), neither does the tendency to stock up, because there's probably never been an evolutionary context (sustained for a long enough period) where that was an issue and thus allowed some organisms to outlive others.
Have you ever owned a cat or dog? My experience is that a percentage of them will overeat unless constantly monitored, eat things that are outright dangerous, etc. What is it that makes humans the stupid ones, here?
Left to their own devices (they weren't each individually heavily supervised - especially when on the range), of the domesticated ones, the only ones that would gorge themselves to death were the horses (when they thought they were getting away with something), with the minor exception of the dogs (who might eat the other animal's grain-based food out of jealousy, and explode their gut because they ate the wrong food because of stupidity)
I did not find that, unmonitored, most animals would eat too much of the wrong type of food for too long (loco-weed for cows might be an exception - but that didn't kill them).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labrador_Retriever#Inherited_d...
And the title is a bit incorrect, other animals do suffer with heart issues/"heart attacks" (usually congenital, but due to old age as well)
It's not just the abundance of food, it's the sustained abundance. Many species follow a feast / famine cycle which puts pressure on stocking up as fast as possible during feast in order to survive the inevitable famine. This is the evolved instinctual mechanism which gets shot to piece by the "endless feast" available to many individuals in advanced economies (or wealthy enough individuals in pre-industrial economies), even more so combined with the physical "leisure" (limited requirements of extensive physical activity in day to day life).
But some seem fine with layers of blubber. It's a feature, not a bug sometimes.
But "you gotta die of something", so when one cause drops in rate, another rises. So if you're stubborn (lucky) enough not to die of anything else, it'll probably be either cancer or heart-related that gets you: up from 12% of all deaths in 1900 to 47% in 2010.[1]
In short, we're more likely to die of affluence diseases[2] if we're not dying of poverty diseases.[3]
[1] https://demography.cpc.unc.edu/2014/06/16/mortality-and-caus...
edit: And also maybe general life style differences regarding availability and richness of food, exercise, shorter life spans etc.
But that would be from malnutrition, not atherosclerosis.
The whole premise behind this headline seems bogus.
Of course we can give rabbits atherosclerosis by giving them high cholesterol from a diet they don't eat in the wild. But in humans, "in roughly 15 percent of first-time cardiovascular disease events (CVD) due to atherosclerosis, none of these [risk] factors apply," where risk factors include "blood cholesterol, physical inactivity, age, hypertension, obesity and smoking."
So the study explores a possible reason for that.
> Interestingly, the evolutionary loss of the CMAH gene appears to have produced other significant changes in human physiology, including reduced human fertility and enhanced ability to run long distances.
Reduced fertility doesn't seem for me important, we have a contraception for that. But enhanced ability to run long distances seems very convenient. I can ride a bicycle or walk for hours just for fun of physical exercise, and I'm not going to lose that.
So in what way are "only humans" prone? Are these not heart attacks?
My Dad's heart stopped and he was kept alive by 45 minutes of CPR by burly firefighters - did he have a heart attack? Nope. His heart's pacemaker cells went on the fritz, but it wasn't a myocardial infarction.
A "heart attack" is a myocardial infarction, but many other bad things can happen to your heart.
What a way to start an article in a website with "science" in its name.
Atheroma is an accumulation of white blood cells. White. Blood. Cells. Not fat.
"Meat bad, saturated fat bad, eat your necessarily fortified grains and heart-healthy industrially extracted seed oils."
https://lmgtfy.com/?q=Atherosclerosis
"When plaque (fatty deposits) clogs your arteries, that’s called atherosclerosis."
~ American Heart Association (https://www.heart.org/en/health-topics/cholesterol/about-cho...)
"Atherosclerosis is a disease in which plaque builds up inside your arteries....Plaque is made up of fat, cholesterol, calcium, and other substances found in the blood."
~ https://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/health-topics/atherosclerosis
"Atherosclerosis refers to the buildup of fats, cholesterol and other substances in and on your artery walls (plaque), which can restrict blood flow."
~ https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/arteriosclero...
-sclerosis is a hardening. E.g arthrosclerosis for a hardening of joints.
The hardening in atherosclerosis is caused directly and exclusively by atheroma.
https://peterattiamd.com/the-straight-dope-on-cholesterol-pa...
my TL;DR (as a non-doctor): LDL "cholesterol" (actually proteins carrying cholesterol and "fat" (triglycerides) in blood) has a tendency to get "stuck" in artery walls. That causes inflamation, which attracts macrophages which also get stuck, and so on until you get plaques ("clogged arteries") and one plaque breaks off and causes a heart attack. Consuming saturated fat / cholesterol is problematic because it causes a decrease of LDL-sensitive receptors and consequentially more LDL in blood. If I understand correctly, the later part of the previous statement is considered settled science ("we know how it actually works" - 1985 Nobel Prize was awarded for this), while the first part (diet) seems to be somewhat debated and has mostly statistical justification ("evidence suggests") and also depends on an individual's genetics.
When the options are “malaria with high probability from birth onwards” or “heart attack after multiple decades with high probability if nothing else kills you first”, this is fitness.
Besides which, if humans didn’t evolve, you need to explain why the creator didn’t use a better mechanism to prevent us from getting malaria. For example: not creating malaria when they created us.
This is the second time I see skepticism about evolution is brought up on HN comments. Science literacy of the community definitely went down.
For yet another study in ... mice.
There are other options like dogs and pigs which are much better models for human biology, so if you really want to make a claim about subtle effects of human genetics you need to be as close to a human model as possible.
This is entirely ignoring the someone generous leap they make that one single gene mutation is responsible for an increased rate of heart disease. It also doesn’t touch on what the benefits for that gene were (to spread through the gene pool completely it must have some benefit that outweighs the cost)
* Hyped-up science is a problem. One clever Twitter account is pushing back.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/15/18679138/nutrit...
Just for some background for those who weren't aware what is the OP all about. But to be fair, I think this article is actually well-written and doesn't contain sensationalized framing.
