The hygiene hypothesis is really the story of unintended consequences associated with the well intentioned efforts to eliminate infectious diseases, like Cholera, Typhoid and Smallpox.
That the lessons of these, and similar well intentioned efforts and their unintended consequences, have not been integrated into the adoption of various technologies is shocking, except that our system is not designed to consider such issues.
And so we can expect this type of phenomena to continue, until its logical conclusion.
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/07/03/2241207
Essentially memes are driving human evolution, not genes, which of course is obvious to anyone with an immunological disorder related to how we have molded our environment in ways deleterious to our genes.
This concept is at the core of not just the hygiene hypothesis, but the Paleolithic diet, that vitamin D deficiencies due to lack of exposure to sunlight may be a contributing factor to various human diseases, that the rise of obesity is due to the fact that we don’t exercise as much as we used to, that computer games are altering the way our children develop social skills, and a hundred other concepts related to the impact of “civilization” on human health, psychology and behavior.
The hygiene hypothesis confirmed by Stephen Hawking, not that is was required, but thanks, doctor.
What is enormously disturbing to me is that memes, ideas or beliefs transmitted like genes from individual to individual, drive natural selection not on the basis of individual fitness, but on group fitness. Witness the impact of agriculture. Agriculture succeeded as a meme despite the fact that it reduced life-expectancy, stature and quality of life for most individuals because it enabled cultures that adopted it to wipe out cultures that did not. A thousand short, weak and short-lived warriors are better than a hundred healthy, tall, and long-lived ones.
We now live in an age in which the determinant of fitness, and the transmission of biological information is no longer determined by just genes, but by memes. The organism carrying those pieces of information (genes or memes) are no longer just individuals, but societies. Whether I breed and my genes get passed on has as much to do with the collection of memes our society carry as the genes that I carry, as well as the subset of of our culture’s memes that I have integrated into my life. Do I drive a nice car, am I a fit mate? These things are determined as much by my ideas and attitudes as by my genetic heritage. Please don’t get cute and argue that the memes I carry are determined by my genes. True, but meaningless in this context.
It was not until the late 20th Century, and only in the USA and Western Europe, that humans regained the life expectancy and stature (5′ 11″ for men) that paleolithic hunter-gatherers had enjoyed before the advent of agriculture, ten thousand years previously. Please see Guns, Germs & Steel, and the Paleolithic diet.
You and I don’t matter in a country, or more correctly a social organism, in which each individual represents one “cell” in 300,000,000. If I die or get sick it is as if you were to trim your finger nails. I just don’t matter as I would in the type of social organism we evolved in, a village or tribe numbering perhaps a hundred.
Don’t even get me started about the price mechanism as the final determinant of what is wonderful and desirable.
How can anything that puts no value on a sunset, love, or clean air be the final word on the allocation of resources? But that is what we are expected to believe. Capitalism has given you HD Televisions, freeways, mayonnaise, and therefore is so wonderful that it is heresy to question it.
Why is it that no effort or resources are put into evaluating the impact of technology before it is thrown into the pool to be evaluated by the market?
Sure, I cannot buy my own personal nuclear weapon, but I can buy the equipment, material and instructions for assembling the Smallpox virus. It may cost a lot now, and take years for me to accomplish, but as we have seen with technology time and time again, in a few years or decades alienated teenagers will be able to code real viruses, not just computer viruses, using equipment available for at most a couple of thousand dollars.
Doubt me? Why ban something that isn’t possible? http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/307/5715/1540a. A few years ago a scientist did a proof-of-concept in which he assembled some random virus using off the shelf equipment, freely available instructions, and mail order proteins, components, and enzymes. He did it part time while he worked on his day job and it took a couple of years, but he did it. Pity I cannot find the news articles describing it, but it is out there.
It is no great leap from that to http://www.newsweek.com/id/204235. Newsweek cheerleads while no one asks whether or not this is desirable. Nor is there any mechanism available to us, except for spending our increasingly scarce money, in which we can vote on whether or not this is a desirable direction for research. You don’t have to be religious to be disturbed by the idea of humans creating life or combining it as casually as a DJ mixes music beats to create a new tune for humans to dance to.
And dance we will.
This issue goes to the core of what it means to be human and the choices we make as a nation and species, and so far we are blowing it in almost every respect.
This might just be bile built up from arguing with the world on the basis of reason, science, and evidence against the herd mentality and collective “wisdom”.
But I don’t think so.
Jasper