I’m a doctor. My job exists because nature hates you, and we can do better.
I have to hold my tongue when patients tell me they don’t want vaccines because they “want to do it naturally.” Fuck nature. Nature made polio, and polio paralyzes children. Nature can kiss my ass.
Nature also made us too fucking stupid to realize we don’t have massive viral issues because vaccines work.
Nature also made our kickass brains which we use to create these amazing things.
Those same idiots drive home in a car to an air conditioned home. What’s “natural” about any of that?
Yep, tool use evolved pretty early in animals (some insects and fish can use tools,) though of course humans have gone a step further and use tools to make other, better tools.
The smallpox vaccine was developed in 1796, nearly a century before the first phone and a good 20 years before the first bicycles. The tech in COVID-19 vaccines was discovered 20 years before the first iPhone, but people act like it was invented yesterday.
turns 50
Dammit, nature, you suck; I’m supposed to be dead. And I sacrificed so many children to you!
Is that David Frum, speechwriter to the Bush Jr administration? Writer of speeches about the axis of evil? Writer of speeches to whip up frenzy for an invasion of Iraq? An invasion based on lies? That David Frum?
You could just as easily say nature wants empathy, cooperation and collective action. Also that tool use that Mr Frum seems so fond of, nature wants that too.
But of course the nature doesn’t want, it just is.
Pretty sure that “dead by 50 thing” includes all the infant mortality.
I bet he’s also using the stats from peak mortality of European late middle ages with urbanisation but no good sewers.
50 actually seemed about right for me excluding infants so I looked it up.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2625386/
That study looks at lifespan after reaching 5, and 50 might still be a little generous with the care that humans could provide each other 50,000 years ago. 50 is about the lifespan of a king 3,000 years ago, I can’t imagine gen pop faired better.
It’s also a sample size of 15 all “King’s of Judah” which is already urbanised.
But it’s good to see some decent data. It’s a nice irregular line from there on, and women do gain a lot more improvement than men.
I wish I had access to scholarly journals still to do my own research, but I don’t so I’ll defer to your stuff for now. Thanks.
Me too. We have plenty of bones of people who lived into old age with signs of disability or having been crippled.
But the overall stats not only do I not know, but since we only have a relatively minor number of data points it’s hard to really say any of us will ever know.
What we have does tend to point to being better than a medieval city iirc, and I think the general consensus amongst anthropologists is that the transition to agriculture saw a decrease in life expectancy.
