Comment on You Ever Watch A Scary Movie or Read A Book and Then Feel Spooked For A While?

• sj_zero@lotide.fbxl.net ⁨2⁩ ⁨years⁩ ago

  I have said fairly often that the proof of the viciousness of human history is written in our blood.

  When something is happening genetically, often you need to take a closer look because there is usually a reason. Traits that are completely deleterious are usually bred out within a few generations, so the ones that remain often have a reason. A perfect example is sickle cell anemia. It is not common in most of the world, but it is very common in Africa. The reason that it is so common is that sickle cell traits provide a level of resistance to malaria. So even though the trait is dangerous to those who have it, it remained because the people who got it survived. Do you know why even though being fat is a deleterious thing there are so many fat people, genetically? Because in the past there were massive famines. Forget about not being able to afford the latest iPhone, people could not scrounge together enough food to live. For most of human history the poorest and sometimes even the richest could not get enough to eat and they would die of starvation.

  It is hard to imagine right now, but the human race has been on the brink of destruction at times. According to scientists, every human being on the planet is descended from one woman who's been named mitochondrial Eve. Mitochondria are symbiotic organisms that exist within animal cells that convert sugars into more refined fuels. They are essential to most animal life because without these specialized organisms, animal cells would have to maintain a method to convert coarser sugars into more refined fuels themselves, and that is rather costly compared to just having a symbiotic organism do it for us. There are several single-celled organisms that do not rely on mitochondria, in some cases, the main cell basically just absorbed the functions of the mitochondrial cell, and in other cases they independently evolved a separate method to refine those sugars, but multicellular life almost universally has mitochondria. The first mitochondria are contained in the mother, and so mitochondria are passed down from mother to child, it is matrilineal. Mitochondria has its own DNA as it is an independent organism living within our cells, and we can sequence that DNA. As far as we can tell, there is only the one person that all our mitochondria descend from. There was probably a time where the human race was so close to the brink of destruction, and it was the offspring of mitochondrial Eve who happened to be strong enough to survive and replicate. Just imagine, every human being alive is a descendant of this one woman. And this was not the first human being either, it was just one particular choke point in the history of civilization. Imagine that all the other mothers in that generation were unable to produce offspring who were capable of surviving and replicating over generations. Every single one of them, the story of their bloodline ended around there. In such a cutthroat world with such a small number of options, it is only understandable that taking risks that could lead to the extinction of your bloodline would cause incredible anxiety.

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