Survival of the Sickest, a book written by Dr. Sharon Moalem with Jonathan Prince, is an analysis on evolution that questions the reasonings behind survival and creation. It explains how many genes are passed down through generations and proves why they increase a species’ chance of surviving and reproducing.
In the introduction, the author confirms that this book is trying to answer the mysteries of life: how we all got here, the future of where the human race is headed, and what we can do about it. In short, this book is trying to answer the questions of evolution. After a brief backstory on Dr. Moalem’s motivation in studying evolution and medicine, the book dives into the curiosity of iron and goes in depth about such dangers of iron levels. It was very interesting to note how the element found in our bodies could cause many problems by feeding the bacteria and parasites, but our body still needed iron to function. For example, iron could damage your organs if there are buildups and even give you a George Hamilton perma-tan because of excess iron being deposited in the skin. The name for this uncommon hereditary condition is hemochromatosis and it causes iron to build up in the body, one of the treatments being bloodletting. The author explains how the disease works in the body, and how just about every form of life needs iron to survive. The body has several mechanisms that lock down access to iron because infectious bacteria thrive on iron. At first it would seem that people with hemochromatosis would be at an additional risk from infections because bacteria would multiply rapidly because of the extra iron. It turns out that people with hemochromatosis also have a problem with macrophages which are blood cells and part of the immune system. In a person with hemochromatosis, macrophages are deficient in iron even though there is an excess of iron elsewhere in the body because of the disease. This iron-deficiency in macrophages has unexpected benefits. Iron proves to be a thriving center for all kinds of life. It impacts human lives because too much iron can be deadly, ultimately damaging the joints, major organs, and overall body chemistry. In addition to human life, iron affects various kinds of life, such as why oceans with ample amounts of iron are teeming with life, and oceans without it are not.
Dr. Moalem continues to move on to diabetes and explain how it was beneficial to some areas of the world at certain times. This example encapsulates the evolution of humankind and how we all are programmed to survive and reproduce the good traits that give our offspring the best chances of surviving and reproducing. In times of extreme cold, excess amounts of sugar in the bloodstream acted as a type of antifreeze, thus keeping humans from freezing to death and giving them the opportunity to survive and reproduce. After the explanation of the necessity of sugars in the bloodstream, the author introduces the relationship within the sun and humanity and its correlation between vitamin D and cholesterol. One captivating thing was how Inuits had darker skin tones, despite the little amount of sunlight in the subarctic: the trait was because of the Inuit’s diet of fatty fish, which was full of vitamin D, meaning that they did not need lighter skin to maximize vitamin D production.
In the next chapter, “Hey, Bud, Can You Do Me a Fava,” the author analyzes the cultivation and consumption of fava beans and how it ties in with plants’ evolution and ours. One statement that summarizes his plant evolution explanation is “Life: it’s such a compromise.” With this line, the author is representing that the nature of life will always have an ultimatum, where fixing one problem such as protecting celery with synthetic pesticides will create an onslaught of other problems, while not protecting them can lead to poisonous levels of natural psoralen. After evaluating the relationship between plant evolution and humans, Dr. Moalem continues to investigate a common genetic mutation and its popularity in certain areas of the world. He points out that favism is thriving in Africa and the Mediterranean because it gives an advantage against the extremely deadly and infectious disease, malaria. People with favism cannot clear out the free radicals produced by fava beans because of a genetic deficiency. The free radicals attack red blood cells. It turns out that people with this genetic deficiency end up being more resistant to malaria. Malarial parasites find the red blood cells of people with favism not to their liking. Through his explanation he correlates how the mutation, despite its adverse effects, is favorable in malaria ridden areas and therefore how a genetic deficiency contributes to the evolution of humans to survive against a more harmful disease.
Subsequently, the book goes on about microbes and how they are evolving alongside us and one of the reasons why we have been evolving for millions of years as well. Furthermore, the author identifies a correlation between sunspots and flu epidemics. One thing that he notes is how the sun can cause mutation through increased solar radiation into Earth’s gigantic magnetic field. In addition, sunspots have occurred in tandem with massive flu outbreaks, and although it might be a coincidence, outbreaks and pandemics are assumed to be caused by antigenic drift, when a mutation occurs in the DNA of a virus, which can be caused by radiation or sunspots. Moving through the chapter the author also explains how transposons, jumping genes that act as if they are cutting and pasting DNA, are similar to retroviruses, which reverses normal information flow and replicates itself in other cells, and how they work and change DNA codes within our cells to help spark human evolution from the inside and not just the outside.
Moving on, the author starts to describe how offspring is also affected by their parent’s lives, and revisits the Lamarckism idea of organisms passing on characteristics that it has acquired over its lifetime. In the chapter, Dr. Moalem explains how some environmental factors on mothers have shown effects to the inheritance of the traits in their offspring. While such environmental factors do not change the DNA within the offspring, it changes the way the DNA is expressed, therefore changing heredity. One outcomes of this Lamarckism-similar idea is how “Good times means more boys. Tough times means more girls.” This expression was used to portray how the stress from environmental factors affected mostly women and their offspring, and how it acted like acquired traits from one generation passed on to the next. In depth, the line “Good times means more boys. Tough times means more girls,” meant that the epigenetic effects that a mother mentally endures during pregnancy, due to good or harsh environmental occurrences, have a large contribution on the baby’s gender.
In the last chapter, Dr. Moalem correlates the death between humans and apple music products. He states that we humans are coded in a way to make the next generation better than the last and therefore need to die, just as how current iPods need to die out so the next line of iPods can be more successful. As he makes this correlation, the last chapter and conclusion helps support the quote, “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution,” by Theodosius Dobzhansky, because this book highlights how biology has been built upon the back of evolution. Without evolution in the equation, biology would cease to exist and not have logical reasoning behind why life is the way it is today. The book supports this quote by analyzing and explaining how our biology has changed over time, and how without the idea of evolution, biology would be an unquestionable mystery. Towards the end, the author includes a series of questions to provoke the reader’s mind into thinking deeply about how evolution is the answer to the human race’s biology. In addition, Dr. Sharon Moalem hopes that at the end of the book the reader gives thought and appreciation to how life is in a constant state of creation, nothing is in isolation in the world, and that our relationship with disease is extremely complex. I also believe that he would want his readers to understand that the survival of the sickest leads to a stronger generation and how that applies to all forms of life, along with the idea, that biology and evolution are the backbones to life and the answers to our existence.
In conclusion, Survival of the Sickest was a great analytical book on the mysteries of evolution and survival, and while it posed many questions about why life is the way it is in the world, the author provided reliable studies and conclusions to support such theories. I thoroughly enjoyed reading the book because it gave me an interesting look into the explanations of our bodies and how they try their best to keep us living. Overall, Dr. Moalem and Jonathan Prince put together a great read that I would recommend to anyone with interest in life science, and even to those trying to understand the meaning of our confusing lives.