Comment by awesome_dude
2 hours ago
We still get diseases though, proving the point that millions of years of evolution are still not enough to build a perfect defence.
Your comment on PNG, seems to ignore Kuru
2 hours ago
We still get diseases though, proving the point that millions of years of evolution are still not enough to build a perfect defence.
Your comment on PNG, seems to ignore Kuru
It explicitly mentions Kuru as "prion disease", it ignores that the mortuary practice of eating various parts of respected dead has long passed in time .. although the lingering effect on the woman and children that ate portions of the brain in the 1970s, early 1980s, is still residual in a very few.
From an evolutionary PoV a perfect defence is overkill - with two separate defences against prion diseases in that region it's only the rare variation that causes any issue - and that rarely occurs before a new generation is birthed - ie. 'perfect' from the PoV of the selfish genes.
The claim is that people in PNG are "largely immune" to these diseases, where kuru shows that they are not, and the "cure" was a stop in the practice, not some evolutionary upgrade