Your body has only a few emergency levers it can pull. It also only has a few detection systems.

It takes time for the immune system to respond. It has to recognize a problem, communicate to the immune system generals, mobilize the early troops and then start producing the rest of the defense warriors.

Mucus production is really quick to start. The detectors are nearby and all that needs to be done is open up a tap and the mucus starts flowing. It provides a protective barrier between the environment and body tissue, plus it also has a flushing effect as it moves out and down.

Nasal congestion not only is just for viruses, it is also for bacteria, pollen and foreign objects. Sometimes a good flushing is all that is required.

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Sorry, I probably should have been clearer about my transition to small heaters.

An example of this in practice is the Zanclean flood that formed the Mediterranean 5.3MM years ago, and the current day Salton Sea in California.

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> noninferior to another similar drug(which is to say, it's not less afe and efficient).

A new drug can be inferior in some ways, provided it is better in others. For instance, if it is a lot cheaper, has fewer side effects, targets a sub-group not covered by the comparison or more easily made available.

For instance, medications suitable for pregnant women are often inferior (less effective) that comparisons.

Anyway, words are fun. You can make them mean whatever you want.

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The folding is driven by thermodynamics, but in a sense, so is everything!

All of nature tends to move from higher energy to lower energy states. You can approximately calculate the energy of a protein structure, but you'll be wrong by enough that your error is bigger than the difference between candidate structures. To calculate the energy with sufficient accuracy, you need to use quantum mechanics using, e.g., density functional theory.

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>Imagine what the life expectancy was for disabled/sick people prior to an abundance of food.

What makes you think that there was no abundance of food before the discovery of agriculture? Hunter gatherer groups tended to migrate around to follow the food over the seasons. Between this and the low populations it would have been pretty rare for the groups to go hungry over a long enough period of time for individuals to starve to death.

Agriculture and animal husbandry is what allowed for humans to settle down and to start multiplying like rabbits.

Yes, animals that consume infected birds can become infected themselves. However, many scavengers, such as vultures and other birds of prey, have a relatively high resistance to avian influenza and may not be affected by the virus or die from it. Additionally, the virus may not survive well in the animal's body, and therefore would not be able to infect others. Many domestic animal like pigs, cats and dogs have a different type of receptors in their respiratory system, which makes it harder for avian flu to infect them, as it is not able to bind to those receptors.

In ancient China, food was not more abundant. In fact, everyone outside of the top 2% ate mostly unpolished grains and wild vegetables, and were usually about 5 feet tall due to poor nutrition. However, Chinese medicine was effective as preventative medicine and supportive treatment, and so the empirical evidence stands that their cities were historically the largest until the industrial revolution entered full swing.

Farming in China has been largely unchanged for the last 2600 years, they had very little arable land per capita and no access to the abundance of the sea like Japan does. Rice is also a luxury for most of history, and only a staple in the South. Northern China was fed on wheat, millet and sorghum etc., and the Yellow River is the area that the Han culture originated and thrived for most of history.

Your point about feeding the weak only applies to famine and war, in a time where death rates are already high. It won't be statistically significant then, because everyone would be hungry and weak, then the plague or a hostile army would come out of nowhere and flatten them anyway. In that case, survival was as much luck as it was rational decisions.

The family, tribe or clan was also the most important unit in all of history, and they always provided for the infirm. Even Neanderthal tribes have left behind evidence that they supported the disabled. Liberalism was significant, because it recognized the individual, where the traditional conservative only saw clans as the smallest unit. That is not how it worked for the longest time. If you were family, you just fed them, it was that simple

Makes sense

Wouldn't animals that eat dead infected birds, infect themselves?

In addition to the points everyone else has brought up, it's important to note that you're sort of always tracking moving objects with your eyes.

If you're not resting on something, your head is basically never completely still. Try moving your head from side to side while staring at one word in this sentence - your eyes will reflexively rotate on their own to stay locked on.

This isn't completely the same. Your vestibular system senses your head's rotation, and your eyes reflexively move in response to that, so they have a little more information to work with here. But essentially, it's just kind of the nature of our eyes to lock onto persistent visual objects, whether your or the object are the ones that are moving.

> The fastest spacecraft is the Parker Solar Probe at 430,000 mph

This is simply wrong. The value you provided is instantaneous velocity this spacecraft had when passing perihelion, and is mostly due to how close to the Sun it was. It has very little to do with actual velocity at which it would travel outside the solar system.

Highly elliptical or hyperbolic orbits look a bit like pendulum or a ball thrown upwards -> you have high velocity when it's deep in gravity well (eg. ball is the fastest right before hitting the ground) but the velocity drops when you're moving away (eg. the ball will essentially reach a point where it has velocity=0 before it starts falling back down). So while parker solar probe had high velocity when passing close to the Sun, it would be moving orders of magnitude slower when moving away, eg. in the direction of this nearby black hole.

this is also my point, I know the whole folding is more classical, and the folding is mainly driven by thermodynamics, but I feel like how the change in shape happen as protein jump from one conformation to another is quantum mechanical

I was trying to look for more than just the bonds and forces but thank you for this!

good point, thanks

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Inbreeding becomes less dangerous the more common it is, and people in early tribal groups were a lot more closely related than today. Genetic differences between groups increases and all it takes is a bottleneck event to make the tribe of 44s the new standard number of chromosomes. Speciation through increased diversity between many groups of genetically similar individual, followed by selective or random culling of many of those groups.

That's a viable explanation of how we ended up with 46 instead of the 48 the other great apes have.

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>If a member of a species was born with an extra chromosome, or two chromosomes fused, their offspring have a high change of being sterile. How could the increase of decrease of a chromosome become wide spread in a species if that happens?

I think I understood the question and answered it. 1. The sterility of an offspring with an additional / fused chromosome isn't that high as shown by examples, it can be neutral; and 2. neutral mutations can become fixed.

The argument is quite similar to mutations in general. There is the general opinion that mutations are bad and overwhelmingly deleterious. They aren't. Most are neutral; the result is most people have mutations, often quite a few. Those mutations can become fixed simply because there are so many of them and they are not selected out. There are certainly bad mutations, which cause developmental or functional problems. They are sometimes really bad and really obvious, and people remember those. Sometimes they are good and increase selection.

Similarly, sometimes chromosomes fuse or split, and it doesn't make a difference. Sure, sometimes, in fact more often than not, they are bad and get selected out. But sometimes they are neutral, and sometimes the different number gets fixed. This is not unexpected.