Detox Woo and Evolution
Most of you are probably familiar with detox woo; the idea that we need to be cleansed of all the "toxins" that are building up in our colons, livers, kidneys, or whatever the fuck the woo wants us to believe toxins are in, and that if we don't we're going to die horribly from the toxin-caused diseases. But this makes very little sense if you look at it in terms of evolution.
Natural selection will wipe out any species that can't stay alive long enough to reproduce. This is obvious to anyone who knows the most basic of basics about evolution. Obviously, our ancestors must not have been affected by these toxins; if toxins built up in the body from normal biological processes in enough amounts to cause serious diseases, we'd be extinct. So, if we can know that our ancestors won't have had this problem, why would we have this problem now? Is there a reason that we're now going to have horrible things happen to us if we don't start cleansing? What could possibly cause us to suddenly start building up toxins?
I await the answers of any detox woo who feels interested in replying.
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5 comments:
While I'm certainly not a toxin-woo, and you are well aware of this, I don't think that's the best argument against it. The thing that toxin-woos say is that toxins build up over time. Their woo is marketed primarily to adults, who have already reached the age of procreation. If the "toxins" don't affect you until you're in your mid 20s, then you wouldn't be killed by them until after you had kids.
Also, humans past had much shorter lifespans, so a tendency to build up "toxins" into adulthood might not have had any effect on a culture whose mean age of death was 35. It's like cancer; it wasn't as widespread as it is now when lifespans were shorter. Now it's everywhere because people live long enough to get it.
Like I said, I'm not at all claiming that toxin-woo is anything other than complete bullshit; I'm just offering some constructive criticism about this particular argument.
That's probably true.
Just realized how this argument still stands fine, is somewhat weaker.
The older you could survive, the more kids you could have. So if the "toxins" contributed to the low lifespan, it would be most advantageous to survive as long as possible by having the best "toxin" filtration ability. So, the people who had the best toxin filtration ability would be the most fit for the environment.
What other arguments would you recommend, by the way? The only one I can think of at the moment is showing we don't build up toxins.
Well, first of all, they don't even define what "toxins" are.
Look at a smoker's lungs. See any toxins?
If we had a long evolutionary history of smoking, there would probably be mechanisms to get rid of tobacco-based toxins, but we don't, so there aren't. There are a lot of other things we do today that we didn't do back in the day. So an evolutionary argument doesn't really work here, unless you're talking about Andaman Islanders or the last uncontacted tribe in the Amazon.
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