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chimaerakitten · 5 months

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Malaria, Sickle-Cell, and Dragons in the Temeraire Universe

so I've been thinking about sickle cell all day because of the very cool real-life FDA crispr treatment approval news, and also I'm just about done rereading empire of ivory so thusly it is time to write the sickle cell/malaria/dragons/benefits of human-dragon mutualism breakdown I mentioned ages ago.

Standard disclaimer that I am not in fact anywhere near an expert on this, this is mostly recall from ANTH 102/215 classes I took five years ago, the info is very simplified and possibly somewhat out of date. I'm doing some quick checks and I write this but only enough to make this an appropriate fantasy novel fandom post, not enough to make it actually reliably informative. I do have a couple citations, but mostly for the parts I'm lifting straight out of a class assignment I wrote, and they're a short documentary hosted on YouTube and the textbook for the class. also none of my links are live because I want this fandom post to actually show up in the fandom tag lol.

second disclaimer is I'm starting at the basic obvious stuff because I genuinely have no idea how much most people know about this and better safe than confusing.

Intro and Background

So the first thing to know about any of this is that human genetics for the most part to not operate on mendelian inheritance. So the punnet squares in high school biology that did human hair or eye color as basic dominant/recessive one-gene traits were totally lying to you. Like they're a teaching tool for a very simple model that works well enough but they're not accurate. Most human phenotypes are way way more complicated genetically than that.

That said, there are exceptions. Mendelian traits (Characteristics that are influenced by alles at only one genetic locus) do exist in humans, a number of them being related to genetic diseases. The list in the ANTH 102 notes I just dug up was: Wet (dominant) or dry Earwax; Albinism; Brachydactyly (dominant); Blood type (ABO, not the positive/negative part); Hereditary breast-ovarian cancer syndrome (BRCA-1, BRCA-2, unknown genes); Huntington’s disease; Lactase persistence (dominant); and Sickle-cell disease (recessive).

So the sickle cell punnet square looks like this for two parents who both have one copy of the sickle cell gene:

Sickle cell is a very painful and life threatening disease, (That's why the FDA approving a crispr treatment for it allowing patients to be their own bone marrow donors is very exciting.) and from an evolutionary perspective, one that very often prevents people from reproducing. It's also not strictly dominant/recessive, in that people heterozygous for sickle cell can have some symptoms like the possibility a sickle-cell crisis triggered in low-oxygen situations (high altitudes, intense exercise, etc).

So one might think that Sickle cell would be a vanishingly rare disease, since having it can be deadly and even having the trait can in some cases cause problems. Only it's not rare by genetically inherited disease standards, not at all.

And to make a long story very short, the reason is malaria.

Malaria

People who are heterozygous (possessing one sickle cell gene and one normal gene) for sickle cell anemia are resistant to malaria. In areas of the world without a high incidence of malaria historically, there is a strong selection against the sickle cell gene, (Biointeractive Malaria and Sickle Cell Anemia, 9:33) but in areas with malaria, both having sickle cell disease (homozygous HbSS) and not having the trait at all (homozygous HbAA) are selected against. People with sickle cell were historically less likely to reproduce, and people who were not resistant to malaria were more likely to die of malaria and also not reproduce. Because being heterozygous with sickle cell is selected for, the gene persists in the population.

The implications of that are best summed up from this map that I just stole from Britannica.com:

I dunno if the percentages on that second one are accurate tbh, other infographic maps I'm looking at give different ranges. but sill, you get the gist about how common it is in equatorial Africa. In the modern United States Black children are much much more likely to be born with sickle cell than white children—the genes don't just go away when the threat of malaria is removed. (And yeah, that's a historical consequence of the slave trade.)

There's some other stuff wrapped up in here too about bio-cultural evolution: There's indications that malaria was not a “significant problem until humans abandoned food foraging for farming” (Haviland, W. A., Prins, H. E., Walrath, D., & McBride, B.). Humans cleared away the forest, which had kept the soil absorbent. Without the vegetation, more water built up on the surface, forming stagnant puddles which were a perfect environment for malaria-causing mosquitoes to thrive, thus creating the conditions for sickle cell anemia to be advantageous. Farming creates caloric surplus which is great for humans, but it also changes the environment in ways that can be detrimental. Malaria is one way, creating the conditions for other epidemic diseases to thrive is another, etc. etc.

But if you've read this far you're probably going "Chi, you promised this would be a fandom post but so far this has been a serious and kind of sad post about disease. when are you going to get to the dragons?"

The Dragons

So the first time malaria comes up in the Temeraire books is in Throne of Jade, when a bunch of the sailors on the Allegiance come down with "malarial Fevers."

Jane, I must ask you to forgive the long gap in this Letter, and the few hasty Words that are all by which I can amend the same now. I have not had Leisure to take up my pen these three weeks—since we passed out of Banka Strait we have been much afflicted by malarial Fevers. I have escaped sickness myself, and most of my men, for which Keynes opines we must be grateful to Temeraire, believing that the heat of his body in some wise dispels the Miasmas which cause the ague, and our close association thus affords some protection. But we have been spared only to increase of Labor: Captain Riley has been confined to his bed since almost the very first, and Lord Purbeck falling ill, I have stood watch in turn with the ship’s third and fourth lieutenants, Franks and Beckett. Both are willing young men, and Franks does his best, but is by no means yet prepared for the Duty of overseeing so vast a Ship as the Allegiance, nor to maintain discipline among her Crew—stammers, I am sorry to say, which explains his seeming Rudeness at table, which I had earlier remarked upon.

I do not know enough about what people thought about malaria in the 19th century to be 100% sure that this is actually malaria, but I think Novik wouldn't want to confuse her readers by calling something malarial that isn't you know..malaria. So I'm going to assume thats what it is. Google is not giving me figures on malaria survival rates before modern medicines for it which is driving me kind of nuts and means I can't say how lucky Riley and Purbeck were to survive with apparently no complications, but that's not the point here anyway. The point is the comment about the aviators not getting sick.

And not only (mostly) not getting sick, but not getting sick even though they aren't actually always near Temeraire. Laurence for example has been working watch shifts near constantly because he's the only one left on the ship who knows what he's doing. That means probably less read & cuddle time than is normal for him and Temeraire, and yet—no malaria.

We modern readers (and Novik) know that malaria is not caused by "miasmas" but by parasites carried by mosquitos. And lo and behold when we get to Empire of Ivory we get:

Mosquitoes sang happily as dusk drew on, though they did not come very close to Temeraire; the flies were less judicious. The shapes of the trees were growing vague when Temeraire woke with a start and said, “Laurence, there is someone coming, there,” and the grass rustled on the opposite bank.

So yeah, the dragons are keeping the mosquitos away. I know fuck all about why—it's probably not heat since you know, mosquitos like warm blooded organisms, but maybe it's an oil or a chemical or some artifact of the way some of them can breathe fire that's present in all dragons or something, they're described as smelling weird a few times, so who knows. If it's a substance like an oil in their skin that could explain why the aviators don't get sick even when they're not nearby, since they could have some on them from contact, but that's just speculation. The point is not the mechanism, just that it's happening.

The Point

This whole post grew out of a throwaway comment I made about the benefits of mutualistic symbiosis with dragons from the human perspective in that one post about how the series has some interesting stuff obviously going on psychologically/biologically. The point of going in-depth on malaria and sickle cell is to show how this is really impressively solid worldbuilding in relation to the Tswana.

See, Empire of Ivory describes locations that seem like they're in modern day Botswana, Zimbabwe, and Zambia, regions which will have had long-term problems with malaria-causing mosquitos. That's not the densest area for sickle cell, but still definitely in the region where malaria would have exerted selective pressure.

Selective pressure which, in a universe where just being around a dragon is going to drastically reduce malaria rates, is going to leave dragon-friendly populations a lot healthier than dragon-unfriendly ones. A community that has a dragon stay every night and work alongside humans during the day is going to have a lot less malaria even without the sickle cell resistance than a community which has no dragon. And considering that malaria is bad enough that sickle cell genes persist despite it also having a high chance to cause a deadly disease, whereas a dragon that's a fully prosocial member of the community is not going to cause more death and instead will probably help with defense and create more caloric surplus (at the cost of consuming most of that surplus) a dragon is just obviously the better option. From there, it's extremely easy to see how the Tswana in the series could develop such a dragon-centric culture and have it be so wildly successful. The dragons provide fertilizer, the dragons allow for fully domesticated elephants, and the dragons render malaria—one of the deadliest diseases in history—nearly a nonissue. Of course they're family.

Citations:

Biointeractive. (2014, August 26). Malaria and Sickle Cell Anemia - HHMI BioInteractive Video. Retrieved October 3, 2018, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zsbhvl2nVNE

Haviland, W. A., Prins, H. E., Walrath, D., & McBride, B. (2017). Anthropology: The Human Challenge (15th ed.). Boston: Cengage Learning.

#Temeraire #it’s more bio-cultural evolution #wikipedia claims that malaria may have killed 50-60 billion people through history but I do not trust that citation AT ALL #regardless its still one of the deadliest killers ever #the kitten rambles #malaria #sickle cell anemia #Artemis if you read this I am sorry for the butchering I made of some anthropology concepts

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kyidyl · 1 year

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I was reading this article and was wondering if you had just...rando boxes of bones that you were taught with. Were they labeled at all? Did you wonder where they came from? This is stemming from an article at MSNBC about a Berkley's professor's hesitation to return Native American remains because basically the bone collection (majority unlabeled) they have is a small percentage of donations and the rest were admittedly stolen.

Congrats, you have secretly unlocked something I have Thoughts (TM) on, lol.

Firstly, if anyone is wondering, here's the article. I actually saw it right before coming to Tumblr when I got up bc someone had posted it in one of the bioanth groups I'm in.

The short answer here is: for undergrad, no, I didn't because most colleges in the US don't have collections of human remains. We just used bone clones. And in grad school yes, I did, but I went to grad school in the UK and we knew where they came from bc we'd (and previous classes) excavated them ourselves from the Poulton churchyard. You can read more about the dig here. The UK obviously is a much different set of circumstances than the US.

Bone collections are not just random assemblages of bones. They're meticulously sorted, labeled, and categorized whenever that is possible. And when the remains are comingled (mixed together), the reason is that we don't know whose bones are whose and we don't want to like....put one person's humerus with another person's femur. Unless the bones are articulated (joined in the position they exist in the skeleton), it's exceedingly difficult to tell which bones go to which individual without a DNA test. DNA tests are difficult to do on historical remains in the post cranial skeleton, they're expensive, and most tribes don't like it when we do them. It isn't feasible for a university to DNA test every one of hundreds of comingled bones, so they leave them together. It's better to have more than one person in a box together than it is to have the wrong parts to an actual, human person stuck together as if they're the same person. That's incredibly disrespectful. And, yes, they're often stored in cardboard but like...it's not because that's what was laying around, it's because it's a good storage method and it's cheap. Like they make special boxes.

Bone collections across the world are a very, very thorny subject. I can tell you that as a student handling human bone was an absolutely vital part of my education and without it I'd have a MUCH harder time sorting human from animal. Bone collections are an important teaching tool, but I also think those skills aren't skills undergrads need to have because most of them aren't going to be digging up human remains.

In the US a lot of bone collections are actually not Native American. A lot of them are, but a good deal of them aren't. Not that they're necessarily more ethically sourced - I'll get to that in a bit - but they're not Native American. But we're talking about Berkley and theirs are NA.

If you read the article (general you to anyone reading this, not you nonny.), it mentioned that when NAGPRA came into effect a few decades ago any institution that takes gov't money - which is basically all of them - was required to disclose and notify the tribes that they had remains. From there it was on the tribes to decide what they wanted to do with them.

And this is where tumblr would say "that's not good enough, just give them back". Thing is guys, some groups don't want them back. I know it sounds wrong, but I want you to know that not every culture is as attached to their ancestor's remains, and they're not just pretending they don't want them bc they're afraid of consequences from colonizers. Let me give you an example. This is an article about a set of remains found in Ethiopia that was excavated by two of my professors in undergrad. The optics of this are: a bunch of white people went to Ethiopia, dug up a skeleton, and took it home to start testing it for stuff. What that surface read doesn't tell you is that those two professors - John Arthur and Kathy Weedman-Arthur - have been working with the local Gamo people for almost 30 years at this point. They have friends there, they speak the language fluently, Dr. Kathy has been spending years helping them create a written version of their language so that they can tell their own stories in their own language to the world. They *want* to do this. And they also don't consider anyone not in their burial forest to be Gamo. It doesn't matter if they clearly are from an outside genetic look, they aren't Gamo if they're not in the forest and they don't care what happens to the remains. And in the US, some native groups don't care what happens to the mortal remains of their ancestors. You (general) don't get to decide that for them how they feel about it, even if you think it's wrong. And I can tell you 100% if no one cares, scientists are going to keep the remains. There are also often issues with figuring out who to repatriate the remains TO. Colonizers re-burying them with the wrong funeral rites is, IMO, just as bad. Plus the natives like to re-inter them in places that aren't told to outsiders so they can't be retrieved.

But, obviously, the groups dealing with Berkley DO care and so the remains should be repatriated if they are Native American. It's pretty easy to tell if a, you know where they came from bc you dug them up (like Berkley) or b, the markers on the skeleton and the context are Native American. And here's where we come up against another problem: a lot of medical specimens in the US come from grave robbers in India and other Asian countries. It was, for awhile, a huge industry over there. People would sell their relatives remains, or grave rob and sell them to companies that will sell them overseas. There are still ethical complications here, and if anyone tries to sell you "ethically sourced" human remains they're lying *coughjonsbonescough*. It's impossible for an individual in the US to have an ethically sourced set of remains unless those remains were directly gifted to them from the family of the deceased. That definitely happens on the medical or university level - people leave their bodies to science - but not on the individual level. Thing is though that Asians have the same skeletal markers as Native Americans. East Asians, South Asians, doesn't matter. I'm using the generalized Asia on purpose. You will find shovel incisors or extra cranial sutures on the vast majority of Asians and Native Americans bc they're related. So if you've got a collection of bones of uncertain origin it's impossible to tell the source without DNA tests, and even if you did those tests it would be impossible to repatriate the Asian ones bc Asia is huge.

But again, that's not the case with Berkley. They know that most of those bones were excavated and that professor doesn't want to give them back. I can tell you know he's going to lose that fight. Because a, the article says they've removed him as the liaison and person responsible for the bones and b, Kennewick man. There is now legal, genetic precedent for remains in a given area to be directly related to the natives living in that area. So I'm like 99% sure Berkley will be giving up all of the bones that they know are Native American. And the vast majority of archaeologists and anthropologists agree with the repatriation of those remains. A lot of people have native remains that were grandfathered in for one reason or another, and they still don't keep them because it's more than clear that a good relationship with the natives leads to us doing better science.

Some people feel that bone collections are unethical in and of themselves, but I disagree. I think that, especially in places like Europe where the remains are more likely to belong to the community they exist in, there are ethical ways to build bone collections. The truth of it is that there's orders of magnitude more dead people than live ones, and if the community doesn't care, why NOT use them for education? Honestly I'd like to be donated to science and I'd be sad if my bones *weren't* used to teach other students to do the thing I love. Like that seems like an awesome use of something that would otherwise go to waste. Human remains are only as holy as the culture they belong to believes they are. Otherwise, they're biological material same as any other animal.

Anyway yeah...hope that gave you more of an insight into what's going on there, and I love answering these types of questions, lol.

#anthropology #archaeology #NAGPRA #human remains #bones #bone collecting #bone collections #human bones #native americans #ethics #bio archaeology

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