Survival Of The Sickest By Sharon Moalem

In Survival of the Sickest, Dr. Sharon Moalem explores how harmful hereditary diseases that are still around in present day have survived through generations. He begins his journey into the world of medicine, genetics, evolution, and the influence of environment when he started looking into his grandfather’s strange love for donating blood and later his diagnosis with Alzheimer’s disease. Beginning at the age of fifteen years old he was determined to find answers and make connections. It wasn’t until years later that he put all the pieces together. Along the way he discovered incredible connections and reasons why so many hereditary diseases are still alive today. He organizes the novel into eight chapters that go into examining different hereditary
He also talks about how the environment around us also plays a role in human evolution and how our genes have come to be.
Throughout the novel, Moalem explains how certain hereditary diseases that are harmful to us and don’t make sense evolutionary are actually beneficial and were beneficial at a point in time. He begins by presenting us with a simple scenario that people might encounter everyday; taking pills. But he goes on to ultimately ask why would an individual take a pill that could kill them in forty years. And the answer was so that they don’t die tomorrow. To support this argument he talks about an inherited disease, hemochromatosis. Hemochromatosis is when our bodies absorb iron uncontrollably because it doesn’t think it has enough to the point where our joints hurt and become “rusted,” organs become