It's getting colder and colder. The North has slowly entered winter. Every year when you start to wear sweaters, it's almost time to wear autumn pants. In a few days, the microblog of friends circle will shout: your mother calls you to wear autumn pants!
Rumor: 'if a country has been wearing autumn pants for 60 years, it will never be able to take them off again. "-- in 1953, when Soviet geneticist Lisenko said this to Stalin, hundreds of millions of autumn pants did not go through any argument, and zhengyuanyuan continued to force promotion in China. Sadly, the autumn pants were not born in the long feudal period of China, but in the blind faith and obedience to the "big brother of the Soviet Union" after the establishment of new China. All over the world, only two countries wear autumn Pants: China and North Korea... To give people warm pants, the cold resistance of people's legs and joints will be lost in a few generations and become completely unable to move in high latitude areas. Lisenko hoped that the autumn pants would lead to the loss of the genetic basis for the survival of the Chinese people in the Far East of the Soviet Union, and bring a series of side effects such as physical weakening, which would weaken China's soft power, so as to consolidate the permanent occupation of the Soviet Union in the far east.
Truth: Frankly speaking, it's a bit unexpected that the fishing post can finally become a persistent rumor. What's the difference between autumn pants as a warm clothing and other clothes for the time being? If autumn pants really damage the cold resistance, then autumn clothes, wool pants, down clothes, hats, gloves, cotton boots are all conspiracies? And hot Kang, heating and air conditioning?
The origin of autumn pants
If we define autumn pants as' long legged clothes worn inside outer pants', we can be sure that autumn pants are not invented in the 1950s, nor are they only worn by Chinese and Koreans. In fact, the practice of wearing two layers of trousers in the west can be traced back to the 8th century A.D., when Europeans generally abandoned Roman robes for the convenience of riding. Costume historians called the pants inside "drawer" and the pants outside "breech".
However, today's tight fitting autumn pants are generally called long under wear or long johns in English. This style of autumn pants may have appeared in England as early as the 17th century. By the 18th century, they became popular pajamas and later thermal underwear. Just search for the word 'long underground' and you'll see a lot of foreigners in autumn pants.
An ad from an American pants company, selling for $11.95, made it clear that it was suitable for cold outdoor work.
At present, the low proportion of people wearing autumn pants in cold areas in Europe and America is mainly due to the good indoor thermal conditions and the popularity of the "car instead of walking" lifestyle.
Can wearing autumn pants really make people lose their cold resistance?
The core of the "autumn pants conspiracy theory" is that after 60 years of wearing autumn pants, people will lose their ability to resist the cold and thus cannot survive in cold areas. Assuming that this cold resistance is really a suitable physiological index, will wearing clothes affect the cold resistance? Can this effect really have a permanent effect in 60 years?
It starts with Lamarck two hundred years ago.
Utilization, waste, retreat and acquired heredity
Although we always put the use into disuse and put it back into Lamarck's head, in fact, it is unfair, because the idea of "more developed, less degenerated" can be traced back to Aristotle at least, and in the early 19th century, it was almost common sense, even Darwinian didn't deny it. Lamarck's academic research is not to put forward the idea of "use in, discard out", but to combine it with acquired genetics to explain the reasons for species change, which is his original creation.
Of course, now we know that his view is wrong. First of all, the term "more developed and more used" only holds for some special cases. It's true that human muscles and bones can be strengthened by reasonable exercise, but improper use can also lead to injury or even scrap. Exposure to certain pathogens can have an immune effect, but unless it's a specially designed vaccine, it's often not worth it. Quite a few other organs do not have this at all. For example, most of the poisons will not be tolerated for a long time and will only lead to chronic poisoning (but arsenic is likely to be an exception, which will be discussed later). In fact, the use of almost all organs is accompanied by loss, but in the areas of muscle and immune system, human physiology adopts a mechanism similar to the 'reserve team', where there is a need to invest resources. But these are special cases and cannot be extrapolated at will.
Second, even those organs that can 'exercise' have no simple mechanism for passing it on to future generations. In Lamarck's time, people knew nothing about the specific mechanism of heredity, and could only assume that all the physical attributes of a person would be passed on to future generations; however, subsequent scientific progress proved that this was not the case. First, Mendel found that the factors that determine the traits are discrete, not a mass of paste continuum; then, Weisman put forward the germ plasm theory, pointing out that reproductive cells and somatic cells are separated, and even if the latter changes, it will not automatically affect the former; finally, Crick put forward the central rule of molecular biology, pointing out that information can only be outward from DNA in most cases Pass, not vice versa.
In recent years, we have a new understanding of Genetics - the field of epigenetics. Although the sequence of DNA itself cannot be changed in an acquired way, the modification of DNA can. And these modifications seem to break down the division of germ cells and somatic cells, and affect the offspring in part -- unfortunately, the effect of these modifications is quite limited, and they are declining gradually. After several generations of maintenance, they will not be fixed in DNA and become the real genetic basis. Epigenetics is a hot new field, it is very important in development, but almost everyone is not optimistic about its evolutionary significance -- if it can play an important role in evolution, we should have found it for a long time.
In a word, in the case of autumn pants, we can't expect to obtain sexual inheritance.
Since acquired heredity is not established, how does leesenko become an authority? In fact, it's totally blind cats bumping into dead mice. The Wheat Vernalization technology he popularized has indeed increased some yield, but this technology has nothing to do with acquired heredity in essence, but it has been used as an argument by him. Once he became famous and successful in politics, the next thing had nothing to do with learning. (for more information about leesenko, please look at autumn pants, leesenko and others. )
Natural selection and human civilization
However, warm clothing really has a possible way to affect people's cold resistance, which is through natural selection. However, this way is very troublesome.
The basic principle is also simple: when the weather is cold enough and there are few clothes to wear, it will always freeze to death. If there is a "antifreeze gene" that makes people not easy to freeze to death, the proportion of "antifreeze gene" will be a little more in the population for each person frozen to death. With the accumulation of hundreds of years, the whole population will become more antifreeze - well, this is the basic principle of natural selection.
Unfortunately, it is not so easy to achieve this' good 'prospect. First of all, is there really a significant difference in cold resistance between different people? Is this difference really because genes play a decisive role? Second, how many people will die of cold weather in reality? Maybe most people migrate to the warm south when they feel cold or stay indoors all day, which is not effective. What's more, this process takes too long. If a person who has no antifreeze gene has a 1% chance of being frozen to death before giving birth, it will take about 1000 generations for the gene to spread to the whole population, which is 20000 years for human beings. At that time, the existence of human civilization is unknown.
What's more, in this rumor, the way Su Xiu tried to adopt was negative: to block the above natural selection process by promoting autumn pants. Assuming that the 'antifreeze gene' has no harm, and that the pants don't allow it to work, it can only wait for it to drift randomly and be destroyed by mutations. These two methods are very unreliable: random drift, as the name suggests, is completely random. The more drift, the more likely it is. In general, the larger the population, the slower it will drift; mutation is not expected. The mutation rate of human base is about 30 million per generation, so the average mutation rate of each generation in a specific gene is about one in ten thousand And the mutation is not necessarily effective. Just now, 1% of the selection pressure will take 20000 years, and now the one in ten thousand mutation pressure really has to wait for the vicissitudes. For such a far-off thing, the evil Su Xiu is a little farsighted & hellip; & hellip;
But we don't have to talk about these possibilities, because the same process really works in our lives. Before civilization, it was easy for human beings to die. If they ran a little slower, they would die. If they were less powerful, they would die. If they were less immune, they would die. But now we have division of labor, agriculture, health, medicine and social security. All these requirements have been relaxed. As a result, modern European men's muscles are better than the standards Female Neanderthals have 10% less muscle.
Is this human degradation? I don't think so. Natural selection can improve some indicators, but every choice comes at the cost of some people's death. We can give up modern civilization, so that many people with weak body, low immunity and congenital defects will die. But who knows how many smart people, sharp people, noble people and great people are there? Who can predict that the people who run fast in the future will adapt to the world better, and the people who draw well will not adapt? The biggest disadvantage of natural selection is that they cannot predict the future As soon as the environment changes dramatically, we will catch up with the blind. However, human civilization has weakened the effect of natural selection, but greatly improved the diversity. In a sense, human beings who master the diversity of civilization are the most adaptable species. However, it is too narrow and short-sighted to require modern human beings to use the "good" standard of the stone age.
Looking back, think about the role of warm clothing in reality. Are you still worried about it?
Conclusion: the effect of autumn pants on people's cold resistance is not different from other warm clothing. If you are afraid of the cold in winter, put on your autumn pants!