creators_name: Wallace, Rodrick
creators_name: Wallace, Deborah
creators_name: Wallace, Robert G.
creators_id: New York State Psychiatric Institute
creators_id: Columbia University
creators_id: City University of New York
type: preprint
datestamp: 2002-11-12
lastmod: 2011-03-11 08:55:06
metadata_visibility: show
title: Biological limits to reduction in rates of coronary heart disease: a punctuated equilibrium approach to immune cognition, chronic inflammation, and pathogenic social hierarchy
subjects: bio-theory
full_text_status: public
keywords: Apartheid, coronary heart disease, hierarchy, immune cognition, punctuated equilibrium, racism, vascular inflammation, wage slavery
abstract: On both empirical and theoretical grounds we find that a particular form of social hierarchy, here characterized as 'pathogenic', can, from the earliest phases of life, exert a formal analog to evolutionary selection pressure, literally writing a permanent image of itself upon immune function as chronic vascular inflammation and its consequences.  The staged nature of resulting disease emerges 'naturally' as an analog to punctuated equilibrium in evolutionary theory.  Exposure differs according to the social constructs of race, class, and ethnicity, accounting in large measure for observed population-level differences in rates of coronary heart disease affecting industrialized societies.  The system of American Apartheid, which enmeshes both majority and minority communities in a construct of pathogenic hierarchy, appears to present a severe biological limit to ultimate possible reductions in rates of coronary heart disease and related disorders for powerful as well as subordinate subgroups.
date: 2002-11
date_type: published
refereed: FALSE
citation:   Wallace, Rodrick and Wallace, Deborah and Wallace, Robert G.  (2002) Biological limits to reduction in rates of coronary heart disease: a punctuated equilibrium approach to immune cognition, chronic inflammation, and pathogenic social hierarchy.  [Preprint]     
document_url: http://cogprints.org/2600/1/heart32.pdf