Humans can have allergic reactions to a crazy number of things, from understandable like bee venom, to random like little Timmy eating peanut butter at the next table over could kill you, to the counterintuitive like aquagenic urticaria (getting splashed with water makes you break out in hives). What’s in charge of that and how are reactions like anaphylaxis supposed to help?
In: 3
It isn’t a decision. The body isn’t choosing between things to be allergic to. It’s an immune system error.
It likely exists because the immune system has been selected by evolutionary pressures to be overactive rather than underactive and that’s just what it’s been overactive towards. Dying to an allergy is not supposed to help. Everything isn’t something that the body chooses and is helpful. The body is an incredibly dumb thing. If it was designed by an engineer they’d get fired.
Also, aquagenic urticaria isn’t an allergy.
Two brilliant brightly coloured videos for the five year old in all of us
[how the immune system works](https://youtu.be/lXfEK8G8CUI)
[you are immune against everything!](https://youtu.be/LmpuerlbJu0)
Enjoy! (I bought the book for my nephew and it’s wild!)
There’s many layers of the immune system. Think of it like a security system. One level of security is guards always patrolling that aren’t the brightest. If one of them gets freaked out to a pollen equivalent of a blank dude with a hoodie, alerts erupt, all the guards are called in, the whole place is put on high alert and the building inhabitants can get annoyed by it all. The guards are going on “quick recognition” reactions.
There are other parts which are more intelligent but take time to act. They’re great when there’s infiltration/spies in the building and more targeting is needed, but it takes time to get them activated.
The thing is, getting those security guard trained when they’re young (infants) makes a big deal. They need to learn what’s a friend and when to just say no. If they grow up in a multi cultural environment (eg: infants being in nature, shoving dirty but non toxic things in their mouth) they don’t need anti racism training later, which has a lot of limitations anyway. Exposure therapy only works so much to older security guards.
Just as every person has gut reactions of what feels unsafe and how unsafe it is, every immune system is unique in its reactions, but of course there’s a lot of commonality. There’s also common tendencies to overreact as evolution taught us it’s often better to overreact than underreact.
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