How does Epistolution Explain Chronic Disease?

If the body is a nested set of synchronizing networks that are all aimed at pairing physiological function to the patterns of the niche, then it follows that the timing of every physiological activity is extremely important. Rhythm, in a sense, is what synchronicity is all about. Observations in medicine have shown that there are clocks (called oscillators) not only in the brain that govern sleep and wake cycle, but in every organ system, in every organ, and in every single living cell in the body, including the cells of all the nonhuman microbiota. I have discussed the alternative theories of chronic disease in my essay “Chronic Disease is a Circadian Problem,” available on Medium.com here, whose title suggests its thesis. I find all these alternative theories unsatisfactory, because in my view they do not go far enough to account for the ubiquitous physiological changes we are experiencing in modernity. If epistolution is correct, then the most important aspect of physiological function may be not what happens, but when it happens. Timing and rhythm may be the key to understanding how the function of our body fits our evolutionary niche. If this is true, then it presents a new way to look at our modern world, and what about it causes us to become obese, anxious, depressed, infertile, diabetic, allergic, demented, and cancerous. If our main question has been, “what in our environment has changed?” now our question becomes “what about the timing of our environment has changed?” This view presents a very different interpretation of our surroundings. The first question suggests that food, transportation, and industrial chemicals are the root of our maladies, while the second question rather suggests that it is the powerful circadian resetting effects of blue light after dark that explain our drift away from 24 hour stable synchronicity. We have not known that the body, including the mind, was an elaborate clock. If we had known it was a clock, we would have been looking for timing issues, rather than material changes.