Ray Peat's "Autoimmunity As Degeneration" Theory Wins Beauty Contest

Something makes me at the same time suspicious and trusting of Raymond Peat’s theories of what happens at the cellular level: their beauty.

Are they too beautiful to be true or could they be true because life is beautiful and we are programmed to perceive it that way? In other words, is beauty in the eye of the beholder, as in “biologically embedded” and are we "encoded" to recognize truth by its beauty and the other way around? Should we maybe trust beauty as a measure of truth at a biological level? Or should we, on the contrary, regard it as an artifact, an artist’s interpretation of things that can hardly be beautiful in and of themselves?

However, Keats’ “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” seems to chime a background bell throughout Raymond’s Peat elegant articles.

Beauty does appear elsewhere in science as well, and in some of these places Raymond Peat distrusts it. As in the autoimmune disease theory, according to which our own immune system, designed to protect us from external attacks, somehow (mysteriously, because to my knowledge nobody has managed to describe convincingly the process) turns its proverbial “guns” against the self tissues and goes on a rampage, causing the “victim” to suffer sometimes mild, other times life threatening consequences. There is drama in this theory, there is betrayal, there is misfortune, destiny is involved (some of these diseases are genetic, of course!), there are the good guys, the guards protecting the princess, who then, under some yet unknown evil charm, become these abominable monsters who hijack and torture her and there should science come on a white doctoral horse and rescue the poor victim, returning the guardians to their former protective personalities…

Ah, the legendary sound of it! It make a lot of "sense", right? Maybe too much so?  "Metaphysical medicine", as Peat might say... A new theory is needed, one more in sync with... truth, of course! So Ray Peat comes up with the following scenario (dramatization is mine, just to make it easier):

Autoimmunity is simply a monster that creeps in the body under the form of malnutrition. It is the owner of the body who, without suspecting a thing, submits his beautiful innards to the havoc of depletion of all kinds. Stupid fool! As this Dorian Gray with a portrait hidden in his mitochondria parties on, his body is subtly failing, by the day, SADly, until it cannot hold it together anymore, and the chain breaks somewhere and symptoms start. Enter doctors, on their white horses, not much more intelligent than the stupid person in question, and even more dangerous, because armed with bad science. In a big hurry to keep track of all the stupid fools that are waiting in line in all those hospitals and doctor’s offices, they rush to prescribe stupid medication that, added to our stupid fool’s stupid diet breaks even more havoc and the inner chain breaks somewhere else and the poor body starts really acting up, throwing tantrums of its own, and it is good bye health, hello “autoimmunity”! Enter other stupid doctors, causing even more havoc, believing in the stupid theory of the body attacking itself, and they prescribe medication that would kill some of the body but at least prevent pain. Ah, this is too painful to describe to the end, I will leave it here.

But... This is beautiful, too!

So much romanticism, so much drama in these scenarios! Who needs TV shows when we have doctors and bad science? Or do we need TV shows precisely to forget about them?

The important question remains: does good science embed good narratives as well?

I don’t remember physics being so full of drama. Chemistry, however… All those electron exchanges and concatenations and reactions… That’s some serious action.

So… Maybe drama is embedded in our biology. And beauty is a sign of truth. Wouldn't it be nice if it could function as a criteria — if a higher degree of beauty would point towards a higher level of truth?  All we would need in that perfect world would be theoretical beauty contests to decide where our answers are... 

Which theory on autoimmunity do I find more aesthetically pleasing, the commonly held scenario in which the immune system attacks self for unknown reasons or Dr. Peat’s proposed script: we harm ourselves through bad nutrition and then run into degeneration?

I would go for Dr. Peat’s, because I tend to consider people not very smart, on average, and when they get together and create dietary trends, they become totally untrustworthy and likely to go into collective trouble. I believe that the intelligence embedded in our tissues is far superior to the power of our intelligent minds and to our current scientific comprehension. We are more stupid than our bodies, if you will — we have not yet risen to understanding the way they work and we are tragically incapable to sustain and protect their optimal functioning.

So my vote goes to Dr. Peat, whose beautiful theory on degeneration embeds that particular truth.