r/science spent the day toggling between ancient brutality and modern biomedicine, with a familiar subtext: we keep trying to pin human behavior and health to tidy mechanisms. The community gravitated toward determinist narratives—genes, immune signals, and even looks—while a few threads reminded everyone that evidence quality still matters.
Biology of behavior: from caves to cash and commitment
Nothing says “nature red in tooth and claw” like the stark fossil evidence from Belgium of Neanderthals hunting and eating their own, a story that pairs neatly with a modern economic note: a finding that more attractive individuals are less supportive of redistribution. We love narratives that naturalize harsh outcomes—predation in the Pleistocene, privilege in the present—because they promise clean explanations for messy realities.
"Homo sapiens are well documented as having practiced cannibalism as well, so this just adds Neanderthals to the club..." - u/zoinkability (1325 points)
Determinism sells, but the lived details resist simplification. The day’s social science blended family history and attachment in research on the factors that lead young adults to consider cheating on romantic partners, while genomics tried to sharpen the “nature” half of the ledger through new mapping of the missing heritability of human phenotypes. The takeaway: behavior isn’t fate, but ignoring structural advantages and rare-variant complexity is how fate gets mistaken for choice.
Inflammation nation: mechanistic ambition meets methodological sobriety
Health discussions coalesced around systemic inflammation as the master key: an proposal that depression reflects an immune–neural axis imbalance sat alongside work linking pro-inflammatory diets to accelerated brain aging and cohort evidence that plant-based eating lowers hypertension risk in older adults. It’s a seductive storyline: tweak the body’s inflammatory state and watch mood, cognition, and blood pressure fall in line.
"This reinforces the Cytokine Theory of Depression... The modern tragedy is that psychosocial stress triggers these same inflammatory pathways." - u/uniquesoul666 (845 points)
Yet r/science did not forget caution. A Neuron critique of microbiome–autism causal claims challenged fashionable mouse-transfer narratives, while bench pragmatism appeared in Nature Communications work evolving bacteriophages to attack resistant Klebsiella. And because mechanistic fixes rarely touch access and ethics, the community nodded to practice with an argument that AI cannot replace therapists but can support them—a reminder that tools, however clever, still sit downstream of trust and rigorous evidence.