On maternity and the stronger immune response in women
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Medical research reports that women often exhibit stronger immune responses than men, while pathogens tend to be more virulent in men. Current explanations cannot account for this pattern, creating an obstacle for our understanding of infectious-disease outcomes and the incidence of autoimmune diseases. We offer an alternative explanation that relies on a fundamental difference between the sexes: maternity and the opportunities it creates for transmission of pathogens from mother to child (vertical transmission). Our explanation relies on a mathematical model of the co-evolution of host immunocompetence and pathogen virulence. Here, we show that when there is sufficient vertical transmission co-evolution leads women to defend strongly against temperate pathogens and men to defend weakly against aggressive pathogens, in keeping with medical observations. From a more applied perspective, we argue that limiting vertical transmission of infections would alleviate the disproportionate incidence of autoimmune diseases in women over evolutionary time.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".