OK, I hope my question doesn’t get misunderstood, I can see how that could happen.
Just a product of overthinking.
Idea is that we can live fairly easily even with some diseases/disorders which could be-life threatening. Many of these are hereditary.
Since modern medicine increases our survival capabilities, the “weaker” individuals can also survive and have offsprings that could potentially inherit these weaknesses, and as this continues it could perhaps leave nearly all people suffering from such conditions further into future.
Does that sound like a realistic scenario? (Assuming we don’t destroy ourselves along with the environment first…)
No. This is a result of thinking of natural selection as working towards an “absolute” better and away from an “absolute” weaker, as opposed to pushing in directions that are entirely defined by the situation.
Natural selection is this: in populations that make copies of themselves, and have mistakes in their copies, those mistakes that better fit the situation the copies find themselves in are more likely to be represented in that population later down the line.
Note that I didn’t say, at any point, the phrase “SuRvIVaL oF ThE FiTtEsT.” Those four words have done great harm in creating a perception that there’s some absolute understanding of what’s permanently, definitely, forever better, and natural selection was pushing us towards that. But no such thing is going on: a human may have been born smarter than everyone alive and with genes allowing them to live forever, but who died as a baby when Pompeii went off - too bad they didn’t have lava protection. Evolution is only an observation that, statistically, mutations in reproduction that better fit the scenario a given population is in tend to stick around more than those that don’t - and guess what? That’s still happening, even to humans - it’s just that with medical science, we’re gaining more control of the scenario our population exists in.
Now, can we do things with medical science - or science in general - that hurts people? Sure, there’s plenty of class action lawsuits where people sued because someone claimed their medicine was good and it turned out to be bad. But if you’re asking “are we losing out on some ‘absolute better’ because we gained more control of the world we reproduce in,” no, there is no “absolute” better. There’s only “what’s helpful in the current situation,” and medicine lets us change the situation instead being forced to deal with a given situation, dying, and hoping one of our sibling mutated copies can cope.
I’m sure you’ll be asking your first responder this question while he or she is in the middle of performing CPR on you, and calling for an AED, right? You’re not regretting the discovery of 30-2, are you?
- You did misunderstand the point of this question.
- Yes, I’d prefer not being resuscitated. If I am finally dead, let it stay that way.
I don’t think I misunderstood. You see dropping dead as your prize for losing in some type of social Darwin competition. You don’t see medical advances and life saving measures as being part of our evolution, as a species, to better survive? No offense, but regardless of how you feel about being resuscitated, some paramedic, or other first responder is still going to try to save your life. They can’t exactly stop the process and ask you for your opinion if you have no pulse, dude.
Bro you did not understand anything he asked about
First of all, it isn’t “bro”. Secondly, I’m trying to make a point that valuing the mental capabilities of people is worth mentioning, when the OP seems to dwell on the physical worth of a human. Part of the evolutionary process is long-term problem solving skills, isn’t it? We create ways to resuscitate people, cures for diseases, and solutions for other medical problems. OP insists that gives us weaker people that continue living in our society? Weaker in what regard? If all cancer is suddenly cured, then which people are weaker? I knew a girl that had an intellectual disability, but was fairly physically fit. She could run well, and walked and talked as well as most people. Would you want to encourage her to have children, while discouraging some woman with breast cancer from having children?
I think I understood OP fairly well. I just question if he wants to limit procreation amongst the disabled. Remember that Hitler wanted to do that.
You need to read a genetics textbook and then some evolutionary biology so you understand OPs question.
Yeah, I guess college biology textbooks and Charles Darwin’s origin of species weren’t enough for me. I shouldn’t try to stop OP’s hint at arguing against letting people with physical disabilities breed.
They never said nor implied that
Pretty much everyone here either misunderstands how evolution works, or is willfully ignoring it to push their viewpoint.
Humans at this point have very little evolutionary pressure from natural selection. We aren’t getting weaker, shorter, taller, or anything like that from natural selection because those traits aren’t killing people.
The main driving factors for human evolution are sexual selection, random mutation, and genetic drift. There are still some poorer areas disease may still play a not insignificant part, but even that is fairly minimal since people largely live to reproductive age.
Human evolution has been fairly stagnant for quite a while. The differences most people would notice are from changes in diet, environment, and other external forces. For natural selection to pressure evolution we would need to have a significant portion of the population sure before they are able to reproduce.
Oh cool, it’s time to find out how much of a burden on humanity I am and whether I should have been left to die. Just hypothetically of course, I wouldn’t want anyone to misunderstand. I always enjoy this question with my morning coffee.
Maybe you should skip these threads in the future. Don’t you think it’s important for people to understand this concept? Not everyone knows everything. Educate.
And miss out on the reminder that my existence is precarious and dependent on the good-will of the able-bodied? Nah, that’s head-in-sand stuff. I prefer to remind everyone of what this line of questioning has led to in the past and the human consequences of discussing the rights of a group of people in the abstract.
Yes. Not educating is the way to go. That always works out well!
