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…)
I think we’ve already demolished natural selection over here, modern medicine being the least of concern. Idiocracy was supposed to be humor, not foretelling.
Call me when evolution figures out how to deal with guns and automotive accidents, which likely represent the largest selection factors on modern humans.
Actually education is probably the largest selection factor. Educated people have less children than less educated people. Sometimes massively so. This is not necessarily linked with intelligence, it correlates more with socio economic factors.
The problem is that people don’t seem to realize the difference between causes of deaths and population declination. Even if for some reason humans everywhere agree on The Purge like laws except for every day, that wouldn’t represent a risk for humanity (as long as governments still withhold their nuclear arsenal), some cities might be all but wiped out, but the chances are humans will survive. Anarchy was the status quo for the vast majority of human existence, and we’re still here.
However other seemingly innocuous things are much worse for humanity as a whole, e.g. electing politicians who disregard climate change or that intend on using military power to take others territories can have much larger consequences on humanity as a whole. Your example is also great, because it’s counter intuitive that higher education leads to population declination, that being said I believe that also wouldn’t become an extinction event, surely the world would become a place where highly educated people want to have children before that.
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.
realistically industrialization and guns have a far larger impact on human evolution rn than healthcare.
Exactly, and yet the question is never “is agriculture a long-term threat to humanity?”. It’s always the people with medical issues who are acceptable first choices as society’s sacrificial MacGuffin, long before we question any technology that benefits the person who is “just asking questions”.
It’s like we didn’t already do Social Darwinism the first time. Super frustrating.
Agriculture has proven itself to be a boon to humanity. It’s our passion for excess that will kill us.
As has medicine and most other technologies. And yet… the question is never asked about the long term threats posed by people who aren’t personally hunting and tracking and foraging.
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!
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- 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.
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Bro you did not understand anything he asked about
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You need to read a genetics textbook and then some evolutionary biology so you understand OPs question.
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They never said nor implied that
I expect gene editing soon to become so cheap that everyone starts customising their children, resulting in a situation analogous to where dogs are now: extreme variability improving the chances for survival by making sure we have the needed people for any situation except gamma ray burst which requires backups far from Earth.
I’ve been working on a sci Fi show where humans have this but they also have the ability to change their current physiology by infecting themselves with modified strains of cancer that slowly replaces you’re body with one you downloaded off the Internet this technology has also sorta obsoleted medicine because if you have a broken leg or infected with a fatel desese so long as the injury doesn’t affect your brain you can just replace your entire body by infecting yourself with genetically modified cancer
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I don’t think so.
For one, natural selection selects the “fittest”, but what the “fittest” means, changes over time.
Also, there’s lots of other factors that you may have overlooked, such as sexual selection probably playing a bigger factor.
Your question is actually a subset of:
“Can short-term-gain actually fatally undermine long-term-viability?”
I don’t consider the question incorrect, at all.
Peter F. Drucker, in one of his books, has it that the “Health Care Industry” hired him,
and one of the 1st things he did, was…
told them, bluntly to their face, directly, approximately that
( this gets the gist of it, but this is from-memory, not exact/verbatim )
“You aren’t the Health Care Industry, you are the Illness Care Industry, and you aren’t fooling anybody, AND you aren’t improving your credibility by speaking falsely”
Does taking all kinds of chemicals, so that one can be a “better bodybuilder”, and then ending up in a population who dies significantly younger than average, due to heart-failures, be considered “good”??
Obviously, to the corporate-“persons” who make money having as much of the population addicted to that distortion as possible, YES!! PROFITS!!
Unfortunately, it isn’t possible, in any political system, to get decisions made by correctness, accuracy, reason, objectivity, maximum-benefit-for-greatest-number-of-dimensions-of-the-population, etc…
The lobbies won’t allow that.
Remember Covid?
Remember the people who were insisting that immunization was a scam, & that people should be relying on their body’s innate robust immune-system?
These were people who consider yogic-living to be corruption, and heavy-meat-eating to be “good”, nitrates in meats, & all.
The lobbies have overrun all discussion, not allowing objectivity to own any territory.
I think you are right, but the right-answer to it includes simultaneously improving the health of individuals, of entire-populations, AND getting people out immersed in nature more, so as to have built-up more-powerful immune-systems, in the 1st place!
Selectively extinguish some infectious-diseases ( I’d target rabies, ebola, HPV because it causes cervical cancer, & a few others, for extinguishment ), while dealing-with as many as we viably can,
in the hopes that “surprises” will not be able to trash/wreck our innate immune-systems, see?
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I would argue that modern medicine prevents non-selective deaths. We try and keep everyone alive, not just the idiots.
It already has affected natural-selection.
Same question rephrased: Can seat belts be a threat to humanity long-term by greatly reducing the effects of natural selection? After all, stronger individuals are more likely to survive car crashes.
What about wood stoves? Surely the fittest individuals are able to handle the cold?
We removed ourselves from “natural selection” a long time ago.
And yet, we have not, for these inventions are the Adaptations developed by other humans for the purpose of the propagation of genetics similar to their own
I think we’re in a more similar position to birds of paradise. Several species of birds that live in the south Pacific/Indian ocean islands/Australia kind of region, where the weather isn’t particularly harsh, their food is abundant and there are no natural predators, so natural selection has given way to mate selection. Male birds of paradise are fancy as fuck with brightly colored burlesque plumage not because it’s any help surviving their environment, but because the girl birds think it’s sexy.
I think our genus is in a similar position, but got there via a different route. Once the upright walking, hands having, brain thinking ape got dexterous and smart enough to build fire and cook food, there was a sort of bootstrapping period of becoming smart enough to do engineering, at which point we arrive at anatomically modern humans, and from there most physical changes have basically been “because it’s sexy.” Men have deeper voices because it turns women on. Women have permanent boobs because it turns men on, etc. People from Asia have distinctively shaped eyelids…is there some environmental pressure in Asia that doesn’t exist in Europe or Africa, or is it because that eye shape became fashionable to ancient Asians?
And now we’ve arrived in a time where we have a functioning understanding of how genetics work, and the ability to manipulate those genetics at industrial scales. Seriously I think we departed the “it was cold so the ones with thicker fur were more likely to survive to fuck another day” phase of existence at some point, with the invention of writing at the latest.
All of this is true, and I agree with it, but until we start employing genetic modifications to our own population, this is all still just natural selection in the same way that celibate worker drone bees building nests for their hive is natural selection.
Natural selection led to our intelligence to be able to made medicine in the first place.
Natural selection is an agent that runs contrary to the thing which is currently out-competing natural selection, that being big brain thinkering
E.g., if a cancer research scientist dies from a weak heart, that will reduce future life expectancy more than it will increase it
Natural selection and evolution happen because genetic traits in some individuals are more beneficial than in other individuals. It has nothing to do with increasing future life expectancy for most or all of the species. If a doctor is helping non-relatives far more than relatives, his contribution is not selected for.
a doctor is helping non-relatives far more than relatives, his contribution is not selected for.
Which is the whole point of my comment…
I think a bigger threat to humanity is a LACK of modern medicine. Both because denying people life-saving medicine because you think they’re “weak” is inhumanly cruel, and because of that plague we just had.
Sexual selection usually takes care of problems like this. People with antisocial tendencies find it extremely difficult to find partners.
Unfortunately, not when they have money.
