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…)
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.
Pretty much everyone here either misunderstands how evolution works, or is willfully ignoring it to push their viewpoint.
Yes! Finally someone else who knows how…
Humans at this point have very little evolutionary pressure from natural selection.
Oh come on! Such a strong start but then you fell on your face. Natural selection is the differential survival and reproduction of individuals due to differences in phenotype. It never lets up. It’s more about reproduction than staying alive. Natural selection is happening every time someone reproduces more than someone else.
Natural selection isn’t the only thing at play though. That solely refers to the organism best adapted to the environment being more likely to survive and produce offspring. Essentially everyone in our population survives to be able to produce offspring.
Sexual selection plays a much bigger part now. That isn’t someone being the most adapted to the environment, it’s someone being the most attractive to a mate. There are plenty of adaptations across nature that are maladaptive to survival, but are selected for regardless.
Then there are random mutations and genetic drift. Those happen in every population. That is more just a matter of chance.
We have found ways to adapt to our environment outside of evolution. So we no longer have a significant natural selection process.
Sexual selection is a subcategory of natural selection
In this age of contraception, it’s more a matter of wanting to reproduce (and how often) rather than merely being able to. I can’t shake off the impression that less educated people are reproducing at a way higher pace, producing many offspring of which in before times many would not have reached reproduction themselves, but now they do.
You should watch the movie Idiocraty.
I’ve seen it. And less educated/poor doesn’t mean genetically less intelligent. And even if it did, all that means is a change in the average gene distribution. A large enough portion of every population still reproduces that we are unlikely to dead end any major gene variations. So we still maintain a diverse gene pool, and if something happens to make natural selection play a role, we still have enough variation to adapt to changes.
I think the point Idiocracy was trying to convey had less to do with the genetics of the stupid people breeding, and more so the downward spiral of intelligence due to policy societal and governmental changes. Dumb people, make dumb policy choices, including with regard to education. To me, it stands to reason that the downward slope of intelligence is percitpitated on how effective governmental policy is and how well education is distributed.
Agreed. Plus it is a satire. It was making a point. It wasn’t required to be factually accurate through the entire movie.
My disagreement was that there was any evolutionary downward pressure on human capability. We can do increasingly dumber things without it being a genetic change. Propaganda, indoctrination, and selective access to information can play a huge role in how people develop and ultimately behave.
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.
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.
If genetic research gets to a point where we can beat any mutations, then probably not.
I would argue that modern medicine prevents non-selective deaths. We try and keep everyone alive, not just the idiots.
Yes. Without the selection pressures to minimize disease, we observe more disease in the population over time. This reduces our fitness for any environment without the artificial benefit of modern medicine.
People don’t want to understand because it is difficult and challenges their worldview. Is this an existential risk? Yes. Can we do anything about it? Yes.
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…
It already has affected natural-selection.
Survival of the fittest just means the most adapted to the current environment. Our current environment has medicine so we’re adapted to that. If that suddenly changes then sure it would be an issue, but so would a climate difference of even a few degrees, a slight difference in the chemical make up of air, etc.
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?
_ /\ _
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.
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.
Oh boy, a population genetics question in the wild.
In technical terms what you are asking is:
When a selection pressure is removed for a deleterious allele, what happens to the allelic frequency on the population?
The answer: they remain stable in the population, unchanging from when the selection pressure was removed. Every generation will have the same ratio of affected individuals as the previous one
Look up Hardy-Weinberg Equilibrium for more info.
Hardy-Weinberg isn’t appropriate here. If all alleles were neutral, they’d get slowly lost or move toward fixation at a rate proportional to the mutation rate by genetic drift. In the absence of negative selection, new variants that are deleterious without modern medicine would do a random walk in allele frequency, meaning some would become prevalent. But the population is so large they would take far too long to be completely fixed.
Hardy-Weinberg is a model that makes by true assumptions (like zero mutation rate and infinite, isolated populations).
You seem to be lost in the weeds a bit. Of course hardy-weinberg is a model that never exists in reality. It’s a good method to explain the importance of selection pressure on populations.
Without an active selection agent on the allele, it’s frequency in the population remains the same.
Now in reality there is no such thing as zero selection pressure on any allele. Having a deleterious or advantageous allele 49.99cM away exerts selection pressure.
However allelic frequencies without a strong selection acting on them remain relatively stable.
You’re not understanding. Without selection, real populations would have changing allele frequencies. They would not stay static. That’s because random sampling exists, but only outside of the H-W model.
Random sampling has a significant effect when the population size is smaller. Say less than 10,000 individuals.
It has very little effect as the population size increases to say something a little more than 8,000,000,000 individuals.
Well that’s interesting, thanks!
Also, a point I don’t see others mentioning, is religious people often tend to have more children, and whilst religion isn’t actually hereditary, children often do have more likelihood to follow the same religion as their parents, the population is likely to tend to more extremist religious people, unless the rate of conversion away from those religions drastically increases.
Well, if that were the case wouldn’t we expect to see near universal religious belief now?
We can’t start the population set now, we should look at when religion started.I’d posit that as time goes on, the religious beliefs tend to want to spread, but they also round off more difficult to wrangle aspects to maintain appeal to a wider audience. A belief system incompatible with observed reality or unpalatable to potential new believers is going to be less robust than one that fits and is welcoming.
It’s why today’s extremists are generally more tame than the commonplace believers of the past.
Eventually some people catch a version of the religion so weak that it’s only kinda comparable, and you have the Christian who never goes to church or thinks about it really, or the person who’s a vague notion of spiritual without much specific behind it beyond a vague notion of purposeful intention to the world.
I’m not talking about converting new believers from outside, I’m talking about children inheriting the religion of their parents. And yes, in the places where religion has spread, only a small percentage of the population wasn’t religious, and it’s a relatively recent thing that a significant fraction of society isn’t religious.
But we still see a trend line of decreasing religiosity and a taming of extreme religious beliefs.
Children are way more likely to take the religion of their parents than otherwise, but they’re still new believers that the idea has to be able to take hold in, and if the idea just doesn’t fit then you’ll see a departure. It’s not like their religion is the only one trying to take root.I just don’t think we see the world today that we would if religion spread with the force of population dynamics.
We see majority religions like Christianity decreasing, but minority religions are actually increasing, at least in the US.
Hopefully the inbreeding within those weirdo groups helps fix that.
natural selection does not choose whats best overall, just those that can reproduce. steinmetz was a hunchback cripple dwarf who was the actual intellectual powerhouse behind GE and responsible for much of our quality of life in the modern age.
steinmetz was a hunchback cripple dwarf
I never want to hear anyone say again that “nobody calls someone a ‘cripple’ anymore”. Perhaps consider this somewhat less grotesque alternate phrasing: “Steinmetz was a person who experienced significant and debilitating disability”.
natural selection does not choose whats best overall, just those that can reproduce.
That’s not only an incorrect understanding of natural selection, i’d add that Steinmetz chose not to reproduce. If he hadn’t been the topic of your next sentence, I wouldn’t have felt the need to emphasise his personal agency. Or his existence as a person
I know he chose to not have kids and the phrasing I used has been used with him in particular forever to emphasize the extreme challenges he had to deal with. Its great you like a certain more generic phrasing which could be applied to anyone.
If you wanted to emphasise the challenges he dealt with, adjectives for his physical appearance were not a good choice. The challenges he would have dealt with may have included chronic pain, limited mobility and discrimination. You could even have said he suffered from kyphosis. But words which have been frequently intended to be derogatory don’t do much to create a sense of empathy.
could be applied to anyone.
And it’s nice to see disability being normalised, even if that wasn’t your intent.
where do you get cripple is a physical appearance description? do video game thieves use differentialy abled strike? ten years from now you will have folks say using disability or disabled makes you worse than hitler. the words only have deragatory meaning to those who have decided they are such.
Even if we ignored the entire history of the word cripple, it still would be remarkable to not consider hunchback or dwarf as physical descriptions. Given that your next question references video games and then we fall down Godwin’s slippery slope, I’m not convinced you’re honestly engaging with the concept of connotation.
the words only have deragatory meaning to those who have decided they are such.
Yes, and when the people who have to live with the consequences of discrimination tell you that you’re speaking in the same way as those who have discriminated against them, it’s worth considering. Even momentarily.
Have a great day, I’m going to go be a cripple elsewhere now. Nah, just kidding, it will still be my couch. Just not this thread.
Yes as I said. Down the line disabled will be used such and because we cow tow to such people disabled will be such in a decade. Im not honestly engaging in the concept of connotation in that im not sure if that is what we are discussing as it is not a commonly used word so and not using them causes discourse to be rather limited. My god dwarfism is a thing as well and a dwarf implies a different condition than midget. These words actually have meaning outside of use as a derogatory which again is not their main usage. These words were not created as deragatories. Where I grew up in the middle of the block was a place called NSAR. I don’t remember what it all stood for but the R was retardation. Now this place housed, fed, educated, and helped adult people with retartdation get jobs. Did they do this to troll them with their deragatory name. No, they did not collect and spend this money for their welfare in a secret mission to be jerks. On the other hand there has been a troll individual using the term in troll posts that I have reported and downvoted because they are just throwing it around as an insult. Due to such usage its now avoided, and it is a freakin medical term. We seen this with things like woke and pepe the frog and I have heard people use special or differentially abled to sarcastically insult someone. We can cede terms all we want but its not going to stop jerks from being jerks and maybe people consider me a jerk for feeling this way but I still feel the way one uses language by some should not have us just throwing things out of the lexicon.
