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 always thought that it was the greater volume of humans, the greater the genetic diversity
There’s barely any pressure to extinguish “bad” traits, though.
If you’re the idiot who eats every berry you can find, cavemen can’t save you and your genes disappear. Modern medicine can and will save you, so you can create offspring and the berryeaters keep their proud heritage alive.
Now, what is considered “good” or “bad” is of course highly debatable, but currently we have effectively no survival pressure, the only selection is how many children you get.
Well, that’s a type of pressure. Ogg the berry lover could well have passed on his genes.
For a long time we’ve largely been selecting for intelligence and social abilities.OG Luci is right, though. There are far more people due to modern medicine. So if we suddenly lose it, there will be a lot of death. But there is more population and diversity to draw from the survivors. So I don’t think it’s a threat to the species.
Exactly, even if 7 billion people died, well there’s still a billion people. If 99% of people died, well there are still millions.
But that if that “idiot” does propagate, but so does everyone else, no skin off the species back. If the selective pressure returns, well then the others keep going.
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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
Survival of the fittest doesn’t mean what you think it means. Fitness, in the evolutionary sense, is a quantitative representation of individual reproductive success. So yes, the fittest of us do survive in the sense that their genes are passed on far more often than those that are less fit. For example, the overweight, nearsighted, diabetic car salesman with a lethal peanut allergy that has 16 children is more fit than most people on the planet.
there’s plenty of class action lawsuits where people sued because someone claimed their medicine was good and it turned out to be bad.
It was only a couple of flipper babies…
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.
Well that’s interesting, thanks!
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.
Hmm, that’s an interesting question. I’m not an evolutionary biologist but I am a biologist (more specifically, a microbiogist).
The crux of the misunderstanding, I think, is that the definition of what counts as advantageous or “good” has changed over time. Very rapidly, in fact. The reason many diseases are still around today is because many genetic diseases offered a very real advantage in the past. The example that is often given is malaria and sickle cell anemia. Sickle cell anemia gives resistance to malaria, which is why it’s so prevalent in populations that historically have high incidence of malaria.
Natural selection doesn’t improve anything, it just makes animals more fit for their exact, immediate situation. That also means that it is very possible (and in fact, very likely) that the traits that we today associate with health will become disadvantageous in the future.
If we remember that natural selection isn’t trying to push humanity towards any goal, enlightenment, or good health, it becomes easier to acknowledge and accept that we can and should interfere with natural selection
the traits that we today associate with health will become disadvantageous in the future.
Yeah I can think of a few, like aging. 10000 years from now kids will be saying, “wow, those poor unevolved savages lived such short lives and only really got to enjoy the first little bit of it before they started falling apart. They even had genetic engineering at the time! Imagine how many people would be alive today if they hadn’t been so scared to edit their genes to prevent aging.” Then their teacher would come over and explain that it wasn’t so easy at the time. There were still so many other problems they had to solve and related genes that need to be modified to avoid undesirable consequences, and let’s get back on topic: how many planets fall under the rule of the galactic empire including our own planet Urth?
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 we’ve already demolished natural selection over here, modern medicine being the least of concern. Idiocracy was supposed to be humor, not foretelling.
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.
The more varied the sample of individuals you can afford to keep alive in your population, the more chances you have that a subset of them will be able to withstand random changes in the fitness function. If the environment changes abruptly, you will have a hard time adapting as a species if you only ever supported people “within the norm”. What happens in those cases is called extinction.
Plenty of answers already.
I’d like to point out that it’s not medicine alone, but empathy that changes natural selection. We have evidence of our ancestors caring for members of their tribe that would have been unable to survive otherwise.
But while in some edge cases (some diseases) you could make an argument that it’s bad for future humanity for some reason, it’s overall good, because it enables a larger population. And a larger population has a better chance of mutating to fit changing environments. Or to phrase it differently: diversification comes first, selection can wait.
Populations do not mutate. Mutations occur randomly within individuals, they do not occur to fit a changing environment, they only occur randomly. A mutation can spread through a population if nothing selects against it. Selection never waits, it’s always there in one form or another.
