3 ms·

Well, Natural Selection doesn’t necessarily mean that only advantageous genes survive the Darwinian hustle, it can also mean that in the absence of negative ext

• carbocation 6y ago
  Yes, I agree. I'm mostly responding to the authors' speculation: > “This increase could have resulted from mutations of genes involved in median artery development or health problems in mothers during pregnancy, or both actually. If this trend continues, a majority of people will have median artery of the forearm by 2100.”
• lopmotr 6y ago
  It seems like we're on a terrible path with this absence of evolutionary pressure. What's happening to all the babies who survive today that would have died in childbirth had they been born at any time in human history before 100 years ago? Since infant mortality was so high, it must have been an close battle for evolution to keep it under control. Now the brakes are off and whatever mutations were regularly killing babies (and mothers) are now free to propagate to subsequent generations. Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. We've already evolved to become dependent on technology (cooking, clothing, shelter) and it probably does us good by freeing up our body's resources to do other things better. So perhaps becoming dependent on healthcare for childbirth will eventually happen too and nobody will be worried when women can only give birth by C-section or whatever. A related issue is immunization. People are so worked up about the politics that they don't want to think about this, but could it be that immunizing ourselves is taking away the evolutionary pressure to maintain a good natural immune system? Multiple generations of measles vaccinated people might end up like the native Americans who were vulnerable from their ancestors having never experienced measles. This seems like a whole alternative kind of morality - protection of the genes of future generations. But it goes against the popular short term moralities that people have so it seems too objectionable.
  • fs_tab 6y ago
    Those are valid points. However, immunization has virtually eradicated entire families of diseases with serious, life-altering side effects. I would argue that the short-term benefits outweigh the potential long-term consequences in this case, especially if we continue to vaccinate children against these diseases. That being said, I think it's far more likely that genetic conditions and predispositions to disease will be resolved through genetic engineering, not natural selection.
    • lopmotr 6y ago
      Yea, it's not obvious whether we should be sacrificing people today to maybe save future people, especially if we can genetically engineer it all away. But our ancestors (or rather the humans that weren't our ancestors) were certainly sacrificed for our benefit. I don't think we'll evolve our way out of genetic diseases or we would have already. Rather, it seems like we'll degenerate into higher rates of them without ongoing selection pressure keeping the rate low.
  • eecc 6y ago
    I can’t even decide where to start picking apart these arguments... it’s mostly just a “the skies are falling” fear-trip occurring whenever some significantly new status quo emerges. Sure, literacy made people less willing to spend their lives farming for a pittance, but we managed to industrialize farming and some of those peasant families contributed to society more than a couple loads of bread. Let’s put it this way: we’re on the path to fully disassemble cellular processes, we won’t need natural selection to tune our immune system when we can design a better one ourselves