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Secondly, when people die in many of these cultures, there is much more physical connection with the body, potentially spreading the disease more. You would th
by sliverstorm 12y ago
Secondly, when people die in many of these cultures, there is much more physical connection with the body, potentially spreading the disease more.
You would think this would have been selected against ages ago.
- emiliobumachar 12y agoHuman culture changes way too fast for evolution to act.
- nhaehnle 12y agoI have no idea why you were down-voted. It's true: even if, somehow, evolution had managed to at some point kill off all cultures with a certain trait, the same trait is likely to develop again in at most a few centuries. If somebody has solid arguments against emiliobumachar's point, I'd be interested to hear them.
- marcosdumay 12y agoMaybe the downvote was because it isn't completely true. Nothing can be too fast, or too slow for evolution. It's only that culture evolves by different means than genotipes, and by those means fitting the norm more than compensates any unfitness caused by health problems. At least at the short term.
- andrewflnr 12y agoOn the contrary, I would say that evolution works pretty quickly to weed out cultural phenomena like, say, suicide cults, in much the same way that it works quickly to remove gross physical deformities.
- Fomite 12y agoIt's hard to select against a cultural practice, generally, as there aren't large numbers of possible phenotypes in the area, and it only matters if that cultural practice results in less children. Dying isn't selected against on its own.
- sliverstorm 12y agoIt weakens the community. I was thinking of selection on a community (or higher) level, e.g. a community that has different practices will be stronger and either outlast or conquer the community with dangerous traditions.
- Fomite 12y agoIt takes catastrophic levels of disease (think: Smallpox introduction into the entirely susceptible North and South American populations) to sufficiently weaken a culture to the point of conquerability. Consider the number of European nations in the middle ages fully capable of going to war with high endemic disease levels, or indeed lasting on the field while there were ongoing epidemics in their armies.
- andrewflnr 12y agoNot necessarily. In the vast majority of cases, being in close contact with a corpse, before it's gotten serious about decomposing, is not a big deal. I would guess the few cases where it is a problem are not enough to exert significant selection pressure.
- DanBC 12y agoEating corpses seems to be selected out with diseases like Kuru. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease) http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kuru_(disease) That's is rather more contact with a corpse than most funeral practices involve.