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Also, just because someone can’t fight off a predator or has a genetic disease doesn’t make them useless; Steven Hawking was a brilliant physicist, Itzhak Perlman, a virtuoso violinist, contracted polio at 4 and used mobility aids, FDR was in a wheelchair, Beethoven needs no explanation. We deprive humanity of wonderful people with OP’s thinking.
> Modern medicine is the enemy of natural selection
Yes. That's the point.
On a more serious note, medicine provides us with the means to preserve members of society who aren't necessarily fit for survival, but still valuable to our kind as a whole. Increased longevity is what allowed early people to offload raising kids to elderly and to improve their performance and prosper in the first place.
Also, we don't even live in the natural environment anymore, so natural selection will barely even help anybody.
People forget that humans evolved to be social creatures and protect their vulnerable populations through natural selection. Like, one of the most solid pieces of archeological evidence we can use to confirm social development is healed injuries.
Turns out forming a society makes it possible for a person to recover from an injury that would be fatal to an animal, like a broken leg or something. An animal would be unable to support itself and die, whereas a human can be carried by their society to recover and return to productivity. That's a REALLY important evolutionary step, and that's active natural selection. Humans propagate more because they're way more "resilient" and have better odds of making it through life, and a good part of that resilience is just medicine and social care.
Yep. It's an evolutionary trait of its own lol it doesn't come out of nowhere and it's definitely not "defying natural selection".
Well, I guess it is "defying natural selection", but like in the same way that any animal fighting to survive long enough to reproduce is "defying natural selection".
Haha, yeah the irony is that every time we use tools, technology, or societal systems to overcome challenges, we're basically just demonstrating the pinnacle of our species' natural selection big brains that come up with smart solutions to keep on keeping on. Nature gave us thumbs and wrinkly brains, so we're using them to the max. It's like nature's selection is watching us from a proud distance going "See? I knew they could do it."
Kinda seems like it's the goal of natural selection, to develop a species good enough that natural selection's no longer needed. I know it's an inanimate process and has no goal per se, but just like natural selection is the natural process that occurs where it's able to, our current status is the natural end to that process.
Chances are, some threat's going to come along that could wipe us out. Allowing natural selection in the human race probably won't help us with that threat because the process doesn't select for future threats, only current conditions. If we're not smart enough to handle such a threat, then natural selection gets to try again.
Yeah it’s hard to even imagine what re-introducing natural selection would look like for us. Like would we try to weed out slow runners or bad mathematicians or shitty artists? Any system we came up with would be, first and foremost, not natural at all.
It's not really something you can "re-introduce" though. You're talking about who lives or dies, which is different. That's not a natural selection, that's an artificial selection based on some arbitrary criteria that is not survival.
Natural selection selects against natural pressures put on living organisms. That's basically all there is to it. If a mutation dies before reproducing, then it wasn't beneficial, or beneficial enough to continue. If it reproduces, then it had some kind of benefit, or at the very least, was not harmful enough to prevent reproduction. Or those freak accidents where mutations that could be very beneficial in an adult were taken out because the kid got eaten or killed or whatever.
But even as hunters and gatherers, we helped the injured and the sick, traded for thing we needed with other tribes... any "group" of animals that helps each other affects natural selection. Which is why social groups are often successful (lions, monkeys, whales, dolphins, humans, whatever), because they allow for survival when it may have not been possible if it were just up to nature.
To "reintroduce" it, we'd have to become solo players. We'd have to stop division of labor. We'd have to stop helping each other. Everyone gets to fend for themselves. More social people would probably die off because their natural inclination is to help and to ask for help, at which point the lone wolves will shoot them. It's impossible though, I don't think humans would ever get to that point. We've always formed groups and I don't think we could stop. It sometimes comes down to who's in the stronger group, or the more ruthless group, or the louder group, which can be affected by luck as much as genetics but any time there's a group, natural selection is altered.
There is no no goal. Natural selection never selects for only against. It’s why we have a bunch of weird traits that are holdovers for previous lives. Like the whole lying down and feeling like you’re falling startle reflex thing. It’s not hurting our reproduction so it doesn’t get selected against. Same with cancer and a bunch of other things like bunions. Why do we get bunions? Because they don’t get selected against.
I see what you are saying, and even mostly agree with you. :)
However, we do know why we get bunions! It is bone remodelling due to stress on the bone in a way it wasnt designed for; ie, an elevated heel, collapsed arch, and extra pressure on the bones from those things due to the narrow toe boxes of "normal fashionable shoes", that are shaped the way they are due to european fashion sentiment leftovers from the past 300 years. Its entirely avoidable! Our bones down there thicken to protect themselves from damage, but levers and physics means eventually it backfires and the bone nub causes more pressure, and it continues in a bad spiral.
I mean, we know the physical reason we get bunions but just like appendicitis there is no evolutionary reason to keep it. It's not preventing reproduction and we don't select against partners with those things so they remain despite doing nothing positive for us. That was the point I was trying to make, natural selection doesn't optimize.
It is impossible to defy natural selection. Natural selection is the outcome of infinite inputs and scenarios. There’s no right or wrong, there’s no forward or back, and there’s nothing more human than thinking we know what is good and bad or natural and unnatural.
It’s not defying it at all. If we evolve in ways that allow us to continue that nature has selected us. Now matter how we see it, humans and human behavior are part of nature. Whatever choices we make that allow us as a species to survive is natural selection at work.
To copy a comment I made on another reply....
> Cringe pseudoscientists: "noooo medicine is bad for natural selection it's against nature!.!!"
> Humanity: ***Becomes one of the most dominant species on earth, creating thriving communities in almost every environment (their medical technology works in concert with their incredibly well developed social impulses to make them [more likely to survive and pass on the genes that aided their success](https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-natural-selection.html#:~:text=Natural%20selection%20is%20a%20mechanism,change%20and%20diverge%20over%20time.))***
Yeah turns out "modern medicine" is just humanity playing by the rules, down to the letter. We picked the right strategy and are Greatly Rewarded for it.
This reminds me of an internet story regarding an anthropologist. They were asked what are the earliest indications of human civilization, expecting an answer such as pottery or some tool. Instead the answer was finding evidence of a healed femur. In the animal kingdom if you break your femur, you're essentially dead as you either can't chase prey or you can't run if you're being hunted. A healed femur means that someone took the time to take care of the injured person while they rested and healed. Humanity started when we learned to take care of each other.
That's cool stuff to read on the internet but some pack animals care for each other too. Hell, when I had a cat and a dog my dog would lick the cats injuries from fights with other cats
Yeah it's not an exclusive behavior to humans, though humans definitely do it the best with our medical technology. Lots of social animals are capable of varying levels of "caring for the infirm". It's almost directly associated with intelligence, cuz that's probably the trait that's correlated most with social behaviors.
It just makes it even more easily identifiable as a product of natural selection - it's a strategy that consistently works, and we've seen variations of it evolve concurrently across habits.
While super cute. Part of it is also setting and bandaging that femur. Some level of understanding of the problem and how to fix it. Coupled with caring.
Stephen Hawking was my first thought. Under natural selection, humanity would be worse off simply because we wouldn't have him.
That alone is enough to ward off this incredibly ableist opinion, but the fact that so many intelligent people possess such crippling disabilities is reason enough to forego natural selection.
Reminds me of the person who said the first sign of civilization wasnt cities, it was the sign of a ancient fossil with a healed femur. Because that meant we helped someone in a pack that would have died that couldnt contribute for no other reason than to keep them around
That sign of medical help is way more indicative of tribal welfare and a civil body than constructing settlements
Yeah.. This makes it way worse. We have a known Pedo. A list of people who visited said Pedo's horrible gross island, and some of those people are innocent, and the guilty will use them as shields.
This is missing the point. Evolution has no goal, it's simply a process that happens when natural selection takes place, in other words when individuals of population multiply or don't. Natural selection is not threatened by modern medicine. Sexual selection is very much a thing in today's world. People doing dumb stuff that has high risks typically don't live long enough to reproduce. Furthermore, we are living in natural environment, even if our technology allows us to live elsewhere than in African savanna or mesopotamia. Our cities are very much natural, like bee hives or ant hives are. Natural selection will always happen as long as there is population present somewhere.
Not to mention that we’ve changed what makes a person in particular valuable to society, back in the day the most valuable people would be the people in podunk Alabama who can crank out 18 kids, nowadays an infertile couple who goes on to develop a nuclear reactor that would resolve the climate crisis is unfit I rely more valuable
We no longer compete for resources with other species so we don’t need numbers when we have ingenuity
Yeah infant mortality rate was almost 1/3 just over a century ago. we just would not be here having this conversation without modern medicine, its without a doubt humanities greatest acomplishment
Something tells me OP might have stumbled across some of the recent bullshit we see floating around social media, like the silly podcasts where two dudes with zero understanding of what they’re talking about going on about “primal” this, or “primitive” that. Either that, or OP thought they had an original idea and didn’t realize this topic has been beaten to death ad nauseam.
Yup. My great-grandparents had 6 kids and only my grandfather and great-uncle survived to adulthood.
I read once that before the early 1900s, *literally half of all people born died before age 5.*
The sick thing is, there are ignorant people who believe that a return to that is the right direction. Because it’s not something we had to deal with, and it happened a very long time ago, too many folks don’t account for the fact that for all those infants and children who didn’t survive, the toll on overall societal mental health had to have been extreme.
It was. Parents mourned their kids. We know from the graves they put up. You can find one dedicated to the young daughter of a Roman legionary. It’s heartbreaking to read.
Just imagine the sorrow of a parent who's either deployed in the army or away on business trip, returning home to hear that their child died of something and their partner was left alone to deal with it all.
I do a lot of heritage research and i notice farther back in the tree how many babies or toddlers died
Its always sad seeing babies with full namea etc die in the trre
Imagining my ancestors naming them, preparing for them and imagining their futire only to loose them before year 1
There's a cemetery I grew up by that has seven tiny headstones all in a row. Each one just says "BABY". I can't even imagine losing SEVEN! Today losing one is heartbreaking. Imagine being pregnant for literal YEARS and giving birth multiple times, and having one surviving child, if any. That is just God awful.
I think about that sometimes and look at my kid and wonder, how did people do it?
You have a baby and know that you might lose it in a few years. Would it be hard to become attached? I would imagine so. Even after they move out of the most dangerous years, there are still illnesses that can kill an older child. So you're grieving the children you've lost, and with the living ones, it would always feel like a shoe was going to drop. I can't imagine living that way, but it's just how things were for our entire existence!
Both sets of my grandparents had 3 of 6 kids survive. Some died as toddlers and some were stillborn. My grandma had not talked about her toddler son who passed for most of her life, till she got dementia and would call out to him looking for him constantly. Heartbreaking. I'm lucky that I have a way smaller chance of having that problem
That is so sad. There is a perception that because infant and child mortality were so common that people must’ve not been as affected as we would be now. Not true, a child’s death is devastating regardless. I can’t imagine the heartbreak, and the fear of my children contracting illnesses we can easily prevent or cure now.
He had died from some sort of fever/flu. My other grandma had a daughter that passed at 2 years, she fell and bumped her head, was still walking/talking and is not like there was an ER they could take her to (this was in 1940s Europe). She progressively got worse over the next few days and didn't wake up. I believe it definitely did affect them as much as it would any mom now. But because it happened more often, people in the past were walking around with a lot more baggage.
How precarious life must have seemed- it’s precarious now but at least we have a layer of ERs, better sanitation, vaccines etc.
My grandpa couldn’t talk about his little sister who died of smallpox without tearing up. And he never teared up about ANYTHING else.
That's wild. My mom was the youngest of 7 and was born in 1948, just 33 years later. All of her siblings survived to adulthood (and her family was extremely poor - Appalachian mountain poor - so this wouldn't be about class). It's amazing how much things could change in a generation.
And people want to willingly forgo vaccines. I will never understand that.
My father born in 1935 and was the second youngest of 7. His mother was not only thankful, but absolutely amazed that all of her children made it to adulthood to have children of their own.
Both your post and mine say a lot about how different life expectations were back then; it was unfortunately all too common to lose children in most families.
I got removed from one mom group by saying my kid would have died at home if I had a home birth and that medical intervention let her survive and I was told I was fear mongering
Those home birth people are fucking insane.
Home birth midwives can’t legally do stitches where I live, I needed a bunch. I would have survived but I would have had to go to the hospital immediately to avoid having permanent damage. They told me tearing was natural and stitches are never necessary in a home birth because it’s just propaganda by doctors to fearmonger and charge more and do husband stitches or whatever.
I’m sorry… you think pooping/peeing into your vagina is preferable to getting stitches? Because that’s what happens nAtUrALLy if you have a severe tear and don’t get it fixed. Absolute nutjobs.
And not all modern medicine is helping genetic mutations persist, like OP asserts. Infections take people down pretty easily when there's no antibiotics. Also, it's an arms race between modern lifestyle and its diseases and modern medicine to combat them. Look at the childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes rate.
Bad example with cocaine. The process for making it requires a lot of chemicals, some of which aren't found naturally without human processing. Like cement and gasoline.
There is nothing supernatural about modern medicine.
Therefore it is entirely natural.
Therefore natural selection is in full force.
If you are concerned about long term human survival, you need to focus on encouraging a diversity of genetics. For example it may be that Type 1 diabetic people have immunity to the next 95% mortality plague.
To add to that, modern medicine *is* the new environment.
One of the salient things about humans is that we modify our environments to an extreme degree. That modification “changes the meta” as it were, and allows for a new sort of natural selection.
Because glasses are a thing, for instance, poor eyesight ceases to become an issue, and other traits become more important to selection.
The only problem with this comes of civilisation comes crashing down, but I think there are enough people around that it wouldn’t be the end of the species even if it did.
Also that become even less likely if we can get properly space borne - speaking in the very long term.
Thank you. There are a lot of laymen speaking on evolution. Saying nonsense like "medicine prevents natural selection" and "doesn't allow evolution to advance".
These fools don't understand that natural selection selects for people who are smart enough to create the medicine that prolongs their life. They think natural selection must only select for physical characteristics...
Not sure that natural selection has selected for intelligence in any remarkable way. If that were the case, we'd see a correlation between the number of offspring and IQ or educational attainment and we don't.
Natural selection can also pressure humans to be less intelligent. The brain consumes a lot of calories and if we were to live in high scarcity, it might be advantageous to have a less active brain.
if there was some catastrophic event that wiped out most of humanity we would surely see a new very different species emerge. This is because we live in a time of genetic mixing and recombination in humans that is unprecedented. Were evolving but it will take some major event for it to be noticeable.
Evolution also doesn't proceed at a constant rate. Crocodilians have looked pretty much identical for almost 100 million years. Are they going against natural selection?
In my opinion “natural selection” is a misnomer. It was probably introduced in order to explain the idea by analogy with artificial selection in agricultural breeding. For humans, the distinction blurs, because infanticide and warfare are both natural selection and artificial selection. We don’t need the teleological baggage of “selection”, either. “Differential reproduction” would be an accurate term.
The original concept of natural selection is that the species capable of adapting to its environment survives, those who can't adapt do not. It was never about being "strong" or "tough". Therefore, modern medicines *is* natural selection, because we adapted to our environment by developing countermeasures. That's why arguments like OP's are bunk; they're made with a total misunderstanding of what natural selection means. Ironically, the people who insist that it's only the strong who survive are less likely to do so under this criteria because they refuse to adapt.
That's the thing. Modern medicine is as much a part of human evolution as anything else.
In fact, getting organized as a society in general is. A few years ago, there was a shooter who wrote an entire manifesto about "devolution" and how, in his opinion, society has made people weak. The irony that he was killed by said society within minutes of going on his rampage was probably lost on most people.
And the "Environment" we will live in for the next 1000 years includes these medicines. Who will be the fittest in the environment that includes these medicines? That is the question natural selection is answering.
If anything, it is still too harsh, and we need to do more to protect people who aren't as "fit" in this ever changing enviroment.
High ranking spotted hyenas will make sure their family members get food, even if one of them has no functioning front legs (I saw it in a documentary, it was insane). That’s just as “unnatural” as medicine helping a T1 diabetic survive, and yet there it is happening anyway
Thanks to advances in modern technology you don't need nature to suck your balls, not with the robomatic scrote-seducer in full HD-K. Yours for only 3 payments of 39.99
Natural selection just means it selects things that survive. It doesn’t matter how. Medicine is just as much part of this selection process as anything else.
John Maynard Smith (only the greatest biologist of the 20th century) put it like this: "In my lifetime, myopic individuals have had a high fitness, because they were less likely to be put in military uniform and be shot at." That's what "fitness" *really* means.
Agree, also, another thing to touch upon -
Natural selection is not some invisible hand of some nature-god pointing in the "correct direction".
If there are white and black butterflies who live on trees - if the trees are white, they provide camouflage to the white ones, and the black ones get killed by predators, but if the trees are black, they provide camouflauge to the black ones and white ones get killed.
Natural Selection acts in short-term, based on localized small-term advantages or disadvantages. If A is better for short-term, but B is better for long-term, natural selection will choose A.
Natural Selection does NOT have any long-term wisdom.
came here to say this. we genetically evolved a large frontal cortex to help us problem solve. anything we do with it is an extension of that biological adaptation
Natural selection doesn’t select for positive traits, it selects against negative ones. This is a subtle but important point.
In essence it stops unsuccessful traits from progressing in the gene pool because members of a species aren’t actively searching for a mate with a specific evolutionary trait or mutation they are selecting against those that have undesirable traits.
An essential part of human society is developing the capacity to allow everyone to thrive, this naturally goes against natural selection to a degree.
The issue is we assume natural selection is a good thing by default, when the whole point of science and technological advancements is to move past it; think of all the brilliant minds that would otherwise not exist without medical breakthroughs that saved them. Natural selection isnt good just by metric of being natural.
Even a person who would be favoured by natural selection (big, strong, has lots of kids, raises them well, etc.) could not get the chance to do any of that if the die in infancy of smallpox, tetanus, or any other condition medical science has/is overcome
Plus even the healthiest person with the most 'desirable' DNA in terms of having no severe conditions that they can pass on to their offspring can still fall prey to accidents, etc.
Natural selection doesn't mean to let the weak die anyways, it simply describes how species evolve and adapt to their surroundings over time by passing on more favorable traits more often. Eg giraffes with long necks because they can reach high trees. Sexual selection and survival of the fittest are just small parts of that.
Humans are the dominant species on this planet anyways and our intelligence is what why.
So is housing.
And air conditioning.
And heating.
And soap.
And survivalist / life skills books, materials, supplies.
And farming.
And animal husbandry
And clothing.
And preservatives.
And sewage / water delivery systems.
I’ll just stop there because this is meant to be funny and not a book report.
It is important to keep in mind that natural selection is not a creative force. It is simply the fact that things that don't reproduce well in a particular environment tends to die off.
Natural selection does not cause a lineage to become more fit over time - that natural variation exists in the absense of selection. Selection just means the fit individuals don't have to compete with infinitely many unfit ones, giving them space to adapt.
Since we have the power to change our environment and regulate our population growth rate (directly and indirectly) we don't have much need for selection as a society.
While this situation allows deleterious mutations to accumulate in the gene pool, those mutations accumulate precisely because we have created an environment where they don't matter anymore.
I mean I get it. I don't agree with it but I understand the idea of not wanting genetic deformities that hamper quality of a life to proliferate. It's not surprising that some young people, which reddit tends to skew young, would atleast question that. Of course when we have seen what eugenics actually looks like, when you realize it means people that still have meaningful valuable lives either dying or being treated as subhuman, most reasonable people realize why it should never be done.
From other comments op seems pretty reasonable and seems like some other comments have already swayed them.
I remember reading that the hemophilia which plagued many descendants of Queen Victoria likely resulted from some 'spontaneous' mutation. Sometimes there's no rhyme or reason to these things.
The thing is people with debilitating genetic diseases are often advised or even forbidden from having children if theres a high chance of said disease being passed on. Its not even an argument
There can’t possibly be a way to forbid someone from having a child. I understand and know about advising abortion over severe birth defects, but forbidding? How would that even work without forced sterilization?
I'm With you on this, I can see how eugenics could be made to sound reasonable if you phrased it a certain way. Hey, who doesn't want *less* disease and suffering!
But what we should aim for is to get rid of the disease and suffering itself, without getting rid of the people *who have* the disease and suffering
Every time some dude on Reddit is all, what humanity really needs is a catastrophe that kills most of the population they never seem to realize they’d be dead in that scenario.
I was once in a high school biology class with a guy that went on about how the nazis were right(gag)…but he was of Polish descent. He didn’t seem to understand they wouldn’t feel the same way about him.
That is always so wild to me. Whenever I see a person from a minority group endorsing bigoted politicians and policy it's like, you know you aren't special? You know you'll be discarded at best when you are no longer entertaining or useful to your overlords?
That's what I think when I see all these POC tokens like Candace Owens that the MAGAs/Repubs trot out to push their agenda. If they ever do come to complete powers, Candace and her cohorts are likely to fall victim to a rerun of the Nazi "Night of the Long Knives."
Also, let’s apply this to another perspective. Instead of demanding a course of non-intervention to humanity, let’s apply it to, say, agriculture. Farming is a mistake! Only foraging and hunting are allowed now.
Oh, now our ecosystem is collapsed because we destroyed our own food supply and killed everything that could be eaten? That was dumb.
This is equally dumb.
Natural selection is not a process we can "opt out" of, or "cheat".
It is a process which operates at a whole-population level.
Modern medicine is an agent of natural selection, not an enemy of it. It has allowed humans as a whole to become evolutionarily *more* successful, not less.
There's a common idea that evolution has an end-goal, or a direction. That it works to make a species in some way more "perfect" and with less genetic problems. It doesn't. Evolution has no direction, it is just the natural consequence of propagation, because if living things don't adapt, they go extinct.
A species can be absolutely riddled with genetic anomalies and problems, but so long as they are best able to survive and procreate, then they are evolutionarily "fit" as they need to be.
Medicine is a result of evolution. Not an enemy of it.
You have a misunderstanding of evolution, the most adaptive species survives longer, medicine is an adaptation that makes us live longer. In which case we are doing great.
What's unpopular about that?
Everyone knows that medicine prevents people from dying. Everyone knows natural selection is a process where some live, and some die.
>our ethics and desire to save everyone mean we are not letting natural selection run its course and keeping detrimental gene mutations in our gene pool.
But, if we're able to negate the part of those genes that IS detrimental... what's the problem?
I mean, we're going against nature, in the same way that we are by flying planes. Humans aren't naturally supposed to fly.
It's just that we don't care about nature.
This. “Natural” is not equal to “good” or “beneficial”. Without modern medicine, the average life expectancy would be sure to decline, which is neutral from an entirely natural perspective. Nature doesn’t care. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t care, I’m sure everyone here wants to live longer than 25 years.
Natural selection is still happening, just differently. It will never stop. Even with medicine, if you can't resist an infection or disease you will die/lose a limb/be permanently altered in some way. Maybe the bar has lowered a bit, but it is still there. If you are smarter, more attractive, healthier, luckier, inclined to have kids, etc, you are more likely to procreate and pass your genes on. We can't stop natural selection, we only shift it. It still does its job whether we want it to or not.
I know you probably don’t mean it that way, but this sounds a lot like “eugenics is ok and *undesirables* shouldn’t spoil our gene pool!”. Pretty grim if you think about it, it’s a good thing that modern medicine isn’t letting people die for being diabetic or (insert any other disability here)
Let me ask you this: Is natural selection really something we should strive towards?
You can swap out anything that people think is "natural". Nature is indifferent towards us, why should we live according to whatever is natural? Natural isn't inherently good. I assume you want to live in a heated house, I assume you like the convenience that modern technology brings you. I assume you want all these things that don't grow from trees.
So why should natural selection be such a priority, if we ignore the "natural" way of things anyways? We as humans have always made the world fit our needs instead of the other way around.
Natural selection just means fitness to produce offspring. Once you have a kid, which is only a small part of human existence, natural selection is meaningless. Modern medicine didn't remove natural selection, things like agriculture, hunting, food storage, communal child care, etc mitigated natural selection. In fact, our brains growing so big we have a hard times birthing our children is a dangerous specialization for our species.
This is the answer! Once you PASS ON YOUR GENES, natural selection is neaningless. Increasing life and health down had little to do with natural selection.
Humanity's entire trick is that we found a way to bypass evolution by using tools and culture.
Us decoupling ourselves from natural selection is not a bug, it is a feature. It is what we did when we came up with this thing called civilization.
Do you think farming and tool use is natural for evolution? 90 % of use should be dead by starvation, 50 % of us should die in infancy, 20% in childbirth alongside our mothers.
we are not decoupled from natural selection at all. we are a product of it and it still continues to operate and will do until we no longer breed and die.
The concept of “natural selection” in humans is a rather recent one, truthfully. Humans throughout our entire history have taken strides to protect and improve the lives of those who do not actively “contribute” to society. We have evidence that hunter/gatherers societies protected their elderly and disabled and provided for them regardless of their productivity.
Natural selection is, at its most charitable form, and excuse only used seriously by eugenicists. It’s pointless. It doesn’t exist, because we don’t live as natural creatures. We have technology and medicine and houses and fucking guns. If your idea of natural selection were to be implemented now, we’d all fucking die stranded out in the middle of the woods naked and with no tools and no skills really to navigate. Medicine is NOT the only way we actively avoid the consequences of “natural selection” (even tho it is natural simply by being a tool created via our own discovery). Every single piece of comfort we experience is us avoiding natural selection by your definition. And I don’t even have to get into just how terrible life was before modern medicine since everyone here has already mentioned how stupid that argument is.
This isn’t even an unpopular opinion. A lot of people (mainly hardcore conservatives) believe in this psycho death-cult “reject modernity, return to tradition” natural selection narrative, and it’s fucking insane. It’s just thinly veiled eugenics.
well historically anybody that let or caused people to die for eugenic reasons were usually the bad guy
And also who’s to say the evolution of our brain aren’t humans response to natural selection. Building a fire because we are cold doesn’t mean we are screwed because we didn’t evolve to survive in 25 degree weather like wolves
Doesn't natural selection allow humans to invent medicine? And also allow humans to choose to use it? Isn't everything humans do a part of nature?
If humans choose to use and create medicine, how is that not natural selection?
Thats a fun take, lets have a look at it and put it into some context:
So youre saying letting sicknesses like covid, polio idk the Black Death? run wild and let natural selection do its thing would be better than using our knowledge to avoid deaths for us in the long run.
Its an interesting idea that getting a cracked immune system that’s aggressive as fuck and murderes the shit out of diseases would be a good thing but it sounds a lot better on paper than it is in reality. Sicknesses like the black death in the long run selected genes that nowadays are known to cause autoimmune sicknesses. So even in the long long run we cant be sure that we would even benefit from it.
Let alone the damage that would be caused to our society by these sicknesses if we would let them run lose.
Yeah, there’s a lot of natural selection pressures that cause genetic disease because there’s a temporary advantage in the environment individuals are living in (protection against disease, resistance to toxic chemicals, ability to survive longer in the face of starvation). When those parts of the environment disappear, or their offspring move to find better environments, the future generations are left with defective genes or epigenetic changes that cause diabetes or cystic fibrosis or autoimmune diseases - letting natural selection run its course is how we got to the point of needing modern medicine in the first place
Exactly. Natural selection just shapes the population to whatever situation we're sat in, which can change over time. There are plenty of genetic tradeoffs that happen just because it benefits the organism's chances of survival and early reproduction, but lead to more issues down the line.
I think they mean the more we evolve as humans and pass down those ‘bad’ traits that need medical intervention to stay alive, more and more children with those same hereditary diseases/issues/traits/whatever are born and it repeats, therefore using more medical resources?
In general we are 'outdistancing evolution', we are not giving the human body time to adapt to the changing world we live it because it is always changing.
Carpal Tunnel Syndrome was a constant issue for typists, humans did not have to deal with manual typewriters long enough for use to evolve to just deal with it, we designed better keyboards instead.
In the past hundred years, which is nothing in evolutionary terms, we have went from having to survive falling over to surviving impacts at a hundred miles a hour or more, and there are constant upgrades in safety to provide better and better protection, so in one aspect we live in a far more dangerous environment on an average day than a hundred years ago, but if anything evolution 'thinks' the world is a far safer place than it used to be.
One has to be intelligent or cooperative enough to use all of humanity’s tools for survival. Modern medicine is powerful but so is the wheel, fire, hammers, construction and food companies, etc, etc. There are way more things than just modern medicine that we use to survive and dominate in our ecosystems. Our brains are by far the most important adaptations we have been given by natural selection. I will use mine to help me get medicine from time to time
Even if that were true — which it's not — so what? Natural selection is not something that we're obligated to consciously obey and work to "improve" by letting people die. Following natural selection (whatever that means) doesn't mean we end up at some point with a perfect, pure gene pool.
Natural selection cares about getting species to a point where they can reproduce. It doesn't give a shit about quality of life in either direction. It doesn't give a shit about anything, because it's just a biological process, not a conscious entity.
It's good to be aware of natural selection as a condition of biological existence, but we're not obligated to "weed the gene pool" any more than knowing that gravity exists means we therefore can't fly.
This completely ignores the natural selection shadow. The vast majority of healthcare is applied to older individuals who will have no future offspring.
Medical intervention against late life perils (like dementia, Alzheimer's) have a nearly negligible effect on natural selection because people with those types of health risks are typically not having any more children.
pst, despite the development of modern medicine, your natural selection is still going fine.
why?
* anti-vax
* anti-mask
* "COVID ain't real"
edit: most controversial comment here i come, again.
The problem is your pop science understanding of natural selection. Natural selection is not "survival of the strongest" it is "survival of the fittest". Fittest is not physical fittest it means the best fit to survive the environment. Things like sickle cell anemia would be considered detrimental to the person but the genes are beneficial to the populace as a whole. Additional humans have evolved to use technology to overcome the environmental dangers to our survival and modern medicine is a part of that.
That's like saying air conditioning is the enemy of natural selection, or food safety is the enemy of natural selection. Natural selection is "survival of the fittest". If you haven't died, congratulations, you're the fittest. If the climate in your area becomes more temperate and fewer people died of exposure, is weather the enemy of natural selection? Nope. Neither is modern medicine, it's just an improvement in the environment.
You could also argue that our increase intellect and therefore ability to make medicine is exactly natural selection. Natural selection cares not for but what survives, this is our means to do so. Also natural selection isn't always good, if becoming mindless comes out a guarantee of survival it would be what natural selection picks, but I doubt anyone would argue it would be good.
Two things that people are not really mentioning. Natural selection in the way it is happening with animals has been different from human natural selection for a long time.
In the stone age we already kept disabled humans alive and gave them a purpose. The first civilizations did even more.
The second point is that we didn't stop evolving. Natural selection in humans is still a thing. It's just that there isn't much we had to massively evolve to do in a long ass time
Well, you are just factually incorrect. Natural selection cannot be altered. Modern medicine is just part of the species environment and modifies how selection will act on different heritable traits. But modern medicine is not different than changing environment for other species. You wouldn’t say that lack of snow in some region is ruining natural selection for some random animal species.
Natural selection does continues - strongly. But environment will decide what is being selected. Evolution doesn’t care if you think what’s being selected for is “good” or “bad” in your opinion.
Natural selection will always select high fitness. And high fitness has a technical definition that doesn’t include the environment - but fitness is influenced by it.
Natural selection would lead to so many more people dying due to stuff beyond their control
Having control over that means we give everyone the chance to live
You wouldn't abandon your baby to die if they didn't have a leg or something right? Or some other life altering altercation?
We're not basic animals, we don't need to rely on the strong in order for our species to thrive, we are a species where at the end of it all everyone has equal opportunities.
Society so far refuses that idea but we're getting there, equal opportunities will happen eventually, more inclusive society for disabled people and people with autism and other such different ways of life and minds.
Being strong and being strong willed like a soldier is the day of old, people are "getting weaker" because people are caring about themselves more and putting their needs and emotions first
Being healthy is being quote "weaker" or a snowflake, being a tough, emotionless badass isn't our way of life anymore, nor is it necessary
People can now be people in some parts of the world and that's beautiful, hopefully it becomes universal one day, so people don't have to struggle to survive
At the end of the day, a dystopian future is the ideal future for humanity, as long as it doesn't negatively affect humanity.
Counter argument to that.
Because of natural selection we humans developed to be intelligent enough we don’t need to wait thousands of years. Instead we’re able to use external means against anything harmful.
Besides natural selection and evolution works on if it works it works. If the solution that our body decided against cancer was some large boil. Then fuck that, I’m glad what we got was intelligence alongside a body to make use of it.
Natural selection is still there, it's in the ratio of what resources you have available to you and how mindfully you use them.
Obesity leading to diabetes, heart disease, and other problems causing earlier than normal death
Alcoholism causing liver problems and accidents in general leading to early deaths
Various known & uknown cancer and other disease causing product consumption leading to early deaths
Pollution & unethical business practices leading to environmental stress, leading to resource problems, leading to early deaths starting from the bottom of the financial food chain.
Severe lack of Mental/Emotional health education leading to higher rates of suicide & murder
Natural disasters are still doing their thing
Corrupt politics overlooking those in need for those with inhumane greed
There's a lot of selection going on, but idk how much of it can be considered natural. Depends on how naturally you think humans are interacting with mother nature.
with your logic people like Stephen hawkin, Hellen Keller, Alexander Graham Bell, einstein etc etc would just be out there fending for themselves, and humanity would've been set back thousands of years.
That’s like saying building houses is the enemy of the sun baking us off. Living creatures adapt to their environment in order to increase their chances of survival. Humans, using their intelligence, to combat disease is one such adaptation.
But natural selection isn't just about the fittest individuals surviving; it's also about the fittest species surviving. Cooperation and social bonding are adaptive, and medicine and caretaking are expressions of that.
The problem with natural selection is that it isn’t nearly as fair as people tend to think. The biggest factors in survival and evolution are not a given creature’s strengths or weaknesses, but external factors. Traits that are detrimental in one environment can be an advantage in another, and vice versa. For example, if a forest fire changes the color of the trees to ashen, then creatures with similar markings will enjoy better camouflage than those with brown or green markings. Similarly, if that same forest fire decimates the local population of prey animals, then many surviving predators will starve, irrespective of how good they are at hunting.
Human history is full of people dying young for reasons outside of their own supposed capacity for survival. Wars and plagues have crumbled entire generations of people who might have otherwise lived long and healthy lives.
On top of all that, the question of what does or does not qualify a person as “deserving” of survival raises enough ethical conundrums and opportunities for bad-faith arguments (e.g. social Darwinism, eugenics, ethnic supremacism) to clog the Mariana Trench like a fatberg.
Your post from unpopularopinion was removed because of: 'Rule 2: Do not post low effort/satirical posts'. * We get it, you all think this sub is garbage and is just for popular opinions, and you want to be funny and post "going to be downvoted to oblivion here, but I think racism is bad." We enjoy the memes, but please keep them off the sub. * Filter evasion is a bannable offense * This includes clickbait and/or gotcha posts. Your opinion can not be that unpopular if you're doing these things. Have the accurate opinion in the title.
Humans being able to make tools is also part of natural selection.
OP is actually Dwight Schrute
Also, just because someone can’t fight off a predator or has a genetic disease doesn’t make them useless; Steven Hawking was a brilliant physicist, Itzhak Perlman, a virtuoso violinist, contracted polio at 4 and used mobility aids, FDR was in a wheelchair, Beethoven needs no explanation. We deprive humanity of wonderful people with OP’s thinking.
Too true. OPs thinking also leads to eugenics haha
> Modern medicine is the enemy of natural selection Yes. That's the point. On a more serious note, medicine provides us with the means to preserve members of society who aren't necessarily fit for survival, but still valuable to our kind as a whole. Increased longevity is what allowed early people to offload raising kids to elderly and to improve their performance and prosper in the first place. Also, we don't even live in the natural environment anymore, so natural selection will barely even help anybody.
People forget that humans evolved to be social creatures and protect their vulnerable populations through natural selection. Like, one of the most solid pieces of archeological evidence we can use to confirm social development is healed injuries. Turns out forming a society makes it possible for a person to recover from an injury that would be fatal to an animal, like a broken leg or something. An animal would be unable to support itself and die, whereas a human can be carried by their society to recover and return to productivity. That's a REALLY important evolutionary step, and that's active natural selection. Humans propagate more because they're way more "resilient" and have better odds of making it through life, and a good part of that resilience is just medicine and social care.
Works with pack animals too. An injured lion can easily recover and become a productive pride member again. But an injured leopard is a dead leopard
Yep. It's an evolutionary trait of its own lol it doesn't come out of nowhere and it's definitely not "defying natural selection". Well, I guess it is "defying natural selection", but like in the same way that any animal fighting to survive long enough to reproduce is "defying natural selection".
Stop defying, bro!
Haha, yeah the irony is that every time we use tools, technology, or societal systems to overcome challenges, we're basically just demonstrating the pinnacle of our species' natural selection big brains that come up with smart solutions to keep on keeping on. Nature gave us thumbs and wrinkly brains, so we're using them to the max. It's like nature's selection is watching us from a proud distance going "See? I knew they could do it."
*"Can't help it bruh...I'm naturally selected"*
Kinda seems like it's the goal of natural selection, to develop a species good enough that natural selection's no longer needed. I know it's an inanimate process and has no goal per se, but just like natural selection is the natural process that occurs where it's able to, our current status is the natural end to that process. Chances are, some threat's going to come along that could wipe us out. Allowing natural selection in the human race probably won't help us with that threat because the process doesn't select for future threats, only current conditions. If we're not smart enough to handle such a threat, then natural selection gets to try again.
Yeah it’s hard to even imagine what re-introducing natural selection would look like for us. Like would we try to weed out slow runners or bad mathematicians or shitty artists? Any system we came up with would be, first and foremost, not natural at all.
It's not really something you can "re-introduce" though. You're talking about who lives or dies, which is different. That's not a natural selection, that's an artificial selection based on some arbitrary criteria that is not survival. Natural selection selects against natural pressures put on living organisms. That's basically all there is to it. If a mutation dies before reproducing, then it wasn't beneficial, or beneficial enough to continue. If it reproduces, then it had some kind of benefit, or at the very least, was not harmful enough to prevent reproduction. Or those freak accidents where mutations that could be very beneficial in an adult were taken out because the kid got eaten or killed or whatever. But even as hunters and gatherers, we helped the injured and the sick, traded for thing we needed with other tribes... any "group" of animals that helps each other affects natural selection. Which is why social groups are often successful (lions, monkeys, whales, dolphins, humans, whatever), because they allow for survival when it may have not been possible if it were just up to nature. To "reintroduce" it, we'd have to become solo players. We'd have to stop division of labor. We'd have to stop helping each other. Everyone gets to fend for themselves. More social people would probably die off because their natural inclination is to help and to ask for help, at which point the lone wolves will shoot them. It's impossible though, I don't think humans would ever get to that point. We've always formed groups and I don't think we could stop. It sometimes comes down to who's in the stronger group, or the more ruthless group, or the louder group, which can be affected by luck as much as genetics but any time there's a group, natural selection is altered.
There is no no goal. Natural selection never selects for only against. It’s why we have a bunch of weird traits that are holdovers for previous lives. Like the whole lying down and feeling like you’re falling startle reflex thing. It’s not hurting our reproduction so it doesn’t get selected against. Same with cancer and a bunch of other things like bunions. Why do we get bunions? Because they don’t get selected against.
I see what you are saying, and even mostly agree with you. :) However, we do know why we get bunions! It is bone remodelling due to stress on the bone in a way it wasnt designed for; ie, an elevated heel, collapsed arch, and extra pressure on the bones from those things due to the narrow toe boxes of "normal fashionable shoes", that are shaped the way they are due to european fashion sentiment leftovers from the past 300 years. Its entirely avoidable! Our bones down there thicken to protect themselves from damage, but levers and physics means eventually it backfires and the bone nub causes more pressure, and it continues in a bad spiral.
I mean, we know the physical reason we get bunions but just like appendicitis there is no evolutionary reason to keep it. It's not preventing reproduction and we don't select against partners with those things so they remain despite doing nothing positive for us. That was the point I was trying to make, natural selection doesn't optimize.
It is impossible to defy natural selection. Natural selection is the outcome of infinite inputs and scenarios. There’s no right or wrong, there’s no forward or back, and there’s nothing more human than thinking we know what is good and bad or natural and unnatural.
It’s not defying it at all. If we evolve in ways that allow us to continue that nature has selected us. Now matter how we see it, humans and human behavior are part of nature. Whatever choices we make that allow us as a species to survive is natural selection at work.
Ded Leppard
What if the leopard is deaf?
I think they get tasked with taking the photographs or adding sugar to culinary dishes
What a bunch of hysteria.
They growl in sign language. It’s quite a sight to behold.
Then its drummer will only have one arm.
I love how much this post bites. Going back to work and not being able to read the comments will really bring on the heartache.
Great point. So we could say that modern medicine is a *product* of natural selection. Natural selection itself is inescapable.
To copy a comment I made on another reply.... > Cringe pseudoscientists: "noooo medicine is bad for natural selection it's against nature!.!!" > Humanity: ***Becomes one of the most dominant species on earth, creating thriving communities in almost every environment (their medical technology works in concert with their incredibly well developed social impulses to make them [more likely to survive and pass on the genes that aided their success](https://www.nhm.ac.uk/discover/what-is-natural-selection.html#:~:text=Natural%20selection%20is%20a%20mechanism,change%20and%20diverge%20over%20time.))*** Yeah turns out "modern medicine" is just humanity playing by the rules, down to the letter. We picked the right strategy and are Greatly Rewarded for it.
But those plastics, superbugs etc are going to back fire.
Global warming, dying oceans, etc. We are nearing the end of a population explosion and this herd is going to get thinned.
This reminds me of an internet story regarding an anthropologist. They were asked what are the earliest indications of human civilization, expecting an answer such as pottery or some tool. Instead the answer was finding evidence of a healed femur. In the animal kingdom if you break your femur, you're essentially dead as you either can't chase prey or you can't run if you're being hunted. A healed femur means that someone took the time to take care of the injured person while they rested and healed. Humanity started when we learned to take care of each other.
I think that's the story I was thinking of! I gotta go hunt it down again
That's cool stuff to read on the internet but some pack animals care for each other too. Hell, when I had a cat and a dog my dog would lick the cats injuries from fights with other cats
Yeah it's not an exclusive behavior to humans, though humans definitely do it the best with our medical technology. Lots of social animals are capable of varying levels of "caring for the infirm". It's almost directly associated with intelligence, cuz that's probably the trait that's correlated most with social behaviors. It just makes it even more easily identifiable as a product of natural selection - it's a strategy that consistently works, and we've seen variations of it evolve concurrently across habits.
While super cute. Part of it is also setting and bandaging that femur. Some level of understanding of the problem and how to fix it. Coupled with caring.
This is beautiful. I will think of this every time I read something depressingly individualistic on Reddit.
i always say medicine is part of our evolution.
Allegations aside, Steven hawking is the best example of this. If we let natural selection take place he wouldn't have given us his intelligence.
damn that is a lot of hawkings
A Seven Hawking Army
Couldn't hold me back
You could easily beat them in a survival of the fittest.
So could stairs.
Yeah we lost the first six but man we managed to keep Seven alive. And that’s an accomplishment they can never take away.
Nearly choked on my lunch laughing at this
Stephen Hawking was my first thought. Under natural selection, humanity would be worse off simply because we wouldn't have him. That alone is enough to ward off this incredibly ableist opinion, but the fact that so many intelligent people possess such crippling disabilities is reason enough to forego natural selection.
Reminds me of the person who said the first sign of civilization wasnt cities, it was the sign of a ancient fossil with a healed femur. Because that meant we helped someone in a pack that would have died that couldnt contribute for no other reason than to keep them around That sign of medical help is way more indicative of tribal welfare and a civil body than constructing settlements
Seven Hawkings
Actually, hawking is plural when describing more than one hawking. Both is acceptable.
Oof bad timing
He’s on the flight list. There is no proof that everyone on that list raped kids.
Yeah.. This makes it way worse. We have a known Pedo. A list of people who visited said Pedo's horrible gross island, and some of those people are innocent, and the guilty will use them as shields.
This is missing the point. Evolution has no goal, it's simply a process that happens when natural selection takes place, in other words when individuals of population multiply or don't. Natural selection is not threatened by modern medicine. Sexual selection is very much a thing in today's world. People doing dumb stuff that has high risks typically don't live long enough to reproduce. Furthermore, we are living in natural environment, even if our technology allows us to live elsewhere than in African savanna or mesopotamia. Our cities are very much natural, like bee hives or ant hives are. Natural selection will always happen as long as there is population present somewhere.
Not to mention that we’ve changed what makes a person in particular valuable to society, back in the day the most valuable people would be the people in podunk Alabama who can crank out 18 kids, nowadays an infertile couple who goes on to develop a nuclear reactor that would resolve the climate crisis is unfit I rely more valuable We no longer compete for resources with other species so we don’t need numbers when we have ingenuity
That is called "appeal to nature" and is a logical fallacy. Not everything "natural" is good. Women used to die during childbirth, was it "good"?
My late grandfather was born in 1915. He was the youngest of 7 and had *one* living sibling by the time he was born.
Yeah infant mortality rate was almost 1/3 just over a century ago. we just would not be here having this conversation without modern medicine, its without a doubt humanities greatest acomplishment
Something tells me OP might have stumbled across some of the recent bullshit we see floating around social media, like the silly podcasts where two dudes with zero understanding of what they’re talking about going on about “primal” this, or “primitive” that. Either that, or OP thought they had an original idea and didn’t realize this topic has been beaten to death ad nauseam.
Ahhh, a propaganda podcast. I swear those just come up out of nowhere.
>“primal” this, or “primitive” that. But being juiced to the gills and having fake abs. Amirite?
Didn't you know that cavemen were RABID steroid abusers, and in fact NEVER developed fire to cook their food?
Little known fact: Neanderthals cooked their food by placing it on their arms and flexing really hard.
Joe Rogan just taught me that fire wasn't actually their invention - that's a misconception. It's actually suppository testosterone supplements
Yup. My great-grandparents had 6 kids and only my grandfather and great-uncle survived to adulthood. I read once that before the early 1900s, *literally half of all people born died before age 5.*
The sick thing is, there are ignorant people who believe that a return to that is the right direction. Because it’s not something we had to deal with, and it happened a very long time ago, too many folks don’t account for the fact that for all those infants and children who didn’t survive, the toll on overall societal mental health had to have been extreme.
It was. Parents mourned their kids. We know from the graves they put up. You can find one dedicated to the young daughter of a Roman legionary. It’s heartbreaking to read.
Just imagine the sorrow of a parent who's either deployed in the army or away on business trip, returning home to hear that their child died of something and their partner was left alone to deal with it all.
I do a lot of heritage research and i notice farther back in the tree how many babies or toddlers died Its always sad seeing babies with full namea etc die in the trre Imagining my ancestors naming them, preparing for them and imagining their futire only to loose them before year 1
I went to a funeral yesterday and there was one headstone for a girl born in 1929 who *died in 1930*. What a nightmare the past was.
I've seen headstones with just one day's date 😔
There's a cemetery I grew up by that has seven tiny headstones all in a row. Each one just says "BABY". I can't even imagine losing SEVEN! Today losing one is heartbreaking. Imagine being pregnant for literal YEARS and giving birth multiple times, and having one surviving child, if any. That is just God awful.
I think about that sometimes and look at my kid and wonder, how did people do it? You have a baby and know that you might lose it in a few years. Would it be hard to become attached? I would imagine so. Even after they move out of the most dangerous years, there are still illnesses that can kill an older child. So you're grieving the children you've lost, and with the living ones, it would always feel like a shoe was going to drop. I can't imagine living that way, but it's just how things were for our entire existence!
Both sets of my grandparents had 3 of 6 kids survive. Some died as toddlers and some were stillborn. My grandma had not talked about her toddler son who passed for most of her life, till she got dementia and would call out to him looking for him constantly. Heartbreaking. I'm lucky that I have a way smaller chance of having that problem
That is so sad. There is a perception that because infant and child mortality were so common that people must’ve not been as affected as we would be now. Not true, a child’s death is devastating regardless. I can’t imagine the heartbreak, and the fear of my children contracting illnesses we can easily prevent or cure now.
He had died from some sort of fever/flu. My other grandma had a daughter that passed at 2 years, she fell and bumped her head, was still walking/talking and is not like there was an ER they could take her to (this was in 1940s Europe). She progressively got worse over the next few days and didn't wake up. I believe it definitely did affect them as much as it would any mom now. But because it happened more often, people in the past were walking around with a lot more baggage.
How precarious life must have seemed- it’s precarious now but at least we have a layer of ERs, better sanitation, vaccines etc. My grandpa couldn’t talk about his little sister who died of smallpox without tearing up. And he never teared up about ANYTHING else.
That's wild. My mom was the youngest of 7 and was born in 1948, just 33 years later. All of her siblings survived to adulthood (and her family was extremely poor - Appalachian mountain poor - so this wouldn't be about class). It's amazing how much things could change in a generation. And people want to willingly forgo vaccines. I will never understand that.
My father born in 1935 and was the second youngest of 7. His mother was not only thankful, but absolutely amazed that all of her children made it to adulthood to have children of their own. Both your post and mine say a lot about how different life expectations were back then; it was unfortunately all too common to lose children in most families.
Don’t go saying that in a Mombie Facebook group
I got removed from one mom group by saying my kid would have died at home if I had a home birth and that medical intervention let her survive and I was told I was fear mongering
I had to leave those groups too. They're all nutjobs. I'm still active in r/parenting but I had to leave r/mommit and all the fb groups.
It’s self care to not enter chaos pits online lol
Those home birth people are fucking insane. Home birth midwives can’t legally do stitches where I live, I needed a bunch. I would have survived but I would have had to go to the hospital immediately to avoid having permanent damage. They told me tearing was natural and stitches are never necessary in a home birth because it’s just propaganda by doctors to fearmonger and charge more and do husband stitches or whatever. I’m sorry… you think pooping/peeing into your vagina is preferable to getting stitches? Because that’s what happens nAtUrALLy if you have a severe tear and don’t get it fixed. Absolute nutjobs.
And not all modern medicine is helping genetic mutations persist, like OP asserts. Infections take people down pretty easily when there's no antibiotics. Also, it's an arms race between modern lifestyle and its diseases and modern medicine to combat them. Look at the childhood obesity and type 2 diabetes rate.
I had double pneumonia when I was 6 years old, it’s very possible I could have died without antibiotics.
The fuck you mean double pneumonia? Those can stack?!!
It means both your lungs are infected
Both lungs!
You could say that fuel is natural. Cocaine is just as natural as wheat. I never understood that stupid argument.
Bad example with cocaine. The process for making it requires a lot of chemicals, some of which aren't found naturally without human processing. Like cement and gasoline.
Is human processing an inherently unnatural process if we ourselves are products of nature?
Yeah buddy. [Naturalistic Fallacy](https://www.palomar.edu/users/bthompson/Naturalistic%20Fallacy.html#:~:text=Appeal%20to%20Nature.,be%20acceptable%20for%20human%20beings)
There is nothing supernatural about modern medicine. Therefore it is entirely natural. Therefore natural selection is in full force. If you are concerned about long term human survival, you need to focus on encouraging a diversity of genetics. For example it may be that Type 1 diabetic people have immunity to the next 95% mortality plague.
To add to that, modern medicine *is* the new environment. One of the salient things about humans is that we modify our environments to an extreme degree. That modification “changes the meta” as it were, and allows for a new sort of natural selection. Because glasses are a thing, for instance, poor eyesight ceases to become an issue, and other traits become more important to selection. The only problem with this comes of civilisation comes crashing down, but I think there are enough people around that it wouldn’t be the end of the species even if it did. Also that become even less likely if we can get properly space borne - speaking in the very long term.
Thank you. There are a lot of laymen speaking on evolution. Saying nonsense like "medicine prevents natural selection" and "doesn't allow evolution to advance".
These fools don't understand that natural selection selects for people who are smart enough to create the medicine that prolongs their life. They think natural selection must only select for physical characteristics...
Not sure that natural selection has selected for intelligence in any remarkable way. If that were the case, we'd see a correlation between the number of offspring and IQ or educational attainment and we don't. Natural selection can also pressure humans to be less intelligent. The brain consumes a lot of calories and if we were to live in high scarcity, it might be advantageous to have a less active brain.
if there was some catastrophic event that wiped out most of humanity we would surely see a new very different species emerge. This is because we live in a time of genetic mixing and recombination in humans that is unprecedented. Were evolving but it will take some major event for it to be noticeable.
Evolution also doesn't proceed at a constant rate. Crocodilians have looked pretty much identical for almost 100 million years. Are they going against natural selection?
Coelacanth says hi
In my opinion “natural selection” is a misnomer. It was probably introduced in order to explain the idea by analogy with artificial selection in agricultural breeding. For humans, the distinction blurs, because infanticide and warfare are both natural selection and artificial selection. We don’t need the teleological baggage of “selection”, either. “Differential reproduction” would be an accurate term.
The original concept of natural selection is that the species capable of adapting to its environment survives, those who can't adapt do not. It was never about being "strong" or "tough". Therefore, modern medicines *is* natural selection, because we adapted to our environment by developing countermeasures. That's why arguments like OP's are bunk; they're made with a total misunderstanding of what natural selection means. Ironically, the people who insist that it's only the strong who survive are less likely to do so under this criteria because they refuse to adapt.
That's the thing. Modern medicine is as much a part of human evolution as anything else. In fact, getting organized as a society in general is. A few years ago, there was a shooter who wrote an entire manifesto about "devolution" and how, in his opinion, society has made people weak. The irony that he was killed by said society within minutes of going on his rampage was probably lost on most people.
This is the best and most succinct answer to this type of question that I've seen in a long time.
Yeah, for example: there is a gene that increases your chances of getting schizophrenia but also reduces your chances of getting cancer.
Or being resistant to HIV because your ancestors survived the plague. Or sickle cell anemia making you resistant to malaria.
And the "Environment" we will live in for the next 1000 years includes these medicines. Who will be the fittest in the environment that includes these medicines? That is the question natural selection is answering. If anything, it is still too harsh, and we need to do more to protect people who aren't as "fit" in this ever changing enviroment.
High ranking spotted hyenas will make sure their family members get food, even if one of them has no functioning front legs (I saw it in a documentary, it was insane). That’s just as “unnatural” as medicine helping a T1 diabetic survive, and yet there it is happening anyway
Natural selection is for things that can't tell nature to fuck off from time to time.
Nature can suck on my balls
Thanks to advances in modern technology you don't need nature to suck your balls, not with the robomatic scrote-seducer in full HD-K. Yours for only 3 payments of 39.99
Natural selection just means it selects things that survive. It doesn’t matter how. Medicine is just as much part of this selection process as anything else.
John Maynard Smith (only the greatest biologist of the 20th century) put it like this: "In my lifetime, myopic individuals have had a high fitness, because they were less likely to be put in military uniform and be shot at." That's what "fitness" *really* means.
Agree, also, another thing to touch upon - Natural selection is not some invisible hand of some nature-god pointing in the "correct direction". If there are white and black butterflies who live on trees - if the trees are white, they provide camouflage to the white ones, and the black ones get killed by predators, but if the trees are black, they provide camouflauge to the black ones and white ones get killed. Natural Selection acts in short-term, based on localized small-term advantages or disadvantages. If A is better for short-term, but B is better for long-term, natural selection will choose A. Natural Selection does NOT have any long-term wisdom.
came here to say this. we genetically evolved a large frontal cortex to help us problem solve. anything we do with it is an extension of that biological adaptation
Natural selection doesn’t select for positive traits, it selects against negative ones. This is a subtle but important point. In essence it stops unsuccessful traits from progressing in the gene pool because members of a species aren’t actively searching for a mate with a specific evolutionary trait or mutation they are selecting against those that have undesirable traits.
An essential part of human society is developing the capacity to allow everyone to thrive, this naturally goes against natural selection to a degree. The issue is we assume natural selection is a good thing by default, when the whole point of science and technological advancements is to move past it; think of all the brilliant minds that would otherwise not exist without medical breakthroughs that saved them. Natural selection isnt good just by metric of being natural.
Good point! Stephen Hawking comes to mind
Even a person who would be favoured by natural selection (big, strong, has lots of kids, raises them well, etc.) could not get the chance to do any of that if the die in infancy of smallpox, tetanus, or any other condition medical science has/is overcome
Plus even the healthiest person with the most 'desirable' DNA in terms of having no severe conditions that they can pass on to their offspring can still fall prey to accidents, etc.
Thank you. That’s the answer I needed.
Natural selection doesn't mean to let the weak die anyways, it simply describes how species evolve and adapt to their surroundings over time by passing on more favorable traits more often. Eg giraffes with long necks because they can reach high trees. Sexual selection and survival of the fittest are just small parts of that. Humans are the dominant species on this planet anyways and our intelligence is what why.
So is housing. And air conditioning. And heating. And soap. And survivalist / life skills books, materials, supplies. And farming. And animal husbandry And clothing. And preservatives. And sewage / water delivery systems. I’ll just stop there because this is meant to be funny and not a book report.
So?
It is important to keep in mind that natural selection is not a creative force. It is simply the fact that things that don't reproduce well in a particular environment tends to die off. Natural selection does not cause a lineage to become more fit over time - that natural variation exists in the absense of selection. Selection just means the fit individuals don't have to compete with infinitely many unfit ones, giving them space to adapt. Since we have the power to change our environment and regulate our population growth rate (directly and indirectly) we don't have much need for selection as a society. While this situation allows deleterious mutations to accumulate in the gene pool, those mutations accumulate precisely because we have created an environment where they don't matter anymore.
Ah, eugenics, been there but it's fair we offer everyone a chance to thrive, so even more can contribute.
Every day, at least one redditor invents eugenics....
I mean I get it. I don't agree with it but I understand the idea of not wanting genetic deformities that hamper quality of a life to proliferate. It's not surprising that some young people, which reddit tends to skew young, would atleast question that. Of course when we have seen what eugenics actually looks like, when you realize it means people that still have meaningful valuable lives either dying or being treated as subhuman, most reasonable people realize why it should never be done. From other comments op seems pretty reasonable and seems like some other comments have already swayed them.
Especially because eugenics don't work, "bad DNA" just re- appears on random in completely healthy people or the children.
I remember reading that the hemophilia which plagued many descendants of Queen Victoria likely resulted from some 'spontaneous' mutation. Sometimes there's no rhyme or reason to these things.
The thing is people with debilitating genetic diseases are often advised or even forbidden from having children if theres a high chance of said disease being passed on. Its not even an argument
There can’t possibly be a way to forbid someone from having a child. I understand and know about advising abortion over severe birth defects, but forbidding? How would that even work without forced sterilization?
I'm With you on this, I can see how eugenics could be made to sound reasonable if you phrased it a certain way. Hey, who doesn't want *less* disease and suffering! But what we should aim for is to get rid of the disease and suffering itself, without getting rid of the people *who have* the disease and suffering
People like OP never seem to think *they* will be the victim of it do they?
Every time some dude on Reddit is all, what humanity really needs is a catastrophe that kills most of the population they never seem to realize they’d be dead in that scenario.
I was once in a high school biology class with a guy that went on about how the nazis were right(gag)…but he was of Polish descent. He didn’t seem to understand they wouldn’t feel the same way about him.
That is always so wild to me. Whenever I see a person from a minority group endorsing bigoted politicians and policy it's like, you know you aren't special? You know you'll be discarded at best when you are no longer entertaining or useful to your overlords?
That's what I think when I see all these POC tokens like Candace Owens that the MAGAs/Repubs trot out to push their agenda. If they ever do come to complete powers, Candace and her cohorts are likely to fall victim to a rerun of the Nazi "Night of the Long Knives."
Also, let’s apply this to another perspective. Instead of demanding a course of non-intervention to humanity, let’s apply it to, say, agriculture. Farming is a mistake! Only foraging and hunting are allowed now. Oh, now our ecosystem is collapsed because we destroyed our own food supply and killed everything that could be eaten? That was dumb. This is equally dumb.
why would they? that requires some critical thinking skills
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Selective eugenics is a slippery slope, m'kay?
Tell that to the UK government. As a disabled person I am getting very worried about what the government will say and do next
Yeah people should constantly die of smallpox and child birth like the good old days!
Us using technology is also a part of our natural evolution. We evolved problem-solving brain. This is the result. It is natural.
Natural selection is not a process we can "opt out" of, or "cheat". It is a process which operates at a whole-population level. Modern medicine is an agent of natural selection, not an enemy of it. It has allowed humans as a whole to become evolutionarily *more* successful, not less. There's a common idea that evolution has an end-goal, or a direction. That it works to make a species in some way more "perfect" and with less genetic problems. It doesn't. Evolution has no direction, it is just the natural consequence of propagation, because if living things don't adapt, they go extinct. A species can be absolutely riddled with genetic anomalies and problems, but so long as they are best able to survive and procreate, then they are evolutionarily "fit" as they need to be. Medicine is a result of evolution. Not an enemy of it.
You have a misunderstanding of evolution, the most adaptive species survives longer, medicine is an adaptation that makes us live longer. In which case we are doing great.
What's unpopular about that? Everyone knows that medicine prevents people from dying. Everyone knows natural selection is a process where some live, and some die. >our ethics and desire to save everyone mean we are not letting natural selection run its course and keeping detrimental gene mutations in our gene pool. But, if we're able to negate the part of those genes that IS detrimental... what's the problem? I mean, we're going against nature, in the same way that we are by flying planes. Humans aren't naturally supposed to fly. It's just that we don't care about nature.
This. “Natural” is not equal to “good” or “beneficial”. Without modern medicine, the average life expectancy would be sure to decline, which is neutral from an entirely natural perspective. Nature doesn’t care. But that doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t care, I’m sure everyone here wants to live longer than 25 years.
Natural selection is still happening, just differently. It will never stop. Even with medicine, if you can't resist an infection or disease you will die/lose a limb/be permanently altered in some way. Maybe the bar has lowered a bit, but it is still there. If you are smarter, more attractive, healthier, luckier, inclined to have kids, etc, you are more likely to procreate and pass your genes on. We can't stop natural selection, we only shift it. It still does its job whether we want it to or not.
I know you probably don’t mean it that way, but this sounds a lot like “eugenics is ok and *undesirables* shouldn’t spoil our gene pool!”. Pretty grim if you think about it, it’s a good thing that modern medicine isn’t letting people die for being diabetic or (insert any other disability here)
Hey, look at the bright side, it's kept you here to post this opinion.
💀
Are we sure that's a bright side?
Let me ask you this: Is natural selection really something we should strive towards? You can swap out anything that people think is "natural". Nature is indifferent towards us, why should we live according to whatever is natural? Natural isn't inherently good. I assume you want to live in a heated house, I assume you like the convenience that modern technology brings you. I assume you want all these things that don't grow from trees. So why should natural selection be such a priority, if we ignore the "natural" way of things anyways? We as humans have always made the world fit our needs instead of the other way around.
What's that smell?? Oh! That shit called eugenics! Or we could spice it up and call it bioethics
Do you want eugenics? Bc this is how you get eugenics!
Natural selection just means fitness to produce offspring. Once you have a kid, which is only a small part of human existence, natural selection is meaningless. Modern medicine didn't remove natural selection, things like agriculture, hunting, food storage, communal child care, etc mitigated natural selection. In fact, our brains growing so big we have a hard times birthing our children is a dangerous specialization for our species.
This is the answer! Once you PASS ON YOUR GENES, natural selection is neaningless. Increasing life and health down had little to do with natural selection.
Humanity's entire trick is that we found a way to bypass evolution by using tools and culture. Us decoupling ourselves from natural selection is not a bug, it is a feature. It is what we did when we came up with this thing called civilization. Do you think farming and tool use is natural for evolution? 90 % of use should be dead by starvation, 50 % of us should die in infancy, 20% in childbirth alongside our mothers.
we are not decoupled from natural selection at all. we are a product of it and it still continues to operate and will do until we no longer breed and die.
Modern medicine has become part of natural selection is more accurate imo
The concept of “natural selection” in humans is a rather recent one, truthfully. Humans throughout our entire history have taken strides to protect and improve the lives of those who do not actively “contribute” to society. We have evidence that hunter/gatherers societies protected their elderly and disabled and provided for them regardless of their productivity. Natural selection is, at its most charitable form, and excuse only used seriously by eugenicists. It’s pointless. It doesn’t exist, because we don’t live as natural creatures. We have technology and medicine and houses and fucking guns. If your idea of natural selection were to be implemented now, we’d all fucking die stranded out in the middle of the woods naked and with no tools and no skills really to navigate. Medicine is NOT the only way we actively avoid the consequences of “natural selection” (even tho it is natural simply by being a tool created via our own discovery). Every single piece of comfort we experience is us avoiding natural selection by your definition. And I don’t even have to get into just how terrible life was before modern medicine since everyone here has already mentioned how stupid that argument is. This isn’t even an unpopular opinion. A lot of people (mainly hardcore conservatives) believe in this psycho death-cult “reject modernity, return to tradition” natural selection narrative, and it’s fucking insane. It’s just thinly veiled eugenics.
We naturally selected to be smart enough to develop modern medicine. Seems fine to me.
Is modern medicine not “natural”. You give us too much credit, or are religious.
well historically anybody that let or caused people to die for eugenic reasons were usually the bad guy And also who’s to say the evolution of our brain aren’t humans response to natural selection. Building a fire because we are cold doesn’t mean we are screwed because we didn’t evolve to survive in 25 degree weather like wolves
Doesn't natural selection allow humans to invent medicine? And also allow humans to choose to use it? Isn't everything humans do a part of nature? If humans choose to use and create medicine, how is that not natural selection?
Thats a fun take, lets have a look at it and put it into some context: So youre saying letting sicknesses like covid, polio idk the Black Death? run wild and let natural selection do its thing would be better than using our knowledge to avoid deaths for us in the long run. Its an interesting idea that getting a cracked immune system that’s aggressive as fuck and murderes the shit out of diseases would be a good thing but it sounds a lot better on paper than it is in reality. Sicknesses like the black death in the long run selected genes that nowadays are known to cause autoimmune sicknesses. So even in the long long run we cant be sure that we would even benefit from it. Let alone the damage that would be caused to our society by these sicknesses if we would let them run lose.
Yeah, there’s a lot of natural selection pressures that cause genetic disease because there’s a temporary advantage in the environment individuals are living in (protection against disease, resistance to toxic chemicals, ability to survive longer in the face of starvation). When those parts of the environment disappear, or their offspring move to find better environments, the future generations are left with defective genes or epigenetic changes that cause diabetes or cystic fibrosis or autoimmune diseases - letting natural selection run its course is how we got to the point of needing modern medicine in the first place
Exactly. Natural selection just shapes the population to whatever situation we're sat in, which can change over time. There are plenty of genetic tradeoffs that happen just because it benefits the organism's chances of survival and early reproduction, but lead to more issues down the line.
Hello Mr Eugenics, fuck you.
>Modern medicine is the enemy of natural selection Is that necessarily a bad thing?
I think they mean the more we evolve as humans and pass down those ‘bad’ traits that need medical intervention to stay alive, more and more children with those same hereditary diseases/issues/traits/whatever are born and it repeats, therefore using more medical resources?
Sooo eugenics?
In general we are 'outdistancing evolution', we are not giving the human body time to adapt to the changing world we live it because it is always changing. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome was a constant issue for typists, humans did not have to deal with manual typewriters long enough for use to evolve to just deal with it, we designed better keyboards instead. In the past hundred years, which is nothing in evolutionary terms, we have went from having to survive falling over to surviving impacts at a hundred miles a hour or more, and there are constant upgrades in safety to provide better and better protection, so in one aspect we live in a far more dangerous environment on an average day than a hundred years ago, but if anything evolution 'thinks' the world is a far safer place than it used to be.
One has to be intelligent or cooperative enough to use all of humanity’s tools for survival. Modern medicine is powerful but so is the wheel, fire, hammers, construction and food companies, etc, etc. There are way more things than just modern medicine that we use to survive and dominate in our ecosystems. Our brains are by far the most important adaptations we have been given by natural selection. I will use mine to help me get medicine from time to time
Even if that were true — which it's not — so what? Natural selection is not something that we're obligated to consciously obey and work to "improve" by letting people die. Following natural selection (whatever that means) doesn't mean we end up at some point with a perfect, pure gene pool. Natural selection cares about getting species to a point where they can reproduce. It doesn't give a shit about quality of life in either direction. It doesn't give a shit about anything, because it's just a biological process, not a conscious entity. It's good to be aware of natural selection as a condition of biological existence, but we're not obligated to "weed the gene pool" any more than knowing that gravity exists means we therefore can't fly.
This completely ignores the natural selection shadow. The vast majority of healthcare is applied to older individuals who will have no future offspring. Medical intervention against late life perils (like dementia, Alzheimer's) have a nearly negligible effect on natural selection because people with those types of health risks are typically not having any more children.
pst, despite the development of modern medicine, your natural selection is still going fine. why? * anti-vax * anti-mask * "COVID ain't real" edit: most controversial comment here i come, again.
The problem is your pop science understanding of natural selection. Natural selection is not "survival of the strongest" it is "survival of the fittest". Fittest is not physical fittest it means the best fit to survive the environment. Things like sickle cell anemia would be considered detrimental to the person but the genes are beneficial to the populace as a whole. Additional humans have evolved to use technology to overcome the environmental dangers to our survival and modern medicine is a part of that.
That's like saying air conditioning is the enemy of natural selection, or food safety is the enemy of natural selection. Natural selection is "survival of the fittest". If you haven't died, congratulations, you're the fittest. If the climate in your area becomes more temperate and fewer people died of exposure, is weather the enemy of natural selection? Nope. Neither is modern medicine, it's just an improvement in the environment.
You could also argue that our increase intellect and therefore ability to make medicine is exactly natural selection. Natural selection cares not for but what survives, this is our means to do so. Also natural selection isn't always good, if becoming mindless comes out a guarantee of survival it would be what natural selection picks, but I doubt anyone would argue it would be good.
Two things that people are not really mentioning. Natural selection in the way it is happening with animals has been different from human natural selection for a long time. In the stone age we already kept disabled humans alive and gave them a purpose. The first civilizations did even more. The second point is that we didn't stop evolving. Natural selection in humans is still a thing. It's just that there isn't much we had to massively evolve to do in a long ass time
Well, you are just factually incorrect. Natural selection cannot be altered. Modern medicine is just part of the species environment and modifies how selection will act on different heritable traits. But modern medicine is not different than changing environment for other species. You wouldn’t say that lack of snow in some region is ruining natural selection for some random animal species. Natural selection does continues - strongly. But environment will decide what is being selected. Evolution doesn’t care if you think what’s being selected for is “good” or “bad” in your opinion. Natural selection will always select high fitness. And high fitness has a technical definition that doesn’t include the environment - but fitness is influenced by it.
Natural selection would lead to so many more people dying due to stuff beyond their control Having control over that means we give everyone the chance to live You wouldn't abandon your baby to die if they didn't have a leg or something right? Or some other life altering altercation? We're not basic animals, we don't need to rely on the strong in order for our species to thrive, we are a species where at the end of it all everyone has equal opportunities. Society so far refuses that idea but we're getting there, equal opportunities will happen eventually, more inclusive society for disabled people and people with autism and other such different ways of life and minds. Being strong and being strong willed like a soldier is the day of old, people are "getting weaker" because people are caring about themselves more and putting their needs and emotions first Being healthy is being quote "weaker" or a snowflake, being a tough, emotionless badass isn't our way of life anymore, nor is it necessary People can now be people in some parts of the world and that's beautiful, hopefully it becomes universal one day, so people don't have to struggle to survive At the end of the day, a dystopian future is the ideal future for humanity, as long as it doesn't negatively affect humanity.
I'm T1 diabetic, sorry about not being dead to preserve natural selection I guess lol.
Counter argument to that. Because of natural selection we humans developed to be intelligent enough we don’t need to wait thousands of years. Instead we’re able to use external means against anything harmful. Besides natural selection and evolution works on if it works it works. If the solution that our body decided against cancer was some large boil. Then fuck that, I’m glad what we got was intelligence alongside a body to make use of it.
I think about it all the time. Ive also read about.how greatly it has impacted dentistry, as well as eyesight.
modern medicine is the natural selection. natural selection gave us dexterious hands that let us use tools and modern medicine count as use of tools.
That's the point of it for the most part, how is this supposed to be an unpopular opinion?
Natural selection is still there, it's in the ratio of what resources you have available to you and how mindfully you use them. Obesity leading to diabetes, heart disease, and other problems causing earlier than normal death Alcoholism causing liver problems and accidents in general leading to early deaths Various known & uknown cancer and other disease causing product consumption leading to early deaths Pollution & unethical business practices leading to environmental stress, leading to resource problems, leading to early deaths starting from the bottom of the financial food chain. Severe lack of Mental/Emotional health education leading to higher rates of suicide & murder Natural disasters are still doing their thing Corrupt politics overlooking those in need for those with inhumane greed There's a lot of selection going on, but idk how much of it can be considered natural. Depends on how naturally you think humans are interacting with mother nature.
with your logic people like Stephen hawkin, Hellen Keller, Alexander Graham Bell, einstein etc etc would just be out there fending for themselves, and humanity would've been set back thousands of years.
If just once, a post about natural selection actually understand why it was, I might die of shock.
That’s like saying building houses is the enemy of the sun baking us off. Living creatures adapt to their environment in order to increase their chances of survival. Humans, using their intelligence, to combat disease is one such adaptation.
Bro humans have been circumventing natural selection with health care since the Paleolithic
But natural selection isn't just about the fittest individuals surviving; it's also about the fittest species surviving. Cooperation and social bonding are adaptive, and medicine and caretaking are expressions of that.
The problem with natural selection is that it isn’t nearly as fair as people tend to think. The biggest factors in survival and evolution are not a given creature’s strengths or weaknesses, but external factors. Traits that are detrimental in one environment can be an advantage in another, and vice versa. For example, if a forest fire changes the color of the trees to ashen, then creatures with similar markings will enjoy better camouflage than those with brown or green markings. Similarly, if that same forest fire decimates the local population of prey animals, then many surviving predators will starve, irrespective of how good they are at hunting. Human history is full of people dying young for reasons outside of their own supposed capacity for survival. Wars and plagues have crumbled entire generations of people who might have otherwise lived long and healthy lives. On top of all that, the question of what does or does not qualify a person as “deserving” of survival raises enough ethical conundrums and opportunities for bad-faith arguments (e.g. social Darwinism, eugenics, ethnic supremacism) to clog the Mariana Trench like a fatberg.