theres some truth to this. deaf usually married deaf (but AGBell did NOT want them to marry each other . he wanted them to communicate with hearing so they will forget they are deaf and assimilate in the population)but it seem to me that more and more hearing people have a copy of conn26 (one of the deaf gene) and more and more kids have cochlear implants. they say that in a few years from now over 500million will have a hearing loss (rather its genetic, age relate or environmental-viruse/treatments/noise pollution (like ipod). but its life
It’s funny how these threads always result in elitist talk of “We’re getting more stupid / ugly / sick, because stupid / ugly / sick people are being allowed to breed!”.
It’s interesting it tends to take this angle.
But as I’ve said upthread, certainly from the perspective of evolution it’s all pretty much moot as our environment will probably change beyond all recognition within a few generations and is likely to include things like advanced genetic engineering and therapeutic nanobots etc. Not to mention the huge social changes in that time.
Humans lived in groups, and any development not only helped the boss, but also the most fit and the losers. I recall also an item about some stone-age grave where the person was sufficiently deformed that it was surprising they would live to adulthood - implying an unexpected great deal of care and assistance from a subsistence society. However, in general if you are not useful in some way to a subsitence society in difficult times, they will put you on the ice floe and push you off into the river…
The difference is that from treatment, previously fatal conditions - congenital heart defects, type I diabetes - instead allow the person to survive and reproduce. This means the gene pool is increasingly diluted by genetic material that normally (pre-medicine) would not be passed on. Fire or agriculture benefits everyone, and it can be argued the more fit will still come out better off. Heart surgery or insulin does nothing to help the already healthy.
OTOH, we have a different experiment, where traditional forced and arranged marriages are replaced by reproductive choice, and birth control allows people to choose their reproductive rate independently.
The difference in stratification is that cities were more compact until post-WWII, and high schools tended to mix kids from both sides of the tracks. The last 2 or 3 decades, people from roughly the same social background find themselves thrown together in most situations from playground to university to the early job market, with much less mixing than 30, 50 or 100 years ago. (IIRC the article was discussing the USA in the last century or two).
Quoth Martiju:
Except that those minor societal benefits are actually a really big deal in humans. Why do you think we live so long, compared with other mammals, to begin with?
Quoth md2000:
There’s no absolute standard for “best”. All evolution must be understood in terms of increasing fitness for an organism’s environment, and medicine is now a part of our environment. So a susceptibility to bacterial infection, for instance, isn’t much selected against any more, since we can easily take care of most bacterial infections with a round of penicillin. But an allergy to penicillin, which as recently as a century ago wouldn’t have been a big deal, will now be significantly selected against.
You might want to try different examples. Type 1 diabetes has a genetic component, but it’s not always fatal to children. Ditto many congenital heart defects and several other of these “dilutions” you reference.
Maybe there are more people surviving who wouldn’t have survived anyway, but how does that ultimately affect human evolution?
It’s not like having those other people around affect survivability for the rest of the human population. There’s no major store of resources being held away from the rest of us.
When there’s a great environmental or biological shock, any traits that aid survival will still be there. That’s why genetic diversity is a good thing. Just because a few more people with a genetic predisposition for a heart defect survive than otherwise would not, there’s still all those other people who don’t have that congenital defect. It’s not like those “good” genes are being displaced.
With nearly 7 billion people on the planet, it’s clear that our current species survival and procreation mechanisms are doing ok.
So, the article was basically referencing an unusual historic epoch in the USA. It’s not admirable, but we’re moving back to historic norms.
On the one hand, you argue more genetic mixing of “bad” traits like congenital defects is not a good thing and unsupported historically.
But you then conversely argue that more genetic mixing along social/economic boundaries, which is only supported historically in one place and for a very brief period, is a good thing.
That’s a bit of a contradiction.
Humans evolved large brains and dexterous hands to a large degree so we could use more and more complex tools. Therefore, any tools (or “technology”) we employ, including medicine, are a direct product of evolution. Separating technology from humanity is like separating a turtle from its shell or a sparrow from its wings.
That’s not necessarily true. As was pointed out by a friend of Ms Hook during a particullarly bitter divorce, “Men will fuck anything.”
i hope genetic engineering keep their hands off of my deaf gene. IF I live on that generation. I despites eugenic type people.
That was a Neanderthal grave, but yes, that is what’s thought.
You have a vivid imagination, but that is not a source of facts.
There is no “normal”. There is only what we have now, or what other societies have now.
And before that? Who much mixing between the poor and the rich was there? The last 200 years is a blink in the eye of evolutionary forces.
Today, on Jerry Springer.
Wow, thanks for that link. Looks like I need to have a discussion with my doctor.
justanotherdeaf, it’d make it a lot easier for people to take your culture seriously if you didn’t insist on calling a medical treatment for a biological defect a horror.
The difficulty with genetic drift is that we may evolve / drift in such a way that much of society is unable to tolerate a change in environment. Yes, what we can do with current technology is good, especially if you need that support. If for some reason there is a catstrophic environmental change, like the great ice storm or Katrina, people who need technology to get around will have a problem. The bigger the gene pool dilution, the bigger the die-off when the “big ones” hit. Bad genes aren’t a problem until you absolutely needed those good genes.
Otherwise, who cares who needs insulin or thick glasses? OTOH, we have an increasingly complex society with less an less room for the “hard of thinking”. Allowing the lower classes to breed out of control, or whatever we call it, may or may not be a problem depending on whether it creates a subclass who need to be watered and fed; or maybe it’s just environmental effects and there will always be some who rise up to the same level as everyone else.
did I ever did? thats up to the individual but don’t impose it on me.
defect huh?
Schwartzeneger for example. I don’t consider Maria hot but I do consider her better looking than the housekeeper is/was.
Yes, defect. As in, an inability to do something that the majority of the population can. It’s a defect which can be worked around, and which many people don’t mind, but that doesn’t make it not a defect.
You won’t live to see any significant movement in that direction.
im am just deaf who can hear at certain decibel level. i do not have an inability to hear. i just dont hear above certain range unless aided.
but defect. that just sound so ugly.
And I have an inability to process alcohol, and an inability to regulate my body’s iron levels. I can live with both of those, and they neither one have much effect on me, but they’re still defects.
you can call it a defect, but deaf have the rights to call it a trait and right to be deaf, and have deaf family and raise them in a deaf culture.