Are we killing ourselves?

Great Debates
1

I’ve often thought of this one, and I keep coming to the same conclusion: Yes. I know I cannot be the only one with this train of thought.

It seems to me that the human race is slowly (quickly!) setting itself up to die.

Not talking about society: That’s a whole other argument. Three years from I bet you someone with the cold is going to sneeze around someone else in some store somewhere and be sued. Mark my words. But not about society: about the human race.

We are becoming more and more “needy” and into “convenience”. We are developing shoes, clothes, chairs that are more attuned to our body structure.
Evolution is supposed to take care of fine tuning body structure. My thought is, if you make everything “comfortable” and “fit to match” every curve and contour in your body, the body will get more and more brittle, more and more weak, and more breakable.

The human body has survived thousands of years sleeping on rocks, on ground, grass. Now within fifty years we have beds that fit every curve and bump, shows with gelatin-filled insoles, custom contour chairs, beds to sleep on with “thousands of individually sensing coils”.

My chair I’m in now. Fits my ass nicely. Holds my elbows to support them. Gives room for my feet. Vibrates if I’m feeling saucy. Rocks never did that.

On the medical front: We have shots and vaccines for everything. To keep you from getting the flu, to keep you from getting this, that, the other thing. When you get sick, your body gets “practice” fighting things off. If you’re never sick, what’s going to happen the one time something nasty comes along?

Antibiotic-resistant germs, viruses. What’s going to happen the day that some germ comes along or mutates that’s fast spreading(airborne) and completely resistant to antibiotics? Will it be the end of the human race?

Granted this is probably not something that will happen in my lifetime, it is bound to happen. Everything is becoming easier on the human body. If it was 1921 and you were “lactose intolerant,” tough crap for you, huh?

I already see things come along that weren’t along before. Why? Who knows. Alzheimer’s. Gehrig’s. MS. MD. None of it documented before now. Where did it come from?

Will the drug boys, the raver kids, the ones who have taken drugs in the past, be the more resistant ones in the future? The ones whose bodies have “changed” to be able to withstand and take more?

Where is the human race going? What is it setting itself up to do? Is it going to die, be wiped out, by some seemingly insignificant “germ”? Will it become so used to being “comfortable” that it will simply become so fragile it will break, crumble, develop significant structural problems and not be able to survive?

2

This ought to be good… who’s got that can of whoop-ass enlightenment?..

3

jrishaw writes:

Huh?

Alzheimer’s has been recognized as a distinct disease since 1906 (by, of course, Alzheimer). Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS; a/k/a Lou Gehrig’s disease) has been known since the 1930’s, at least. Charcot identified multiple sclerosis in the 1860’s, although we have reports of what might be MS from as far back as the 14th century CE.

Granted, giving them names was of less importance back in the days when, no matter what you had, a shaman gave you some herb tea and told you to go away and die. Such things were probably less noticeable, too, when everybody and his brother was dropping from typhus, plague, malaria, and malnutrition.

But, of recent origin? Tell to the marines, kid; the old sailors know better.

4

I didn’t know where to begin dissecting your post, so I thought I’d handle this part.

Time for Immunology 101: When your body encounters a pathogen for the first time, it mounts the best defense it can, often woefully inadequate. It also remembers that pathogen, so that the next time it sees it, it can open up the full can of IgG whoopass.

Vaccines show your body what some of these bugs look like, without causing the disease. That way, when the bug does show up for the first time, your body knows it. It’s like putting up a wanted poster.

Essentially, vaccines are “practice”. If we didn’t vaccinate, you wouldn’t have to worry about the Unknown Nasty Bug, since smallpox/polio/diptheria/etc. probably would have had its way with you already.

It’s probably worth pointing out that viruses cannot become “antibiotic-resistant”, since they aren’t susceptible in the first place.

This is probably your most valid point, but it still doesn’t support your conclusion. You’re worried that someday people could die left and right due to Ab-resistant strains of bacteria. You’re forgetting that if it were not for antibiotics, people would be dying left and right due to afflictions that we can now cure.

When you take care of the big problems, it frees you up to take care of smaller problems. This is progress.

People have always become forgetful in their old age, some more than others. Dr. Alzheimer described a particular form of this dementia with specific pathologic findings and a predictible course. That doesn’t mean that no one had AD before then, they just didn’t call it that.

Very rarely before this century, people would gradually lose motor function over the course of several years, ending in death. By this century, this had been seen often enough to give it a name–amyotrophic lateral sclerosis–and it became part of our common culture when a famous baseball player was stricken with it.

(Best opening line of a lecture from last year: “ALS is a progressive neurologic disorder, whose most famous victim was baseball star Lou Gehrig. It is also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease, which if you ask me, is quite a coincidence.”)

Dr. J

5

You know, I’ve often wondered about the OP myself.

A hundred years ago, I never would have been born. Neither would have my mother. I come from a line of women who have trouble giving birth, and this line would have died out if not for the wonders of modern medicine. Should I choose to breed, my daughter would have the same problems, most likely. So, my genetically defective line could continue, and pass down those defective genes.

It occured to me that there are a lot of people out there, like me that without modern medicine would never have been born, and pass these problems down to their children. Modern medicine allowed faulty genes to pass on, generation after generation. Over time, won’t this weaken the species? Survival (and reproduction) of the fittest no longer applies.

6

Oy vey.

Or, you make it stronger and more resilient. My chair fits my back and ass; but that doesn’t make me a softy- rather, by fitting my back and ass, it allows me to work longer and harder without suffering the aches and pains and disabilities of old days.

And those aches and pains weren’t the symptoms of my body getting ‘stonger’; in fact, they were signs of my body getting weaker from being bent and pushed the wrong way. If pain makes you stronger, try this experiment- every day, hit your finger as hard as you can with a hammer. Sixty days later, does your finger work better? Is it stronger? More resistant to hammer blows? More able to do dextrous work?

Human society moves at light speed when compared to evolution- genetically, we’re practically unchanged from those that discovered fire; societally, well, judge for yourself.

No more than diseases we faced back before we had antibiotics. In addition, our society is much more scientifically bent and aware, which means we’re more likely to come up with a solution to this terrible new disease in less time than the 6000 years it took to recognize the strengths of antibiotics.

Okay, more fallacies in that statement than I know what to do with.

1.) These are not ‘newly documented’ diseases; as others have pointed out, they were documented early this or previous century.

2.) Discovering a new disease does not mean the disease did not exist previously. AIDS was ‘discovered’ in the early '80’s, but it is believed came about in the late '50’s. Discovering a disease is a matter of having enough tools to investigate the disease and enough knowledge to determine the specifics of the disease, neither of which were available before the mid-1800’s.

3.) People live longer; ergo, diseases that strike late in life (such as cancer, Alzheimer’s, etc.) only began to show up in numbers recently because people only began getting en mass to such advanced ages recently.

7

A good topic that I’d like to spend more time on, but for now, I only have 2 cents to contribute…

cent 1) Not knowing the future, we need to proceed down some path & we’re just doing the best we can. (well, I hope this isn’t the best we can do!)

cent 2) The main concern you bring up relates to technology. And yet, IMHO, technology is humanity’s prime evolutionary advantage. Other than our cleverness, our physical attributes are out-done by many other species. I agree that technology is a double edged sword…it can be our undoing as much as it can help us (wisdom is needed to keep the use of technology to our advantage). Hmm…without technology, perhaps we would survive a few million years (at a greatly reduced population size) like other mammal species, but with technology we have the potential to last a lot longer (or kill ourselves tomorrow) and to improve our quality of life.

Anyway, it’s an opportunity that requires consideration for the long-term effects (as you point out).

8

Lissa writes:

Fit for what?

I will freely concede that, were I dumped out on the Kenyan savannah, my smartest move would be to cut my throat: my death would be a lot quicker and less painful that way. OTOH, my usual milieu is development and maintenance of mainframe systems, and I do quite well at it (at least, the IRS seems to think so :)). Assuming for the sake of argument that my niftiness at the keyboard is genetically determined, am I unfit? Or just unfit to be a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer, but marvelously fitted for being a senior technical analyst?

Well, if you do decide to breed, I recommend that you stay out of areas without modern obstetrics whilst gravid :). That way, it’s unlikely that you or your hypothetical daughter will have problems.

9

John,

This is one of the most delicious pieces of sarcasm I have read in a fortnight!

Thank you.

LOL!

10

Agreed. Humans use technology to change their environments to suit themselves; rather than letting the world force us to adapt, we adapt the world. As has been pointed out, this is a good thing. It is faster than biological evolution, and allows us to apply our own ideas of fairness and ethics, rather than let nature judge us fit or unfit. (Should we eliminate the weak? Ethically, I find that abhorrent. Fortunately, we adapt the world so we don’t have to eliminate the weak. Once again, this is a very good thing – especially if I’m the weak one.)

The fear is that if somehow we lost our ability to adapt the environment to fit our needs – if ended up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where only the Feral Kid and Kevin Costner have what it takes to survive – that humanity would be doomed.

This is basically a tautology: our survival advantage is our technology, and the question is almost the same as asking if polar bears, being extremely well adapted to the cold, are now too “comfortable” in their niche to survive in a desert. If you put any specialized species in a dramatically altered environment, most of the species will not survive.

It makes no sense to worry about our species’ “fitness” without technology. First, any threat to our survival that can’t be mitigated through technology is CERTAINLY not going to be mitigated by evolution any better. So, it makes no sense to subject our species to a cruel eugenics program to produce “fit” individuals when we can just use technology to redefine who is “fit.”

Ugh… I’ve gone on too long without saying anything that hasn’t already been said. I’m just not cut out for Great Debates.

But

11

Not at all Keenan. I think you’ve answered the OP and summarized it best thus far.

12

if [we] ended up in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, where only the Feral Kid and Kevin Costner have what it takes to survive – …humanity would be doomed.

I think I may have just found my new sig.

13

Absolutely. I’d be the one to cut my own throat if I actually had to live through Waterworld. Or the Postman.

14

I remember once hiking through the hills of Sulawesi, an outer island of Indonesia. Some boys – 12, maybe 13 – trotted up beside me carrying some rice in baskets balanced on yokes they carried on their shoulders. I joked with them and they, joking, got me to carrying one of their yokes for a while. I was twice their size. After about three minutes, my entire upper body was burning under the weight, I was sweating, my whole system was in meltdown, and an entire village had come out to laugh at me.

One of the boys, laughing, plucked the yoke off my shoulders and lightly jogged up the hill after his friends.

Now these boys were strong; they’d been working and carrying their whole lives. They certainly weren’t “soft” and I, demonstrably, was. But thanks to malaria, ruined water, poor medicine, malnutrition, parasites, and a homicidal government, they’ll be lucky if they live until they’re 50. And they’ll have to work like dogs.

I’ll take the relative strength of technology, thanks. Softness seems to work just fine.

15

Absolutely. But he was OK in No Way Out

To the OP - if I had to sleep on lumpy matresses, I would not want the vaccines to save me from all those dredful diseases…

16

Don’t worry about it. Natural Selection can be postponed, but not repealed. As long as we can maintain the civilization which makes all this comfort and convenience possible, it doesn’t really matter whether we’re unfit or not. If we can’t, Darwin’s beast will be unshackled and will rampage through the aftermath, gobbling up the unfit and/or unlucky, with appalling thoroughness.

But in the end, those who were still fit–or capable of getting fit fast enough–will survive, and theirs will be the bloodlines that continue.

Well…yeah. Lactose intolerance is the least of it. Frankly, I’M glad that I wasn’t born prior to the 20th century since medicine and anaesthesia (especially the latter) didn’t exist (or weren’t any good) before then.

I suspect that these diseases all existed before. But, given the myriad of exciting ways to die that co-existed with them, they didn’t get much attention. Granpa doesn’t get a chance to spiral into senile dementia or Alzheimers if he died of an infected cut on his toe 40 years earlier. [Having had to be given IV antibiotics for just such a thing less than a year ago, I sing the praises of modern medicine with clear and sincere enthusiasm!]

17

As a child, I had scarlet fever once and pneumonia twice. Were it not for penicillin, I would be among the ranks of the dead.

Was this because I had a defective immune system that was vulnerable to the ravages of opportunistic infections like these, which would have been weeded out of the gene pool if not for antibiotics? No. It was because scarlet fever and pneumonia strike random targets. Back in the Good Old Days before modern medicine, you had as many kids as you possibly could, because less than half of them were going to survive 'til puberty. Not because half your kids would inherit your less-superior genese, but because surviving childhood diseases was a crapshoot.

Antibiotics have effectively eliminated that particular crapshoot.