About 200,000 ya, according to latest speculation, there arose in Africa a species with brains, opposed thumbs and a self-conscious realization of mortality. Carrying weapons they spread thruout the world and by 10,000 ya, they had taken it over, killed off most of the mega-fauna and started to develop agriculture, capital and class. The rest, as they say, is history.
We, as a species, are not living a sustainable lifestyle. Overpopulation, increased demand on finite energy resources along with a doomed-to-fail economic system and global warming do not bode well for the species as we know it. Living the way we do, how can we imagine ourselves as fit for anything but a big dieoff?
Humans cooperating with each other and alleviating illness and injury is part of what we are as a species. It’s every bit as much a part of who were are as the colour of our skin or our hair or the way our hands have opposable thumbs.
Der Trihs nailed this in one; behaviour’s genetic, and if helping the sick and wounded causes that population’s genes to reproduce, that population will be successful, and its genes will spread. If one day that happens to be overwhelmed by our species’s enjoyment of the use of nuclear weapons, well, that’s evolution, too.
As living creatures, we cannot avoid evolution. We can’t stop it. Our very behaviour is just part of evolution.
I guess someday we’ll go extinct. All animals do. The world used to be ruled by dinosaurs but they’re all gone now, unless you count birds. Before them trilobites ruled the earth for time beyond human conception. Such is life. The time it’ll take humans to go extinct is probably beyond the scope of history - if we went extinct in 60,000 years that would be a blip in the time frame of life on Earth, but it’s still ten times longer than current recorded history and is far too long for us to do anything about it now.
I think you mis-understood me there RickJay. I said that we don’t have to co-operate with evolution, not that our instincts haven’t been shaped by it. I agree that we evolved to be altruistic, but we have choices about what kind of society we want to live in.
It’s a grey area, what aspects of our behaviour are instinctive, which are learned, and which are a product of conscious choices.
Our ability to learn and make conscious choices is a product, and an ongoing effect of, evolution.
You’re trying to create something people do that lies outside of the concept of “evolution.” You can’t. There’s no such thing as people “helping” evolution, or cooperating with it. Everything we do is evolution in action.
I believe that this has already been said, but I’d like to throw in on the side of the position that the question is based on a misidentification of medicine’s role in our evolutionary world. Medicine is part of our environment. Evolution reacts to the environment to (unintentionally) improve reproductive fitness with respect to the environment you’re in. If you’re living in a desert, then relying on external heat to keep you living to the age of reproduction is okay, even though you’d die if you went to the arctic. If you live in the sea, then it’s okay to rely on water passing over your gills to keep you alive to spawning, despite the fact that being on dry land kills you. And if you live in an environment with insulin shots available, then it’s okay if you ‘evolve’ to rely on them, becuase such a reliance doesn’t inhibit your or your descendants’ survival as a species.
Of course, medicine is a post-hoc change of environment to change the environment to match our needs, rather than waiting for evolution to change us to survive better in our existing environment - but from the standpoint of evolution itself it’s equivalent. The better we fit the environment the better, is all that matters.