the guy she marries is not always the father of her children. The chauffeur may have a tighter butt.
-In these days of court-ordered child support, when it comes to guys with fat wallets, they do the picking.
-there’s the Wallace Simpson factor - i.e. there’s no accounting for taste, and looks alone or up-front attributes don’t guarantee she wins the contest. He may pick the butt-ugly one, who knows why? (I think Charles has inherited his great-uncle’s gene…)
-Rich may not be an indicator of good genes; sometimes it’s luck, sometimes father or grandfather was the one who struck it rich, etc. Not all rich guys look like Robert Redford. (Some of the richest guys in the USA - Buffet, Gates, etc. - are not noted for marrying supermodels. )
First of all, pre-technological hazards also killed many robust and otherwise fit people via accident and disease. Technology is allowing many people with congenital problems to live but it is also saving the lives of many other people who don’t have such problems. The highly robust people of old might die confronting wild animals, for example, whereas now wild animals aren’t such a problem and if you are attacked modern medicine makes your chances of survival much higher. This is a good thing for our species. Likewise, falling off cliffs, out of trees, being struck by lightning, etc. are still deadly dangerous but nowadays have a lower fatality rate.
So while technology is allowing survival for some of the “weak” people, it’s also saving a lot of “strong” people. Until you really look at that, it’s hard to say whether this is a net gain or loss.
Also, I mentioned in a previous post that some people with congenital defects voluntarily forgo reproduction. As human intelligence and foresight are an integral part of the species you have to take that into account as well. There are individuals who elect not to reproduce for the benefit of the species as a whole. They will tend to mitigate the effects caused by the environment not eliminating defects as effectively as in the past.
The elimination of megafauna started in prehistoric times, arguably among stone-age tech hunter-gatherers. It’s not a product of modern technology. Eliminating the “microfauna”, by which I presume you mean disease, isn’t necessarily bad. Resistance to malaria is conferred by a gene that, in double-doses, causes a pretty nasty disease. Elimination of that gene in today’s world, however, would mean even more death and debility from malaria than there is at present, because a single copy of the gene confers resistance. If you eliminate malaria the disease, then you can eliminate the sickle cell gene without causing further mortality and morbidity, so it would be a net gain for humanity. There are plenty of less deadly disease to stimulate our immune systems, after all, if that is even really necessary.
And finally, the weather - yes, we have HVAC systems. However, as a recent perusal of the news these past years shows, we are still at the mercy of extreme weather. From hurricanes to tornadoes to blizzards and heat waves, and all the rest, extreme weather still exists and it can knock out our technological life support systems. When it does, the sick, elderly, and disabled die first. That form of selection still exists. It has changed form, though - instead of winnowing out the weak gradually day-to-day, week-to-week, year-to-year what happens is that those folks live on until a major disaster… then they keel over in relatively large numbers.
It still sucks to be old, disabled, etc. during a disaster.
It depends on a lot of factors, not the least of which we are both a social species and an intelligent one.
In the wild, among social animals, critters than couldn’t survive on their own may well endure for some time. Older wolves may be less able to run down and kill prey, but as part of a pack and assisting other, younger wolves they might well live an additional year or two than they would otherwise. Does this make wolves less fit? No, I don’t think so. The same applies to, say, an elephant matriarch who may have physical problems that slow her down or whatever, but her knowledge of the environment helps the rest of the herd to survive by finding water and food. Humans are a more extreme version of that - we may keep around someone horribly disabled who nonetheless contributes in some way we find valuable (see Stephen Hawking). We require more contributions to our way of life than just muscles, that’s why we have blind poets (Homer) and deaf inventors (Thomas Edison). We have restructured our environment so that disabilities that might have been fatal in the stone age now are more annoyances and inconveniences by comparison. That doesn’t mean the less fit are surviving, what it means is that, in a Darwinian sense, those disabilities no longer make one unfit, or at least no as unfit. (The disabled still suffer in regards to sexual selection, and by “conscious” selection as mentioned once or twice here.)
If it’s the dominant selection process in humans then, for humans, it IS the more important selection process. However, unlike, say, peafowl there is no one standard of human beauty. Some human females like facial hair, some don’t. Some like dark hair, some like blond. Rinse and repeat. On top of that, human mate selection criteria are not solely based on appearance. Wealth, power, status, and so forth also affect desirability among humans, with this woman giving more importance to money and that one more importance to looks and yet another placing a premium on something else. Being short is usually seen as undesirable in men, yet it can be compensated for by something else - in other words, a short powerful man like Napoleon can still easily find a mate and have offspring.
Human males also engage in sexual selection, although theirs tends to be weighted more towards appearances - yet even so there exists more than one standard. Tall vs. thin, for example, and there are some societies where a physically strong woman is seen as highly desirable in addition to just visual beauty.
What this means is that, even if sexual selection is the dominant selection process in humans, the fact that there are variable criteria will keep the human gene pool diverse. This will be a net positive for the species.
I would also like to point out that sexual selection is entirely natural. The form in which it manifests in humans - among women, for example, including not just appearance but control of resources and social standing - is ALSO entirely natural. Nor entirely unique to humans as social status has an impact on reproduction not only in our close relatives the chimpanzees but also wolves and probably others. And, again, because humans use variable criteria our sexual selection helps maintain the genetic diversity in the population, which is usually considered a good thing.
Selection is neither good nor bad, it just is. Given we now have something like six billion humans on the planet, as Darwin defined it we are extremely successful. So far, preserving those with congenital defects, reducing disease, and so forth seems to have had no detrimental effects on us as a species.
The good vs. bad comes in as a human judgement - under Darwinian terms a world of 20 billion humans living subsistence lives in a brutal, totalitarian state with and average life expectancy of 40 but where everyone had six kids would be a success - but I think most humans would subjectively view that situation as bad. A world with only 2 billion people might make for subjectively much more pleasant lives for everyone, but wouldn’t necessarily be “good” or “successful” in the terms of natural selection and evolution.
I’d be apprehensive, too - if indeed mating prospects were determined by “pubescent girls” and all mating/reproducing had to be done by the age of 20. That’s not how it is, though. People make mating/reproductive decisions into their 40’s, in some cases even beyond that. Also, few girls are going to bag their “rock star” - most will settle for less than perfect mates (meaning guys like you, presumably). Woman may idolize the rock stars and heros, but the stereotype of lusting after the cowboy but actually marrying and having kids with the eyeglass-wearing accountant has some basis in fact you know. The cowboy may have good genes, but the accountant has a steady income and will stick around to raise the kids - two traits important to human females that want to successfully reproduce. It’s not about how many babies you can squeeze out, it’s about how many babies you can raise who then go on to have children of their own. Two children who produce children of their own is a greater Darwinian success than fourteen children who don’t live to adulthood and/or never reproduce.
In other words, I think your concerns are a bit overblown. If you look at the situation as a whole in some detail you’ll realize that a few more less than perfect genes in the pool won’t affect the ability of the species to swim
Tibbytoes: Not to be snarky or anything, but you aren’t raising any new issues, and if you go back and read this thread, I think you will find answers have already been given.