We have altered the path of natural selection by medical techniques; Does this help or hurt the “Evolutionary Plan” for the human species? and why?
There is no “Evolutionary Plan”.
That’s not how evolution works.
What plan? Evolution isn’t “teleological”; that is, it isn’t working to any kind of goal.
Now if you mean “is medical science leading to the human species being dependent on advanced medical techniques for it’s survival”, that’s a legitimate question. In particular some worry that fertility treatments could lead to a large portion of the population being unable to breed naturally.
My W.A.G. is that before medicine has that big an effect on the gene pool we’ll be able to write our genes directly, which will solve the fitness problem but open up a giant can of worms.
A can of giant worms? People are gonna eat giant worms in the future?
Nobody likes me, everybody hates me,
Guess I’ll go eat worms,
Long, thin, slimy ones; Short, fat, juicy ones,
Itsy, bitsy, fuzzy wuzzy worms.
Down goes the first one, down goes the second one,
Oh how they wiggle and squirm.
Up comes the first one, up comes the second one,
Oh how they wiggle and squirm.
Dude, what if in the future we ARE the worms?!
Whoa, Dude - I gotta go lay down…
like a WORM?! OMG! Mind BLOWN!
Does it help, hurt or neither evolution for the future?
To repeat:
Evolution does not plan for the future
That’s not how evolution works.
There is no “evolutionary future” to hurt.
This is a serious question, but it doesn’t have an answer.
Everything humanity has ever done has had some effect on its future development. Fire, stone tools, agriculture, war. Have they helped or hurt? Well, compared to what? Do they create changes? Sure. No matter what, these developments changed who lived, who died, who reproduced and when. That’s all that evolution is.
That will continue forever. Everything we do has some effect. We can argue about the effects of medicine, and certainly peoples’ futures will change because new medicines (in the broadest sense) will become available. But nobody can ever answer whether this is good or bad or indifferent. It’s all there is. If there is only one thing, you can’t compare it.
We ARE the worms!
We are the annalids!
Where do I get a copy of this plan?
They are on display
In a cellar. With the lights gone. And the stairs. In the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.
As stated, there is no “plan” in regards to evolution.
I say “neither”, because there is no plan. There is no direction that evolution is going.
Evolution is a matter of weeding out those who are less suited to the current environment than others, and it’s not a matter of individuals dying young, or for the “winners” who is strongest/fastest/smartest/whatever, it’s a matter of who leaves the most offspring down the line. Someone sickly from birth who dies of some genetic disease at 35 who nonetheless produces 10 kids during their lifetime is more “fit” than some super-athlete who lives a totally healthy life and dies in his/her sleep at 110 but never reproduces.
In many instances, medical science has little to no impact on an individual’s reproductive success - cancer and heart disease usually strike after the prime reproductive years and those are two of the most common causes of death. In those cases medical science has little to no impact on human evolution. The only time it does affect it is when it saves the life and/or fertility of someone who otherwise wouldn’t reproduce. That’s a very small number of people compared to the overall population of the Earth.
It would be around 85% of the overall population of the Earth. Before medical science that’s around the percentage of people who died before they reproduced.
There’s “medical science” and there’s “modern sanitation”.
Clean drinking water, some concept of “clean” and/or “sterility” when appropriate, and toilets that help keep pee&poo separate from drinking/bathing water have more to do with that than what we normally think of as medical science - drugs, surgery, etc.
Evolution is all about surviving to child-bearing age, and then having children who ditto.
I like your distinction, Broomstick. Seems to me that there’s sanitation, which helps some people survive who might otherwise have died of disease. Then there’s medical intervention that helps (as noted above) couples who are infertile to have children.
Both santitation and science are “tampering” with the “natural process” of evolution; whether that’s good or bad is a different question. A third factor tampering with “natural” evolution is societal pressures. In modern, developed countries, the poorest people tend to have the most children. To whatever extent (if any) intelligence is related to genetics, we’re breeding against it. (The movie IDIOCRACY was very funny but the point underlying is a very real risk.)
One thing it does is it “helps” the species. More gene diversity = better. You never know what gene or genes we might need in the future. We are now 7B strong, pretty much all over the globe. Much harder for us to go extinct than when we were only a few thousand wandering around Africa (and that wasn’t that long ago, on the time scale of evolution).
I say this, because at the root of such a question is the notion that we are somehow “weakening” the species. But we aren’t. If we were 7B clones of the same individual, that wouldn’t be so good in terms of our survivability.
That presumes that being poor is the same as being stupid.
Also, nature is wasteful. It eliminates a bad gene by eliminating the entire person who has it; it doesn’t matter how useful his or her other genes are, they get thrown out with the bad one.
From an evolutionary perspective, what we’re doing with modern medicine and technology is reducing selective pressure. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing in and of itself. It’s just something that is happening. You hear a lot of people talking about how we’ve somehow escaped natural selection, or that evolution no longer applies to us. That’s not true. It’s just that we’ve changed the environment, which is the source of most selective pressure.
Now, the thing that I think is unique about humans, evolutionarily, is the fact that we are continually changing our environment, and doing so far more quickly than biological evolution can respond. Instead of a long-term, slow, even pressure toward, say, being taller or more muscular, our pressure is shifting on a very short time scale. Just look at how our picture of the ideal woman has changed over the last couple hundred years. I don’t think anyone really knows what that’s going to do to us, evolutionarily. I would guess that it would tend to keep things pretty much the way they are in the long term, since there’s no real consistent directional pressure, but we’ll just have to wait and see.
Since the invention of repeating firearms, there’s been a selective effect against being crazy-brave.