as the title says.
because of medicine saving peoples lives, extending lives and curing defects are we becoming a weaker race?
for instance. i had an operation on my spine, had i not had this operation i would surely be crippled by now. but thanks to the operation i lead a normal trouble free healthy life. if i became crippled my chances of reproduction would have been reduced thus not passing my dodgy spine gene down (which i got from my dad) and it ending there.
Define “weaker”. The problem with this particular hypothesis is that it gives some sort of mystical favored status to “the wild state” as some kind of perfect yardstick whereby to measure “strength”, “weakness”, etc. That’s like presuming that “natural” means “no humans involved” or on the order of thinking that “organic produce” has no chemicals in it. It sets up an artificial and false distinction. Evolutionary fitness means nothing outside of the context of the immediate environment or micro-environment. The fittest animal at the bottom of a sea trench probably won’t do so well in Central Park’s big grassy spot, likewise, vice-versa. Does that mean neither one is evolutionarily fit at all?
Like Dogface said, define weaker in some quantitative way, and then we’ll talk.
Personally, I think we’re becoming progressively stronger, due to the advances in nutrition, exercise knowledge, steroids, etc. As a whole (at least in the developed world), people are taller, many of them are more fit than ever, and holding that fitness longer into their lives.
I have no cites for any of this of course. But if you’re going to call a negative for modern living, you got to call the positives also.
well if it wernt for medicine, would we have less genetic defects as a race?
Again, define. What is a defect?
On the one hand, there are some people born with genetic conditions that would have probably caused death in millenia past. I wonder how much they actually successfully mate and pass that trait on, however. How many generations has medicine been around to alter the stakes like that anyhow… 2 generations maybe?
IMO (again no cites)… the rate of “defect” has probably risen very slightly. On the other hand, you have a much much larger population in the world, and there are probably billiions of people alive today with no particular defect who wouldn’t otherwise be were it not for advances in semi-medical knowledge… nutrition, hygiene, germ theory, etc.
There are also arguments that modern medicine can eliminate diseases or defects that would otherwise hamper the human race. Certainly, an otherwise genetically ideal person who lost a limb or two would likely not survive “in the wild,” but with modern medicine can live, procreate and pass on their desirable genes.
As well, there’s the contribution of knowledge and skills from individuals who might not have survived without medicine. It’s not hard to see how a mind like Stephen Hawking’s could fundamentally improve humanity.
Several previous posts put forward the general idea, but I will outline it anyway.
It is true that in some cases humans have been saved by medicine where they otherwise would not have survived, but people with desirable traits are also saved with the same technology. Even so, I would be comfortable with saying that modern medicine has increased the number of people with genetic abnormalities in the population, and reduced our immune system’s strength.
This is not to say that humans are getting progressively weaker. Suppose scientists were collecting data on a group of squirrels who inhabited an isolated grove. They notice over time that their resistance to the weather has been reduced, and that they have become more vulnerable to parasites. The scientists note that this can probably be explained by the squirrels developing clothing and advanced structures, as well as communal grooming habits to reduce parasite infection. Have the squirrels become weaker? In certain aspects they have, but overall the species has greatly increased in survivability.
This I think illustrates the progress of humanity. The average human placed out in the wild might not be able to survive as well as another animal, but humans are undoubtedly the most survivable creature known.
Well, there a few ways I can take your question.
1st. With the advent of advanced modern medicine, folks that would otherwise have died in the ‘wild’, have their life’s extended by medicine. If these people reproduce, it doesn’t necessarily make us ‘weaker’ as a race, but it could slow the process of evolution. IMHO I’ve always thought that humans will stop evolving completely. Besides death in the womb, with filters out most of the more severe mutations/deformations, there isn’t much natural selection anymore. After birth, every effort is made to maintain the life. If the parents have money, there is a much higher chance the child will make it to reproduction age. While one could try to make the argument to associate money with intelligence (as a type of evolution), Darwin probably wouldnd’t agree.
2nd. Taking your OP a little differently (and probably a little tangentially to this discussion), modern medicine, while extending life, does make us weaker. Not the population as a whole, but the individual taking the medications. Remember the old proverb that whatever didn’t kill you made you stronger? That doesn’t apply anymore. Look at a person who has recovered from a serious illness, typically their immune system is weaker than when they started. The process of ‘disease management’ that modern medicine follows, doesn’t actually cure many diseases, but suppresses and masks the symptoms, which has a detrimental effect on the body. Couple that with loading patients up with antibiotics for any infection/illness, which further ignores and detriments the immune system. Try actually sitting thru your cold or flu, actually build up some natural antibodies, give your immune system a work out, and you might actually not get sick again in a few weeks!
Yes, probably because you’ve died of complications and are no longer in any position to serve as a host.
Remember that in the time before antibiotics and effective palliative care, people would routinely die of bacterial and viral pneumonia. The flu was another killer, even when it wasn’t a particularly virulent strain (the Spanish Flu epidemic, one of the world’s worst epidemics, killed more people than died in combat during the Great War, but it was an anomaly). People who were already weakened by another condition would be most susceptible to diseases of that kind. The two great medical revolutions in the first half of the 20th Century, general cleanliness (including antiseptic practice for physicians) and antibiotics, plus the rise of acceptable symptomatic control, have relegated pneumonia and the flu to managable diseases except in extreme cases.
If this is what you’ve always thought, then I’m afraid you’ve always thought wrongly. Natural selection doesn’t just go away. Selective pressures may change in both form and degree, but unless a) resources become infinite, b) mutation ceases altogether, or c) humans begin mating completely randomly, natural selection can’t stop.
We may well create or modify our own environment to a great extent, but we are still subject to selection based on the very environmental parameters we create.
rodmunch, i believe your concern is that “defective” genes are now able to propagate with advances in medicine. this is most definitley NOT true.
It all comes down to the difference between recesive(spelling?) and dominant genes.
eye color is an easy example: having blue eyes is a recessive trait, brown eyes are dominant. I can have two parents with brown eyes and still come out with blue eyes, if they are both carrying the recessive gene for blue eyes. the brown gene is dominant so there would be no way of knowing if they had the blue eye gene or not. Now lets say we live in a world where everyone with blue eyes would be killed. The blue eye gene would still be around, because people with brown eyes would still be carrying it.
What I’m trying to say is that “defective” traits have always been around and are no more prevalent today than any other time, it just so happens that generally, the genes causing these problems are rare and recessive. they don’t appear unless two people with the same recessive genes meet and then the chances of it appearing are %25. If we didn’t have the medicine to help you, it wouldn’t matter because other members of your family are probably carrying the same gene and are able to spread it just fine.
Define “defect” in a purely context-independent manner. Anything less makes any answer depend 100% on the environment in question. Do not dogmatically insist upon some priviliged position for “the wild”, or if you do insist upon it, demonstrate how “the wild” must be used as the yardstick.
You’ve never actually studied real evolutionary biology, have you? I could make an argument that so many different types of people surviving who otherwise would not have actually ACCELERATES evolution, by increasing overall population genetic diversity.
I think what the OP is saying is that, in the event that our medical technology was instantly taken away from all of us, we would be worse off because of our medicine…
I think maybe he’s thinking that by taking pills, we are not letting our body grow strong by fighting for itself, but rather we are pampering it, so it becomes like a little dependent house-cat, instead of a fierce independent tiger. This is happening on a personal level, not on an evoluionary level, but could progress to that…
Is that it, rodmunch?
If we look at the population as a whole, and the “fitness” of the population genome, it really doesn’t matter how many “weak” genes survive unless they displace some “strong” genes. And you can define “weak” anyway you want. If we suddenly lost all our technology, I’d argue that the human gene pool now would be more fit (as in survival of the fitness) than it was 25,000 years ago. Simply due to the fact that we have about 10,000x times more people alive with all types of genes and gene combination to choose from.
Let’s assume you had some objective way to determine the genetic fitness of an individual. Let’s just say you developed some standard that somehow was pretty good. And lets assume you could somehow evaluate everyone alive today. So, how many people were alive 25k yrs ago? Probably not even .5M, but let’s say it was .5M people. Don’t you think you could find .5M people out of the 6B people alive today who were more genetically fit than those .5M people who were alive 25k yrs ago?
Just a thought experiment, and impossible to prove, but does that make you look at your OP differently?
help correct a layman’s assumptions…
do you inherit poor eyesight from your parents? if so, would the using of spectacles/contact lenses be an example of cultivating a defect? this is with the hypothetical that poor eyesight would somehow reduce your chances of survival in the “wild”, so that if glasses are not available we’ll selectively breed our defect away?