Partially inspired by this thread:
Assuming we can all agree on evolution, is modern medicine actually hindering our species? I know it’s great that little Timmy can survive Horrific Childhood Cancer (patent pending), but, from a purely objective point of view, is it really good that he is?
Note: I do not wish death, dismemberment, or disease on most people–er, anyone–nor do I think that the dopers in the above thread deserve horrible deaths.
If I understand you, you are asking if mankind is defeating “survival of the fittest” which tends to improve the species by allowing unnatural “survival of the non-fittest”?
It does seem to be a bad idea in the long run, but it would take oodles of generations before long-term effects were evident.
What are you really arguing, that a lot of the people who are now alive because of modern medicine shouldn’t be here? Why? Because they’re annoying?
This is a conflict with the individual survival of the fittest (little Tommy) versus the survival of the fittest culture. A fit culture is a culture that grows in numbers because it allows fewer of its members to die off. That effort pays off, as long as only one saved Tommy per generation turns out to be either the inventor of a new cure for cancer, or the reason someone else invents a new cure for cancer.
And that is bound to happen by shere statistical numbers, assuming the fit culture will have enough literacy to share the Tommy-related new information.
How do you figure? If someone would have died of cancer at ten, but because of modern medicine, lives for another fifty years and has a bunch of kids, how is humanity weakened? Because he’s passed on a gene for an easily curable form of cancer? So what? When his kids get cancer, we give them the same treatment we gave him, and they go on to live productive lives of their own. I don’t see a downside to this scenario.
Hmm… I think of “Evolution” as a type of training wheel that Mother Nature has put on our species. Mother-(Nature)-knows-best logic has gotten us this far, Now its time to take off the training wheels, and go on our own. Modern medicine, genetic engineering, bioncs, and so on are the technologies that will allow Self-evolution (is that a theory of some sort?).
Or maybe we will all start dying of an uber-resistant mutated super-virus… who knows?
I can’t recall who said this “We have reached a place where man finds himself not the endpoint of evolution, but its conscious agent.”
The easy availability of glasses may lead to more people having bad eyesight. We can make them glasses too.
Besides, how close are we to artificial organs, cybernetic limbs, and rewriting our DNA?
It’s an evolution revolution baby!
There’s no argument that it’s bad–I plan on being a medicinal chemist myself. It was just a thought. More like “are we becoming too dependent on these medicines?” What if they suddenly weren’t available for some reason? Where would we be? I know it’s not entirely realistic that the supply would dry up.
Meh, never mind, I quit. 
I agree with others and dispute the premise of the OP. Evolution cannot ever be thwarted. It created a species that uses the use of medicine as one of its survival strategies.
However, there are some related subjects that really are bad. The overuse of antibiotics is creating resistant bacteria at an alarming rate and will eventually hurt us and maybe quickly and in a devastating way. The prevalence of anti-bacterial agents even in consumer soaps and hand cleansers probably isn’t so great either. Something seems to be causing conditions like asthma to skyrocket. It may be that we are raising our kids in environments that are too sterile. Our bodies are adapted to be around dirt and animals so insulating our children those things away may make things go haywire.
If you define ‘fitness’ as the ability to survive and flourish in the world, then modern humans are remarkably fit, far more so than our closest evolutionary relatives. It’s a bit of a strawman argument to say that Little Timmy could not survive in the bush, and hence he’s unfit. By that standard, so are we all, with the exception of a few hunter-gatherers who live in the original human habitat of East Africa.
I’m relatively sure that biological evolution has played much less of a role in the fitness level of humans than cultural evolution since the Neolithic Revolution. The only way that modern medicine would suddenly vanish is if it were banned by some culture. At that point, we’d see a wonderful example of ‘survival of the fittest’ at the cultural level, as said culture was immediately outcompeted by every other in the world.
It’s possible to take a species-engineering perspective and say that taking the low-hanging fruit (survival of “less-fit” individuals now) is threatening aggregate species damage in the future (poor genes are spread throughout the gene pool and overall medical costs go up). This is a viable stance, but I think it is predicated on the idea that tech-level is static. If tech-level continually increases, the economy will grow, capabilities will increase, and medical costs will go down. But again, this is a matter of cultural evolution. There would be no difference between humans then and humans now biologically, but humans-then with these tech advances will be able to compete better against other humans without.
Biological competition is irrelevant, and has been for millenia. We’re the 800lb gorilla of the animal kingdom, and short of an asteroid hitting us, most likely to survive of any animal species on the planet.
Nah, don’t quit. I think survival of the fittest can certainly include fittest in the sense of intelligence, and gaining knowledge. Modern medicine has made incredible strides in the past few decades in understanding the intricacies of the body. With AIDS research; a greater understanding of the immune system. With cancer research; understanding of cell mutations. With depression and other brain disorders; understanding neurotransmitter systems. And on and on.
The intricacy of understanding is often brought about by good minds wanting to overcome the plight of others who suffer disease, and want to help overcome that suffering. I’d call that compassion, a mighty nice form of evolution.
In other words, we value Timmy as an equal human being, and not a diminished body.
Seeing Crescend’s post in preview; well-said.
I think a better question to be asking would be how is drastically-lowered infant mortality and drastically-lengthened lifespans coupled with exploding population numbers going to affect the longterm survival of the human species? Part of that equation is that more people are living longer due to medical advances, but I think the problem is more in terms of sheer numbers of humans on the planet, polluting with wastes and consuming resources, rather than our race being weakened by medicine stepping on evolution’s toes. In my opinion, anyway.
Modern medicine isn’t an issue. Stupid people having more children than smart people is, though.
Good luck passing the law that says, “U 2 st00pid 2 m8!”
Well, while from a purely selfish point of view I’m very glad that Mom survived her 3yo-lung-infection (which led to my no-lung-infections-self and Lilbro-no-lung-infections and Middlebro-3yo-lung-infection), there are some aspectes in which modern medicine is, IMO, overdoing it.
Overuse of medications is one; often the campaigns to get people to “not self-medicate”, instead of getting people to “stop grabbing leftover antibiotic when all you have is the common cold”, gets people to “freak out and go to the ER when they have a headache because, you know, taking a tylenol without the doctor having said so for this particular headache I have today might be self-medication” (those campaigns need to define “standing orders”).
Another is the mistaking of “endure” and “live”. When someone is dying, the doctors know it, the family knows it, there’s no way they can be healed, they are worse and worse every day, they’re eating up the emotional and financial resources of half a dozen relatives… who are the doctors helping, by insisting on every procedure that can elongate heartbeat for another week? We refer to the aneurysm that nailed Dad after three years fighting cancer as “the favor” (not in front of SiL-the-doctor, of course).
SiL’s father has ALS. She recently sort-of-apologized to Mom for having thought, years ago, that Dad, Mom and myself weren’t “bouncing happily off the walls” whenever she came to visit (which in those three years she did about half a dozen times, and most of those at the time of the wedding)… now she’s realized that compared with that kind of physical and emotional drain, whether someone has bought one new T-shirt at Mango or two is “so fuckin’ bloody important, dearie, ask me if I fuckin’ care.”
That’s part of the drastically-extended lifespans - we’re so against euthanasia here in North America, but I think people don’t understand end of life issues and are simply terrified of them. When people get too old, or too sick, they quite often just want to die. It’s not a bad thing, it’s not “against God’s plan” - if you’re helping an old person live longer than they want to through medical intervention, chances are YOU are the one going against “God’s plan.” When your body wears out, what is more natural than dying? But we have hospital wards throughout North America that are basically warehouses for old people who have all but left their bodies already and aren’t doing anything but waiting to die, and that just isn’t right.