Imagine the setup for the Captain America movie but there’s no super-soldier serum. Strong, healthy guys like Bucky Barnes are off to war, probably to get killed . . . which leaves the chicks on the home front with walking invalids like Steve Rogers. Is this good for the gene-pool?!
I have a lesbian friend who slapped me down when I pointed out that men’s American navy uniforms are impressively gay looking. “I bet they’re getting tail by the minute.” She said.
I’m personally betting that if even your local lesbian recognizes the hotness of a military man in uniform, and it’s pretty well true that military men on leave have no problem finding a short-term relationship, that war may well be dysgenic, but that evolution has built in a coping mechanism.
Right before shipping out, didn’t Barnes nail both of the girls on that double-date where Rogers got ignored?
And of course, the strongest, healthiest males who go off to war are the ones least likely to come home in a body bag. Weapons that put everyone equally at risk are a really recent innovation, evolutionarily speaking. For that matter, the weak staying home while the strong go fight is also a pretty recent thing: It used to be, everyone went.
Was 4F really that common a classification in WW2? Especially towards the end of the war, I thought you’d have to have a pretty severe disability not to serve at all. Even a scrawny guy could do something, company clerk or whatnot. And this isn’t even talking about Germany or the Soviet Union, which through everyone into the meat grinder.
That’s really the answer. Pretty much “too early to tell” as far as evolution is concerned.
Historically, rape has been very common in war; in many cases a central feature of it. So far from being a Darwinian poor choice, it has been a good way for men who couldn’t attract a woman if their life depended on it to go out, kill rival men, impregnate women by force, and get away with it.
I always wondered if there was any kind of genetic changes, or even social changes (lack of aggression, etc…) in Germany and Japan as a result of having a large proportion of men killed in the war.
Then again, what percentage of men were actually killed, and is there any evidence that they were disproportionately strong and healthy? I mean, if only 10% of males were killed, and there’s no proof that the distribution of strong, healthy ones was any different than the population, then there would be no effect.
In WWII, the United States but about 25,000,000 men in uniform and about 400,000 were killed. Other nations had much higher percentages of their soldiers killed, and high percentages of their civilians as well. Yet there is no evidence that any nation suffered genetically as a result. Of course, there is no evidence that any nation in human history has had a gene pool superior or inferior to any other. Some of the nations that suffered high death tolls in WWII or other wars have done extremely well in the years since then. Germany, Japan, and South Korea would be obvious examples. Meanwhile, some third-world nations that largely stayed out of international conflict are still, well, third-world nations.
So I am a young man who goes off to war: (1) I get laid at home, (2) I get laid where I am fighting, (3) I fend off an invading army who will rape all my women and probably kill me, and (4) and I conquer territory where I can rape the women and and kill males who directly compete with me to pass on their genes: how is this dysgenic?
It sounds so good for our genes, we should be doing it more often!
Worst poster name/ post combo ever.
Oh, and, apologies to any offended feminists here, of course I meant “dames.” (Chicks did not exist before 1950.)
When was this?
Mass conscription is a pretty recent thing. Armies have become exponentially larger since social, economic and technological innovations of the late 18th and 19th centuries made it possible to raise much larger armies.
A lot of people have proposed this about WW1. Particularly for the upper classes (casualties among officers were disproportional high, and due to poor public health working class recruits were much more likely to be turned down due to poor health).
I don’t think it is borne out by the statistics though. Though they seem incredible, as a percentage of the population the casualty rates were not that high.
I can think of two problems with this idea. One is the implicit assumption that war is more deadly to soldiers than to civilians. This isn’t the case, war has usually killed as many or more civilians as soldiers and the trend recently has been towards increased civilian vs. military deaths with the increasing ability to actualize total war; indeed WW3 would see the obliteration of civilian populations as its major goal. The other problem is the assumption that violence is the major cause of death in war. It is only in the 20th century that this became true, prior to the 20th century the number one cause of death in war was disease, often by a heavy margin.
Dunno. I use use Pepto-Bismol whenever I am feeling “dysgenic” butchering all over the place. I feel genic right-quick.
As long as laboratories exist, our kind will last forever!
I remember reading the late UK Master of the Rolls, Lord Denning said that the best men got killed in WWI & II.
The Forever War comes to mind as being in favor of the suggestion that war is dysgenic.
Since something like tribal war is observed in chimps, it seems fairly clear that war is not “bad for the gene pool.”
I’d say it is a huge unsupported leap from casual social bias (our brave strong soldiers) over lack of fact to reach a conclusion about genetic fitness. Plus the sheer randomness of death, and the general brevity of war… I’d say war would be generally swamped by other effects over any genetically important time frame.
I am not even sure that except on the extreme margins, that strong going to fight, weak staying home is in fact a descriptor of war. Ancient or modern. Too much need of cannon fodder, need those mass levies of spearmen or equivalent.
When? Look at citizen levies in the ancient period; practically every male citizen of reasonable fitness, and non-slave.
I think it a massive leap to posit that being a slave during the ancient period showed any genetic unfitness - just bloody bad luck enough if your side lost in a war.
Eh? Nice book I recall but what the bloody hell does speculative fiction have to do with answering the question?