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(oddly enough this was in part inspired by Cannerus's post on his chop job he wants, thanks weirdo )


Ok SO im curious what dakka thinks. Do any of you think the human gene is degrading over the time we have been in existence? Im curious simply because I know my family health history is not so good for us males, and reading about Cannerus's family history (in brief of course) Im wondering that if over time, we will have passed on so many bad things that humans in the future will be totally screwed. Kindda like bad gene seeds I suppose is 1 way of looking at it.

Also if you actually are in the know on these things would you mind posting some links or similar? Its got me wondering now


( and for the love of GOD dont start pulling this off topic and get it locked like the last one I started)

I put together a theory on this subject a few years ago. The jist of it is that human society is so good at taking care of each other that Darwin doesn't get his full cut. These bad genes are then passed on instead of dying out as per Darwin's theory.
In short, Humanitys' greatest asset is also a great weakness. Thus the tendancy towards "de-evolution".

Don't forget hand sanitizer. We will all die of the Flu in a few generations because we've never seen a germ before.

Quickly, we must splice our DNA with another creature, perhaps half man, half smurf:

Just kill me now...

there goes the neighborhood

Maybe in the Western countries, but not in poorer disease ridden developing countries with bad health care.

Soon the US and the EU will be toppled by the unstoppable juggernautic supermen from China well adapted to living in our smog and green house gas covered future.

Or perhaps it will be the Russian ubermensch, an indomitable half man-half chess computer fueled entirely by vodka and beets.

avantgarde wrote:Maybe in the Western countries, but not in poorer disease ridden developing countries with bad health care.

Soon the US and the EU will be toppled by the unstoppable juggernautic supermen from China well adapted to living in our smog and green house gas covered future.

Or perhaps it will be the Russian ubermensch, an indomitable half man-half chess computer fueled entirely by vodka and beets.

It will be Vodka and Turnips, Comrade. Good Russian Turnips!

Iur_tae_mont wrote:

avantgarde wrote:Maybe in the Western countries, but not in poorer disease ridden developing countries with bad health care.

Soon the US and the EU will be toppled by the unstoppable juggernautic supermen from China well adapted to living in our smog and green house gas covered future.

Or perhaps it will be the Russian ubermensch, an indomitable half man-half chess computer fueled entirely by vodka and beets.

It will be Vodka and Turnips, Comrade. Good Russian Turnips!

I saw we pass a resolution to deport the entire United States to Antartica.

Of the .01% that will survive, the new breed of Americans shall arise to take over the world.

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Considering the intelligent educated professionals have few children, and toothless one eyed illiterate welfare peasants have 20 each so they can get a bigger house, you might be onto something!

Although.. its not exactly how evolutionary biology works, but let's not have that get in the way of a good story!

Yeah, 'degrading' kind of assumes an intent or a final destination that evolution is moving away from.

Natural selection no longer takes place due to our developments as humans. Sucks I know thats why more and more hics are arriving. And hippies, God how I hate hippies.

Sorry WarOne, Antarctica is ours.

Bryce-2-Good87 wrote:Natural selection no longer takes place due to our developments as humans.

Yes it does. Human beings are an evolutionary blip in terms of the sheer timescale involved. Even so, natural selection has taken place during our lifetimes.

Personally I think we are a bit of an evolutionary backwater anyway. We succeed in clinging on to life despite our evolutionary heritage.
Evolution has given us the best and worst adaptation to life on our rock..the human brain.

Bryce-2-Good87 wrote:Natural selection no longer takes place due to our developments as humans.

Not at all, the selective pressures are simply different, they haven't been entirely lifted.

And regarding other comments on the thread, the idea that the stoopid people breed carelessly and with little restraint while the more intelligent people take care to have fewer isn't exactly a new idea as Kornbluth's The Marching Morons demonstrates when written in 1965.

Howard A Treesong wrote:

Bryce-2-Good87 wrote:Natural selection no longer takes place due to our developments as humans.

Not at all, the selective pressures are simply different, they haven't been entirely lifted.

And regarding other comments on the thread, the idea that the stoopid people breed carelessly and with little restraint while the more intelligent people take care to have fewer isn't exactly a new idea as Kornbluth's The Marching Morons demonstrates when written in 1965.

Thats ok, zombiepocalypse will clean out the shallow end of the gene pool. Its all good.

I have to state in my defense that I will ALWAYS HATE HIPPIES! A bit off topic I know, but man I hate them hippies.
And South African Emos.

Bah! Of course we have more health problems in our family history than we did even a hundred years ago. Our life expectancy is skyrocketing. Even a hundred years ago, it was rare to live past 80. 40 was the midlife crisis. Go back another century, and 60 becomes about as old as you'd get.

The longer our bodies operate, the more inventive ways they have to fail. How much lower would our cancer rate be if 90 percent of us died before we were 60? Would Alzheimers even be known, let alone a problem?

Thanks to modern medicine we live long past the time we would naturally survive. Thus, our medically supervised population commonly suffers from previously rare and unnatural problems. We can keep the dead alive for decades on machines! What we can do for the living is nothing short of miraculous.

Frazzled wrote:
Thats ok, zombiepocalypse will clean out the shallow end of the gene pool. Its all good.

On the contrary, it's the shallow end that has all the guns.

agnosto wrote:

Frazzled wrote:
Thats ok, zombiepocalypse will clean out the shallow end of the gene pool. Its all good.

On the contrary, it's the shallow end that has all the guns.

.........Feth. Could we possibly trick them into giving them to us?

Natural selection hasn's actually stopped. It's been postulated several times that over the course of the next few thousand years, humanity is going to split into two distinctive breeds, to be precise, the pretty intelligent ones, and the ugly stupid ones. Why is that?, you may ask.

Well, have you ever noticed that as a general rule of thumb(there will always be exceptions) attractive people marry attractive people? And intelligent people tend to marry other intelligent people? Stupid people tend to irritate intelligent people for very good reason. Anyway, the theory is that the attractives and intelligents will slowly begin to merge, and what will happen is you end up with genetic 'have's' and 'have nots'.

Of course, beauty is subjective, but the general consensus is that the more commonly seen physical traits will be the ones that manifest themselves amongst the new superior human race. So the men will be physically larger than the ones you generally get today, the women will have larger busts and so on. Those traits which enhance general attractiveness will be the ones that breed true.

It's an interesting concept, but means the short ugly stupid people on the other end kind of lose out.

But what if we are just evolving into the next phase?

Like a super-gorilla or something?

That is the nature of evolution. Whatever we become will be better suited to our environment than we are today. Even if it is a race of illiterate knuckle draggers that crack mirrors and curdle milk serving a race of intensely beautiful and intelligent superpeople.

The Time machine... Humans evolve into two races Eloi and Morlocks.
The Eloi are the beautiful people living a life of ease on the surface of the world.
The Morlocks are the ugly people, live underground and tend the machines that grant the eloi a life of comfort.
However, The Eloi also serve as a food supply for the Morlocks.

Do the ugly people win?

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