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Medical advancements have increased the lifespan of humanity from the average of 40's to the 70's and 80's.

We have made medical advancements to stop/cure/prevent so many diseases.

We have dveloped birthing and surgical techniques to help different types of children to be born and survive (mental retardation, congenital heart defects...just examples).

Here is the question......

Are we unintentionally creating a weaker humanity through our use of medical technology?

To put it in other terms: should evolution be allowed to naturally keep our population controlled or should we do everything within our technology to stop the natural adaptation of humanity to its environment?

Evolution doesn't make a species "stronger," it makes a species more adapted to its environment. Part of that environment is the medical technology available. Evolution will make us a species better adapted to our current environment, including available medical technology, social conditions, etc. with the caveat that evolution moves a heck of a lot slower than those things change, so its effects will be questionable.

Yeah, let's just start killing everyone we perceive as weak.

But by adapting to its environment does a species not become stronger?

If a body can adapt (ie evolve) to destroy an invading virus or bacteria that is in the environment....is not the body therefore stronger for having done that?

It is indeed a common misconception that evolution makes things 'stronger'. It generally changes a creatures adaptability.

Polar bears have clear hair covering their skin to they appear white. This allows them to sneak up on prey and eat it. If there was a random event that turns all snow/ice/cold things purple, soon all your polar bears will die.

Actually there was a study that came out a few years ago, it suggested that several thousand year in the future humanity might diverge into two distinct species. One race of super fit intelligent coffee skinned people (due to racial integration) and one race of sub-human goblinoid.

 Soladrin wrote:
Yeah, let's just start killing everyone we perceive as weak.

But who determines who or what is weakness? You? The doctor? The president? The pope?

If you can catch them and kill them, then you win.

Social Darwinism at its finest.

 TheMeanDM wrote:
But by adapting to its environment does a species not become stronger?

If a body can adapt (ie evolve) to destroy an invading virus or bacteria that is in the environment....is not the body therefore stronger for having done that?

No, it means the body is better suited to that environment. There will be costs to the adaptation as well. It doesn't become stronger in an absolute sense.

Evolution could, for instance, cause us to become overall stupider and shorter-lived, if that was more beneficial to our genes passing on.

That evolution doesn't make us "better" in an absolute sense (and really, it doesn't necessarily make us better by our standards at all, just more likely to transmit our genes onwards) is really, really important and I can't stress it enough.

 welshhoppo wrote:
One race of super fit intelligent coffee skinned people (due to racial integration) and one race of sub-human goblinoid.

Are those goblinoids going to be descended from the hunched computer addicted pale skinned antisocial internet trolls of today?

 TheMeanDM wrote:

 welshhoppo wrote:
One race of super fit intelligent coffee skinned people (due to racial integration) and one race of sub-human goblinoid.

Are those goblinoids going to be descended from the hunched computer addicted pale skinned antisocial internet trolls of today?

Yes actually All the coach potatoes and everyone who spends far too much time browsing internet forums.........

Looks like we know where the Dakkaites are heading too then.

What do we define as stronger?

Physically stronger?
Stronger at resisting environmental conditions?
Stronger at combating bacteria/viral attacks?

Other definitions perhaps?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Interesting thought about polar bears.

So a sudden, drastic environmental change *will* cause the extinction rather than further adaptation of a race?

If we are heading towards two races it will be because of political changes to the effect.

Create a master race of genetically engineered persons, and also tweak others so they are progressively inferior to act as the bulk populace.

The Nazis would have loved this.

 TheMeanDM wrote:
What do we define as stronger?

Physically stronger?
Stronger at resisting environmental conditions?
Stronger at combating bacteria/viral attacks?

Other definitions perhaps?


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Interesting thought about polar bears.

So a sudden, drastic environmental change *will* cause the extinction rather than further adaptation of a race?

The reason I say to stay away from "stronger" is it's a loaded word. It implies better. What evolution does is makes a species more likely to pass on its genes (by killing off those of the species who aren't as effective at it) in the environment that it's in. It doesn't make things better either in an absolute sense or in a subjective human sense.

Part of why that's really important is getting it wrong can lead you to eugenics, which is more or less what your OP is about.

 TheMeanDM wrote:
But by adapting to its environment does a species not become stronger?

If a body can adapt (ie evolve) to destroy an invading virus or bacteria that is in the environment....is not the body therefore stronger for having done that?

Not necessarily, the sabre-tooth was incredibly adapted to its environment, it was so adapted in fact that it sent its prey species into extinction, leading to their own demise because they could not hunt anything else. I would hardly call driving yourself to extinction making yourself stronger.

The point of technology is to stop having to adapt to the environment and start adapting the environment to you.

All this "allowing the weak to live and breed weakens the human race" nonsense is simply the old tiger of eugenics in new stripes and like eugenics should be squashed flat and belittled at every turn when we got past the point of needing survival of the fittest ages ago.

I'll also go ahead and godwin this thread by pointing out that this was the same reasoning used in Nazi Germany to purge the country of the infirm of mind and body and create their race of Aryan ubermensch, causing massive amounts of suffering that it took a world war to end. Suffice to say, I am not pleased that people keep on thinking that they can somehow restore some of the core tenents of Nazism or similar eugenics programs around the world to socially acceptable status by waving around bull about BIOTRUTHS. Inadvertent genocide is still genocide and you should feel bad about even suggesting that eugenics is in any way okay.

In any case the coming revolution of transhumanism means that eugenics will be double pointless when you can skip over selective breeding and just cyborgify/genemod yourself.

I think the answer is 'it depends'. If medical technology is allowing for people with genetic conditions that would otherwise be selected out of the environment to continue to survive and reproduce, thereby allowing for the continuation (and possibly spread) of said condition, then yes, technically we are engineering a 'weaker' race (in the sense that future generations will be more prone to these abnormalities, defects, and conditions that will make them more sickly, less likely to survive, and more dependent on medical care). As for non-genetic factors, no, not really, because those are non-hereditary issues that won't be passed along.

Many genetic defects started as genetic advantages; Sickle Cell for example might kill you if left untreated, but it also makes you quite resilient against Malaria (and you'd probably die of something else long before sickle cell killed you anyway).

We've just replaced the need for such odd-ball genetic quirks with modern medical science. Today, sickle cell is no longer advantageous but it once was very advantageos when you're living in sub-saharan Africa and the bugs are bity.

Interesting, learned something today, though I struggle to think what the advantages of something like Huntingtons disease (which mind you AFAIK we have no real way to treat) might be.

 welshhoppo wrote:

 TheMeanDM wrote:

 welshhoppo wrote:
One race of super fit intelligent coffee skinned people (due to racial integration) and one race of sub-human goblinoid.

Are those goblinoids going to be descended from the hunched computer addicted pale skinned antisocial internet trolls of today?

Yes actually All the coach potatoes and everyone who spends far too much time browsing internet forums.........

Looks like we know where the Dakkaites are heading too then.

But remember that's not a naturally breeding population...

Oh my. Where to start...

Individuals do not adapt in evolutionary terms. Individuals either are or are not able to propagate their genes. Evolution, very simply, can be defined as the change in gene frequency in a population over time.

Populations evolve over time. One creature does not.

There are many, many people alive today because of human technology. Farming was the number one contribution to increasing human populations way back when. Did farming allow "weaker" people to survive? Compared to what? Its a false logic situation. Medical advances allow more people to survive and reproduce. All this means, evolutionarily speaking, is a more genetically varied population.

This concept of judging the survival and reproduction of people based on arbitrarily defined "weaknesses" is a bit of a hint of the old fashioned "great chain of being" concept of evolution. This is where humans place value on traits that make humans "superior", particularly certain humans. Specifically, this concept was used to justify the superiority of the white, European male over all other humans, animals, etc. Its all a bunch of human fantasy, though.

Nature doesn't place moral or ethical value on traits. Nature is about finding food, keeping from being food, and living long enough to reproduce. That's it. Mammals aren't "better" or "more evolved" than fish. That's a human value judgement fantasy.

Finally, and why I am writing so much, the concept of placing value judgements on heritable traits is completely antithetical to modern science. Its something that lingers on, and it should not (progression, below, means evolving to more complex/more "evolved" states). Emphasis mine:

"But this is not just an academic issue: the dangerous consequences of keeping a progressionist language alive extend, potentially at least, to critically important social issues: “an abandonment of progressivism in evolution rightfully undermines the unfortunate conflation of Darwinian evolutionary biology with social Darwinism. … Social Darwinism involves notions such as inherent progress in evolution and inherently favored classes or groups of humans as a basis for moral norms and social attitudes and action. … With regard to understanding the role of progress in evolution, the implications for getting evolution wrong are much graver than simply getting it wrong” (Johnson et al2012, p. 137). "

Also, from same paper (because I'm sure it should be clearly stated, again): "Evolution seems to follow an intrinsic trend towards increasingly complex organisms as a result of people concentrating on the small number of large, complex organisms that inhabit the right-hand tail of the complexity distribution and ignoring the simpler and much more common organisms..."

From. http://www.evolution-outreach.com/content/6/1/18

So, to sum up: Human environment and selective pressures are significantly influenced by human technological advances. We make our environment. Judging certain traits as inferior because they are distasteful is a human thought fallacy and irrelevant to evolution. Confusing human value judgements with evolutionary fitness is flat out wrong, both factually and morally, and dangerous.

 Krellnus wrote:

 TheMeanDM wrote:
But by adapting to its environment does a species not become stronger?

If a body can adapt (ie evolve) to destroy an invading virus or bacteria that is in the environment....is not the body therefore stronger for having done that?

Not necessarily, the sabre-tooth was incredibly adapted to its environment, it was so adapted in fact that it sent its prey species into extinction, leading to their own demise because they could not hunt anything else. I would hardly call driving yourself to extinction making yourself stronger.

Not quite exactly what happened.

For one we don't know what specifically led to their extinction. Most popular theory was that it was a combination of loss of primary prey (megafauna) and competition with newly arrived humans. It was NOT because they were so good at killing things that they drove other species to extinction, and thereby themselves.

Eugenics always seems so deceptively simple....

 Easy E wrote:
Eugenics always seems so deceptively simple....

All pseudo-science hokum is, otherwise it wouldn't get populace support.

No, because the majority of reproduction is going on between average people. The people that are being saved are outliers in terms of the overall population. It's the same reason why a society as depicted in Idiocracy would never actually come to pass: The same people have been squeezing out the same babies since humanity started more or less.

What is eugenics, as you understand it to be/mean?

Human Beings are physically one of the weakest species on the planet. W/O Medical care we rarely live past 40. Our primary adaptibility is our intelligence, our ability to communicate and create. Our Upright body with dexterous fingers is not adapted to any form of enviroment. We can survive an most enviroments due to our ability to rapidly adapt.

 hotsauceman1 wrote:
Human Beings are physically one of the weakest species on the planet. W/O Medical care we rarely live past 40. Our primary adaptibility is our intelligence, our ability to communicate and create. Our Upright body with dexterous fingers is not adapted to any form of enviroment. We can survive an most enviroments due to our ability to rapidly adapt.

We also have great endurance. We may not be as fast as a Cheetah but we can certainly chase it long after it's exhausted itself from running.

Modern living does it. There was a program about the Romans in Britain and the guy pointed out how much weaker we are compared to that era. Ran through a typical day for a Roman soldier working Hadrian's Wall. Made me wince Just think of how much stronger a Viking warrior would of been from all that rowing. Then there's the research they did on the bones of the archers & sailors from the Mary Rose, showed how powerful their arms and chests were.

Yes we are weaker, but we do live longer and have a better quality of life (in the West that is)

 TheMeanDM wrote:
What is eugenics, as you understand it to be/mean?

The idea that you can build a better human with selective breeding, aka dehumanizing everyone who doesn't meat an arbitrary standard of superiority.

 Orlanth wrote:
If we are heading towards two races it will be because of political changes to the effect.

Create a master race of genetically engineered persons, and also tweak others so they are progressively inferior to act as the bulk populace.

The Nazis would have loved this.

I doubt there will ever be only two races since 1. race is a "social" construct 2. the physical characteristics that we ascribe to different races are products of their environment.