A bit of a weird question: Can modern medicine be a threat to humanity long-term by greatly reducing effects of natural selection?

OK, I hope my question doesn’t get misunderstood, I can see how that could happen.
Just a product of overthinking.

Idea is that we can live fairly easily even with some diseases/disorders which could be-life threatening. Many of these are hereditary.
Since modern medicine increases our survival capabilities, the “weaker” individuals can also survive and have offsprings that could potentially inherit these weaknesses, and as this continues it could perhaps leave nearly all people suffering from such conditions further into future.

Does that sound like a realistic scenario? (Assuming we don’t destroy ourselves along with the environment first…)

fiat_lux,

Oh cool, it's time to find out how much of a burden on humanity I am and whether I should have been left to die. Just hypothetically of course, I wouldn't want anyone to misunderstand. I always enjoy this question with my morning coffee.

PoisonTheWell,

Maybe you should skip these threads in the future. Don’t you think it’s important for people to understand this concept? Not everyone knows everything. Educate.

fiat_lux,

And miss out on the reminder that my existence is precarious and dependent on the good-will of the able-bodied? Nah, that's head-in-sand stuff. I prefer to remind everyone of what this line of questioning has led to in the past and the human consequences of discussing the rights of a group of people in the abstract.

Fedizen,

realistically industrialization and guns have a far larger impact on human evolution rn than healthcare.

fiat_lux,

Exactly, and yet the question is never "is agriculture a long-term threat to humanity?". It's always the people with medical issues who are acceptable first choices as society's sacrificial MacGuffin, long before we question any technology that benefits the person who is "just asking questions".

It's like we didn't already do Social Darwinism the first time. Super frustrating.

Rhynoplaz,

Agriculture has proven itself to be a boon to humanity. It’s our passion for excess that will kill us.

fiat_lux,

As has medicine and most other technologies. And yet... the question is never asked about the long term threats posed by people who aren't personally hunting and tracking and foraging.

Contramuffin,

Hmm, that’s an interesting question. I’m not an evolutionary biologist but I am a biologist (more specifically, a microbiogist).

The crux of the misunderstanding, I think, is that the definition of what counts as advantageous or “good” has changed over time. Very rapidly, in fact. The reason many diseases are still around today is because many genetic diseases offered a very real advantage in the past. The example that is often given is malaria and sickle cell anemia. Sickle cell anemia gives resistance to malaria, which is why it’s so prevalent in populations that historically have high incidence of malaria.

Natural selection doesn’t improve anything, it just makes animals more fit for their exact, immediate situation. That also means that it is very possible (and in fact, very likely) that the traits that we today associate with health will become disadvantageous in the future.

If we remember that natural selection isn’t trying to push humanity towards any goal, enlightenment, or good health, it becomes easier to acknowledge and accept that we can and should interfere with natural selection

shasta,

the traits that we today associate with health will become disadvantageous in the future.

Yeah I can think of a few, like aging. 10000 years from now kids will be saying, “wow, those poor unevolved savages lived such short lives and only really got to enjoy the first little bit of it before they started falling apart. They even had genetic engineering at the time! Imagine how many people would be alive today if they hadn’t been so scared to edit their genes to prevent aging.” Then their teacher would come over and explain that it wasn’t so easy at the time. There were still so many other problems they had to solve and related genes that need to be modified to avoid undesirable consequences, and let’s get back on topic: how many planets fall under the rule of the galactic empire including our own planet Urth?

Ibaudia,
@Ibaudia@lemmy.world avatar

If genetic research gets to a point where we can beat any mutations, then probably not.

UnpluggedFridge,

No. Human evolution is driven primarily by mate selection.

r3df0x,

Sexual selection usually takes care of problems like this. People with antisocial tendencies find it extremely difficult to find partners.

Olhonestjim,

Unfortunately, not when they have money.

Churbleyimyam,

I would say that the greater the population (in part thanks to medicine) the greater the chances of beneficial mutations occurring and entering the collective gene pool. I see medicine as a safety net. I’m sure it’s more complicated than that, but that’s my professional take on it, as a musician.

gandalf_der_12te,

I don’t think so.

For one, natural selection selects the “fittest”, but what the “fittest” means, changes over time.

Also, there’s lots of other factors that you may have overlooked, such as sexual selection probably playing a bigger factor.

bear,

Yes. Without the selection pressures to minimize disease, we observe more disease in the population over time. This reduces our fitness for any environment without the artificial benefit of modern medicine.

People don’t want to understand because it is difficult and challenges their worldview. Is this an existential risk? Yes. Can we do anything about it? Yes.

Tehdastehdas,
@Tehdastehdas@lemmy.world avatar

I expect gene editing soon to become so cheap that everyone starts customising their children, resulting in a situation analogous to where dogs are now: extreme variability improving the chances for survival by making sure we have the needed people for any situation except gamma ray burst which requires backups far from Earth.

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/967fb815-cf6b-48b0-9de6-20582d37f65d.jpeg

creditCrazy,
@creditCrazy@lemmy.world avatar

I’ve been working on a sci Fi show where humans have this but they also have the ability to change their current physiology by infecting themselves with modified strains of cancer that slowly replaces you’re body with one you downloaded off the Internet this technology has also sorta obsoleted medicine because if you have a broken leg or infected with a fatel desese so long as the injury doesn’t affect your brain you can just replace your entire body by infecting yourself with genetically modified cancer

ParabolicMotion,

I’m sure you’ll be asking your first responder this question while he or she is in the middle of performing CPR on you, and calling for an AED, right? You’re not regretting the discovery of 30-2, are you?

user224,
  1. You did misunderstand the point of this question.
  2. Yes, I’d prefer not being resuscitated. If I am finally dead, let it stay that way.
ParabolicMotion,

I don’t think I misunderstood. You see dropping dead as your prize for losing in some type of social Darwin competition. You don’t see medical advances and life saving measures as being part of our evolution, as a species, to better survive? No offense, but regardless of how you feel about being resuscitated, some paramedic, or other first responder is still going to try to save your life. They can’t exactly stop the process and ask you for your opinion if you have no pulse, dude.

Dogyote,

Bro you did not understand anything he asked about

ParabolicMotion,

First of all, it isn’t “bro”. Secondly, I’m trying to make a point that valuing the mental capabilities of people is worth mentioning, when the OP seems to dwell on the physical worth of a human. Part of the evolutionary process is long-term problem solving skills, isn’t it? We create ways to resuscitate people, cures for diseases, and solutions for other medical problems. OP insists that gives us weaker people that continue living in our society? Weaker in what regard? If all cancer is suddenly cured, then which people are weaker? I knew a girl that had an intellectual disability, but was fairly physically fit. She could run well, and walked and talked as well as most people. Would you want to encourage her to have children, while discouraging some woman with breast cancer from having children?

I think I understood OP fairly well. I just question if he wants to limit procreation amongst the disabled. Remember that Hitler wanted to do that.

Dogyote,

You need to read a genetics textbook and then some evolutionary biology so you understand OPs question.

ParabolicMotion,

Yeah, I guess college biology textbooks and Charles Darwin’s origin of species weren’t enough for me. I shouldn’t try to stop OP’s hint at arguing against letting people with physical disabilities breed.

Dogyote,

They never said nor implied that

ParabolicMotion,

This part made me think OP was implying that they shouldn’t breed if they have a physical ailment, or disability:

https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/a05ccc4c-ae55-4f32-8d0a-412e023ece4b.jpeg

Dogyote,

Weaker is in quotes, which suggests to me they don’t mean weaker, just those carrying potentially deleterious traits. Plus, if those people are reproducing, those traits can’t be that bad anyway.

JackbyDev,

Natural selection led to our intelligence to be able to made medicine in the first place.

Cosmicomical,

The more varied the sample of individuals you can afford to keep alive in your population, the more chances you have that a subset of them will be able to withstand random changes in the fitness function. If the environment changes abruptly, you will have a hard time adapting as a species if you only ever supported people “within the norm”. What happens in those cases is called extinction.

Paragone,

Your question is actually a subset of:

“Can short-term-gain actually fatally undermine long-term-viability?”

I don’t consider the question incorrect, at all.

Peter F. Drucker, in one of his books, has it that the “Health Care Industry” hired him,

and one of the 1st things he did, was…

told them, bluntly to their face, directly, approximately that

( this gets the gist of it, but this is from-memory, not exact/verbatim )

“You aren’t the Health Care Industry, you are the Illness Care Industry, and you aren’t fooling anybody, AND you aren’t improving your credibility by speaking falsely”

Does taking all kinds of chemicals, so that one can be a “better bodybuilder”, and then ending up in a population who dies significantly younger than average, due to heart-failures, be considered “good”??

Obviously, to the corporate-“persons” who make money having as much of the population addicted to that distortion as possible, YES!! PROFITS!!

Unfortunately, it isn’t possible, in any political system, to get decisions made by correctness, accuracy, reason, objectivity, maximum-benefit-for-greatest-number-of-dimensions-of-the-population, etc…

The lobbies won’t allow that.

Remember Covid?

Remember the people who were insisting that immunization was a scam, & that people should be relying on their body’s innate robust immune-system?

These were people who consider yogic-living to be corruption, and heavy-meat-eating to be “good”, nitrates in meats, & all.

The lobbies have overrun all discussion, not allowing objectivity to own any territory.

I think you are right, but the right-answer to it includes simultaneously improving the health of individuals, of entire-populations, AND getting people out immersed in nature more, so as to have built-up more-powerful immune-systems, in the 1st place!

Selectively extinguish some infectious-diseases ( I’d target rabies, ebola, HPV because it causes cervical cancer, & a few others, for extinguishment ), while dealing-with as many as we viably can,

in the hopes that “surprises” will not be able to trash/wreck our innate immune-systems, see?

_ /\ _

Nibodhika,

There are already lots of great answers, I would like to point out that Natural Selection doesn’t care about the individual at all, it cares about the population, e.g. internal gestation, do you think any individual enjoys carrying a baby inside them? Preventing them from doing anything during the gestation period, being an easier prey to predators, etc… Unfortunately for the individual, creatures that carry their unborn babies inside them are less likely to abandon them even temporarily while seeking food, they’re also more easily kept warm, so for the species as a whole it’s better that there be internal gestation.

In short more individuals = better, imagine you have two populations, one with only 10 strong individuals, and one with 100 individuals of which only 10 are strong, which do you think is more likely to survive? And that is even assuming a strong/weak deterministic position, which is not the case for anything.

throwafoxtrot,

Plenty of answers already.

I’d like to point out that it’s not medicine alone, but empathy that changes natural selection. We have evidence of our ancestors caring for members of their tribe that would have been unable to survive otherwise.

But while in some edge cases (some diseases) you could make an argument that it’s bad for future humanity for some reason, it’s overall good, because it enables a larger population. And a larger population has a better chance of mutating to fit changing environments. Or to phrase it differently: diversification comes first, selection can wait.

Dogyote,

Populations do not mutate. Mutations occur randomly within individuals, they do not occur to fit a changing environment, they only occur randomly. A mutation can spread through a population if nothing selects against it. Selection never waits, it’s always there in one form or another.

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