Is Modern Medicine Doing a Disservice?

Off Topic
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I did not read the thread, so this might already have been addressed but:
Natural selection has not stopped like people seem to think it has.

The advent of industry and modern medicine just means that it no longer selects for the traits it used to. In a modern human society we may no longer select for the biggest muscles or the best immune systems, but that does not me there is no selection. It simply means other traits are favored.

So ya, there is no ‘weakening’ and we are not ‘evolving backwards.’ People often seem to think of natural selection as a process with a goal that is trying to produce a ‘better’ species. In reality, it’s just a name for the fact that some stuff procreates and other stuff doesn’t.

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I actually got into an argument about this with one of my friends last month. My position is similar to the OP’s. Modern medicine does “dilute” the gene pool by allowing inferior genetics/intelligence to be passed on. But that’s ok. Society needs stupid people to consume all of the stupid shit that the smart people make and sell to them. It improves the lifestyle of the people that have what it takes to figure the system out.

We, as intelligent, health conscious people (well, most of us on this forum) know better than to breed with people that are fat and stupid. And the best part of this whole thing is that ANY one of them can do something about it!

They can go on a diet, make money and hire a trainer, start a business, go to college and improve their education. There are NO boundaries in their way, other than their own stupidity, emotional immaturity and laziness.

Some people say that it’s only in the US that we have this opportunity, and I call BULLSHIT. Some of the most successful people in the US are not from here. They came from somewhere else because they had a pair of ball and a dream. There are people from every country on the planet in the US, and some of them are successful, some of them aren’t (kinda like our own indigenous population). There are also people in other countries that don’t leave that climb to the top, step by bloody step - and that’s ok.

If you want it bad enough you will make it happen. Whatever it takes. If not, then enjoy your job at Walmart.

Back on track, I think that modern medicine IS diluting our gene pool and that natural selection will prevent it from ever becoming a problem. I see it as a good thing. Modern medicine is remarkable in some ways by allowing people returning from war as amputees to have a semblance of normalcy; or a woman with breast cancer to get a double mastectomy, get some new tits and go on with life… I am all about this type of treatment and believe that it is a good thing.

As for Birth and Death, We as a society have a lot to decide. If there is no cure for a disease, and someone is in a coma or being kept alive by a machine with little hope that they will ever wake up, I say pull the plug. Who the hell would want to live like that? Also, as someone mentioned earlier about saving premature babies. Where do you draw the line? Personally, I would say that a person with good genetics and reasonably responsible behavior can carry a child for at least 7 or 8 months - if you can’t manage to do that, then perhaps you aren’t fit to breed… It’s harsh, but true. Having kids isn’t a “right” as a human being. You can hope for it, but in life there are no guarantees about anything. People who were born with silver spoon in their mouth and never had to struggle to get anywhere in life tend to have a sense of entitlement. I deserve to have a good job, I deserve to have universal healthcare, I deserve to be able to do what I want, etc…

You are born. You do your best to achieve the highest status your intelligence/genetic advantages enable you to. You attempt to reproduce with the highest status/genetic specimen you are able to attract. You attempt to give your offspring an advantage. You die.

Modern medicine helps us achieve these goals, and those of us lucky enough not to need the advantage it provides will attract a higher quality mate. Good for us.

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[quote]angry chicken wrote:
I actually got into an argument about this with one of my friends last month. My position is similar to the OP’s. Modern medicine does “dilute” the gene pool by allowing inferior genetics/intelligence to be passed on…

We, as intelligent, health conscious people (well, most of us on this forum) know better than to breed with people that are fat and stupid. [/quote]

Well that’s what I was saying above.

But what about when your descendants use their descendants for food? Besides, Morlocks are ugly as hell and have poor posture.

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Let’s see… we’re now at the point where we’ve become so weak and helpless that we need a pill to help us sleep, help us stay awake, help us cope with sadness, help us get a boner, help us get pregnant, help us prevent pregnancy, help us lose weight without exercise, help us with simple daily pain, help us focus on the task at hand, help us fight simple infections, help us manage blood pressure, cholesterol, blood sugar, help us quit addictions to other pharmaceuticals, … etc.

Some may call this progress.

Bullshit! So many of these things we need help with are quite manageable with proper diet, exercise, rest, and responsible “take control” attitude.

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[quote]Gregus wrote:
Does modern medicine allow for the survival of inferior and recessive genes in people? Is it paradoxical in the sense that as it saves one individual it allows that individual to pass on their weaker less resistant genes to others and make them weaker?

Nature has a way to survive only the fittest and healthiest most robust subjects of the highest adaptability and intelligence. Are we short circuiting that system with modern medicine? Are weakening humanity?

I know the very topic is very sensitive and i certainly would not follow any kind of logic like that if i or anyone i know was in sick. [/quote]

I’ll take a stab at this. First off, when you say weaker, what do you mean? The guy that can wrestle with a bear? Or the guy who invented the uzi? Generally humans are strongly social animals and it is extremely rare that we end up having to deal with predators in anything approaching a fair way. Matter of fact, all the ventilation about us being at the top of the food chain is stupid; most humans have never even seen the food chain, let alone been in it.

So here is something to think about – disasters. What do people really do in a disaster? Hollywood says we all run around in circles in stark panic and die, roughly in reverse cast order. While this can happen, much more common is that people get very quiet and passive. They then easily follow a lead. This is not good in a lot of modern scenarios: For instance, for airplanes that crash intact, most often people sit safely strapped to their seats and burn to death. This is why flight attendant safety training now has them screaming instructions at the passengers.

Ok, so here is how it is supposed to work. Nasty saber-toothed kitty comes out of the bushes. The guy with ADD (shifts focus every 2 seconds) spots this and sounds an alarm. The entire group stops what it is doing. The autistic kid (who doesn’t react fearfully) faces the tiger. The entire group follows. Someone picks up a rock – then they all do. Someone throws a rock… So tiger, who wanted to pick off one of the stragglers is now confronting a whole army of the buggers who are armed. Since the group’s safety requires a large number of different talents (and an awful lot of syndromes psychiatrists fret about are probably extremely reasonable survival adaptations in other contexts) rather than simple raw strength, human societies tend to accumulate a wide spectrum of behaviors that individually would be fatal.

One last little thought I’ve been mulling as of late is Malthus’ grim prediction. That is, that the speed at which population increases always will outstrip farm output, so any day now we will have a catastrophic famine and… Wait a minute – it’s been nearly 200 years since the good vicar told us civilization’s end was at hand. What happened? Ideas. Yes. Innovations in farming have canceled this out to the point that we have agricultural excess (famine is caused mostly by political failures, such as in N. Korea, rather than a bona fide world-wide shortage). And so it goes with people and humans. It is ideas and the ability to pass them around that is the important point. We have slowly evolved to use this, along with prehensile hands to make tools. When you talk about survival of the fittest and how the human race is decaying you might want to ask the saber-toothed tiger about that. I think that any creature in the Animal Kingdom would find your hand-wringing a touch on the surreal side, as they scurry in our sewers and dodge cars.

And as always, I might just be full of shit…

– jj

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[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
As TC has pointed out, instinct will cause each to mate with the highest apparent genetic quality mammal they can find that will accept them.

Therefore there will be little to no reduction in degree of evolutionary improvement of those at the higher end of apparent genetic quality.

However many who in the past due to genetic problems would not have survived to reproduce, will due to medicine survive, and find others who likewise rate low in the genetic sweepstakes.

The greater divergence becomes in apparent (or actual) genetic quality between these groups, the less interbreeding will occur between the groups, at some point probably coming to no interbreeding.

At this point total divergence will have occurred. One group likely will live underground, and the other aboveground.

Unfortunately those of the group that lives underground will probably eat those of the group that lives aboveground.[/quote]

Lol. I see what you did there.

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[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
As TC has pointed out, instinct will cause each to mate with the highest apparent genetic quality mammal they can find that will accept them.

Therefore there will be little to no reduction in degree of evolutionary improvement of those at the higher end of apparent genetic quality.

However many who in the past due to genetic problems would not have survived to reproduce, will due to medicine survive, and find others who likewise rate low in the genetic sweepstakes.

The greater divergence becomes in apparent (or actual) genetic quality between these groups, the less interbreeding will occur between the groups, at some point probably coming to no interbreeding.

At this point total divergence will have occurred. One group likely will live underground, and the other aboveground.

Unfortunately those of the group that lives underground will probably eat those of the group that lives aboveground.[/quote]

LOL

Seen/Read The Time Machine recently?

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Ladies and gentlemen, may I present the Jewfin. The pinnacle of human evolution.

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Caught the recent movie on TV a couple of months back; liked the book a lot as a kid and also re-read back in my 20’s.

[quote]tom8658 wrote:
Bill Roberts wrote:
As TC has pointed out, instinct will cause each to mate with the highest apparent genetic quality mammal they can find that will accept them.

Therefore there will be little to no reduction in degree of evolutionary improvement of those at the higher end of apparent genetic quality.

However many who in the past due to genetic problems would not have survived to reproduce, will due to medicine survive, and find others who likewise rate low in the genetic sweepstakes.

The greater divergence becomes in apparent (or actual) genetic quality between these groups, the less interbreeding will occur between the groups, at some point probably coming to no interbreeding.

At this point total divergence will have occurred. One group likely will live underground, and the other aboveground.

Unfortunately those of the group that lives underground will probably eat those of the group that lives aboveground.

LOL

Seen/Read The Time Machine recently?[/quote]

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[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
Caught the recent movie on TV a couple of months back; liked the book a lot as a kid and also re-read back in my 20’s.

[/quote]

That movie sucked. Considering what they had to work with, I expected a huge improvement over the original.

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[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
As TC has pointed out, instinct will cause each to mate with the highest apparent genetic quality mammal they can find that will accept them.

Therefore there will be little to no reduction in degree of evolutionary improvement of those at the higher end of apparent genetic quality.

However many who in the past due to genetic problems would not have survived to reproduce, will due to medicine survive, and find others who likewise rate low in the genetic sweepstakes.

The greater divergence becomes in apparent (or actual) genetic quality between these groups, the less interbreeding will occur between the groups, at some point probably coming to no interbreeding.

At this point total divergence will have occurred. One group likely will live underground, and the other aboveground.

Unfortunately those of the group that lives underground will probably eat those of the group that lives aboveground.[/quote]

Hardy-har-har. Wells we being a good little socialist when he wrote that book. The point of it all was that class differences between the haves and have-nots would cause society to diverge into the oppressed working classes – who ended up starving after the last war – but still dutifully tended their machines, finally eating the idle rich who lived on the surface. This struck a strong chord at the time since there were a lot of racial theories about why the poor of the Earth ended up that way and actually showing that class differences would lead to the ruin of humans into two essentially subhuman species (monsters and idiots) was seen as very unsettling.

So tell me people, with all this talk of eugenics and such, why haven’t you all actually talked about using these abilities? What good is breeding a better human if we’re still going to be sitting on our fat asses watching Gilligan’s Island re-runs and midget Kabuki porn?

How many people actually live up to their genetic potential? Do you? Why buy a Maserati to keep it in the garage?

And as always, I might just be full of shit…

– jj

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Bring out the torches.