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...)

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 ,
@gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

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 OP ,
@user224@lemmy.sdf.org avatar
  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.

Fedizen ,

Call me when evolution figures out how to deal with guns and automotive accidents, which likely represent the largest selection factors on modern humans.

throwafoxtrot ,

Actually education is probably the largest selection factor. Educated people have less children than less educated people. Sometimes massively so. This is not necessarily linked with intelligence, it correlates more with socio economic factors.

Nibodhika ,

The problem is that people don't seem to realize the difference between causes of deaths and population declination. Even if for some reason humans everywhere agree on The Purge like laws except for every day, that wouldn't represent a risk for humanity (as long as governments still withhold their nuclear arsenal), some cities might be all but wiped out, but the chances are humans will survive. Anarchy was the status quo for the vast majority of human existence, and we're still here.

However other seemingly innocuous things are much worse for humanity as a whole, e.g. electing politicians who disregard climate change or that intend on using military power to take others territories can have much larger consequences on humanity as a whole. Your example is also great, because it's counter intuitive that higher education leads to population declination, that being said I believe that also wouldn't become an extinction event, surely the world would become a place where highly educated people want to have children before that.

marzhall ,

No. This is a result of thinking of natural selection as working towards an "absolute" better and away from an "absolute" weaker, as opposed to pushing in directions that are entirely defined by the situation.

Natural selection is this: in populations that make copies of themselves, and have mistakes in their copies, those mistakes that better fit the situation the copies find themselves in are more likely to be represented in that population later down the line.

Note that I didn't say, at any point, the phrase "SuRvIVaL oF ThE FiTtEsT." Those four words have done great harm in creating a perception that there's some absolute understanding of what's permanently, definitely, forever better, and natural selection was pushing us towards that. But no such thing is going on: a human may have been born smarter than everyone alive and with genes allowing them to live forever, but who died as a baby when Pompeii went off - too bad they didn't have lava protection. Evolution is only an observation that, statistically, mutations in reproduction that better fit the scenario a given population is in tend to stick around more than those that don't - and guess what? That's still happening, even to humans - it's just that with medical science, we're gaining more control of the scenario our population exists in.

Now, can we do things with medical science - or science in general - that hurts people? Sure, there's plenty of class action lawsuits where people sued because someone claimed their medicine was good and it turned out to be bad. But if you're asking "are we losing out on some 'absolute better' because we gained more control of the world we reproduce in," no, there is no "absolute" better. There's only "what's helpful in the current situation," and medicine lets us change the situation instead being forced to deal with a given situation, dying, and hoping one of our sibling mutated copies can cope.

Chef ,

there's plenty of class action lawsuits where people sued because someone claimed their medicine was good and it turned out to be bad.

It was only a couple of flipper babies…

Dogyote ,

Survival of the fittest doesn't mean what you think it means. Fitness, in the evolutionary sense, is a quantitative representation of individual reproductive success. So yes, the fittest of us do survive in the sense that their genes are passed on far more often than those that are less fit. For example, the overweight, nearsighted, diabetic car salesman with a lethal peanut allergy that has 16 children is more fit than most people on the planet.

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