This morning's discussion.
 

Humans in the developed world are the only animal to actively encourage the breeding of "inferior" successors.

It's the afternoon now ;)

bloody hell time moves on

Natural selection suggests the weak die and the strong survive. Well in todays society of keeping diseased, mentally and physically handicapped people alive when they would have otherwise died and allowing them to have children, surely we are messing up the human gene pool for the future.

My thoughts exactly.

Any with (many of the) the mentally adapt people working and perusing "careers" over families - we are producing less intelligent people.

Does that mean if you prang your car or get ill you dont want the ambulance to be called!!

We studied this in biology at A level and it is a potential problem, but how many otherwise healthy people has medication saved the lives of?

A moral issue you will never answer, but i am pro abortion when the child has a seroius birth defect

Just my veiw, or have i got i wrong did you mean all the Trisha watching, job shy, dole claiming inbreds?

Let's get rid of medicine altogether then (including band aids):D

RayC - I didn't imply any of your suggestions! You came up with them all on our own.

Some of them are justified!

Natural Selection is an important thing, the trouble is humans keep messing with it. In the 3rd world there is a culture that children look after their parents in their old age. Many children die before adulthood, so have a lot of children to ensure somebody is around to look after you. Once medicine etc steps in then the population explodes and the agriculture can't support them all. This kind of thin happened in the West, we got round the problem by plundering other countries and exploiting them to ensure we were OK.

It can only carry on for so long, if we slow down the evolutionary process by keeping the weaker genes in the pool, and continue to over populate and over farm we will end up wiping ourselves out and then something that is evolving well will come along and finish off the survivors :D

Yes and what we as a society is doing is the complete opposite. Those quoted were trying to speed up and direct evolution to suit their aims. Society is trying to slow down and dilute evolution to be PC so that people don't get left out. Longer term, the society approach could be the bigger disater, although I by no means advocate eugenics either. Just think we need to let nature take its course to some extent as well.

But that is a problem, you cannot let nature take it's course to an extent. You either do, or you don't there is no in between.

Hopefully I will be dead long before the inevitability that is everyone in the world being a chav. ;)

Geezer

Every other species survies change and becomes better suited to that change becuase the strongest / those most suited to those changes survive when others do not. It occurs because of breeding and they "naturally" become better suited. As humans, we take those who under normal circumstances would not survive (accidents accepted) and help to maintain their genes in the pool when if left to nature they would no longer be there. As a result instead of strengthening the gene pool (naturally, we are not talking eugenics here) we artificially weaken it, keeping genes about that are not advantageous to have, thus creating more problems for future doctors to have to find solutions to to maintain unproductive genes in the pool. What you are suggesting is backwards, you are suggesting we thwat nature's inbuilt ability to remove the genes that not useful and improve itself.

It's been shown that natural selection doesn't work in favour of the most successful, most intelligent humans anymore though, the less successful, less intelligent ones are having far more babies and as a result reducing the average intelligence of the overall gene pool.

It is an articficial situation, all other species would most likely be unable to feed themselves as a result and would die. This is an accident and isn't really a major factor in natural selection, unless the reason for the break is a gene that tells cows to climb trees and jump out thinking they can fly. In hat case, the removal of such a gene from the pool would be advantageous :D

I am not trying to propose a solution saying that we should stop treatment at point X and let people die. I am just saying we are creating an artificial situation where genes that are not beneficial to humans as a whole are being maintained in the gene pool, which is making the specied weaker, rather than stronger to changes in environment. The effects are going to take millenia to be seen I suspect and no doubt some people will say "Ahh but we will have cured all diseases and gene defects by then". Personally I doubt we will and I don't know that the world would be a better place even if we did.

Avalanche - that was the point I was hopeing to raise

Ah well it's not affected me

speaking of articficially modifying our enviroment - are we pushing our selves toward a "gattica" like situation where we are having our gene's cleaned of any defects & advantageous genes promoted to improve the suitability / prosperity of an individual?

The technology is there - it's just we are bound by law not to impliment it

That is making the assumption that intelligence is the most important factor in surviving (propogating ones genes), personally I think it is way down the list

Clearly it is (way down the list) since it more intelligent people are having less babies. It does kind of raise the question of whether natural selection works for humans though.

That's essentially what the eugenics side of things was about, but done in a rather more droconian way. Rather than allowing everybody to improve their genes, they just stopped the "lesser mortals" from breeding, in Hitler's case by gassing them in huge numbers.

I suspect that if people did start doing that, they inclination would be to "super purify" ones genes and choose 10 out of 10 ratings for every option, which in turn would probably be detremental. We need a degree of mutation and imperfection as some of them are beneficial to the changing environment. Humans would most likely choose to be "slim, tall, good looking, have a big penis / pair breasts" and forget about some of the more essential things!

It's not the most important factor in OUR enviroment currently (when having babies) - but it is the most important in the corp world.

When / if our "natural" gene pool becomes saturated with the less intelligent baby-makers, is modifying it the only way to ensure the "intelligent" people strive? (without modifing the enviroment to discourage the baby-makers from prospering).

Otherwise (eventually) we (humans) will be slipping backwards, surely only leading to our demise

Some people shouldn't be allowed to paddle in the shallow end of the gene pool! ;)

It needs to work otherwise long term we are knackered as a species. Our environment will change over time, as a species we need to be able to adapt to handle that. Now we could say "next ice age, big deal, we have heating and stuff" but food will be a far bigger problem in reality, so those who can digest food better will be in a far better position to survive.

Intelligence is part of the natural selection process though. I am going to make a generalisation here, but for arguments sake, lets say more intelligent people breed less - becuase they would rather persue a career and material goods than have children. I also put forward that having an IQ over 140 is not required to survive, being able to find food, water, shelter and somebody to breed with is far more important (as the Chavs show :D ) So the for the survival of humans as a species, intelligence is not that important and so it is being bred out of the species in favour of things that allow the better procreation of the species.

I don't think it would lead to the demise of the species. It may well lead to less scientific advancement to support the artifical maintaining of un-required genes and so bringing things back in to balance again :D

We need to separate advance in to advance in terms of genetic ability to survive in the environment and social advance in terms of material goods to make our lives comfortable. Comfort is not required for survival. So in terms of social yes we may go backwards, but in terms of suitability for the environment, we go forwards.

They do, I don't have the statistics to hand, but have seen them and they do produce less offspring.

They do in general, but not in all cases!! Sorry too much time on the JREF forums where you have to be so damn careful not to generalise whithout stating such otherwise you get pounced on :D

I think the thing that affects the human race is the ability to broadly communicate, and on a lower level, such as feelings of love, and hatred... we care for each other, and the human race likes to help one another. therefore if we see an injured person, we like to help - its in our nature...

IMHO this is what seperates us from lower intelligence - IE animals.

Most animals care for their young in some manner or other. Pack animals will help older/injured pack members, to a degree. We are essentially pack animals.

The point is that all of this is well and good and makes for a "pleasant" society, but it also makes us less strong genetically as so more and more less suited to our environment, which in turn could lead to our demise. It will be long after I am gone so I don't really give a rats ass, but human's have this rather nasty habit of living for now rather than the long term, all this rapid social evolution will need to be balanced out somewhere along the line, the planet cannot support it indefinately.

Exactly.

I think you need to make the distinction between those that have merely suffered an injury and those that are carrying a genetic fault.

Clearly, advocating the removal of someone who would otherwise be of benefit to the gene pool based on the misfortune of injury is counterproductive.