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…)
i always thought that it was the greater volume of humans, the greater the genetic diversity
There’s barely any pressure to extinguish “bad” traits, though.
If you’re the idiot who eats every berry you can find, cavemen can’t save you and your genes disappear. Modern medicine can and will save you, so you can create offspring and the berryeaters keep their proud heritage alive.
Now, what is considered “good” or “bad” is of course highly debatable, but currently we have effectively no survival pressure, the only selection is how many children you get.
OG Luci is right, though. There are far more people due to modern medicine. So if we suddenly lose it, there will be a lot of death. But there is more population and diversity to draw from the survivors. So I don’t think it’s a threat to the species.
Yes absolutely. We’ve already affected our biology and evolution.
Birth control, antibiotics, are examples
Given time, and even greater lifespans, we will have a larger impact on the path of our evolution.
As a thought experiment let’s imagine humans that live for 2,000 years. What does this mean for our adaptability to environmental changes? What does this mean for our fertility?
If nothing else changes, the carrying capacity for new humans will decrease, if the average lifespan goes up to 2,000 years.
From an evolutionary perspective, the question is always what is the current selection pressure? Historically it’s almost always been intelligence plus something else, melanin in the skin, the ability to metabolize lactose into adulthood, etc…
This has been happening for a while now and the results of which are the voting populace of the anti-intellectual movement that is explained in the documentary film, Idiocracy.
It already has affected natural-selection.
I would argue that modern medicine prevents non-selective deaths. We try and keep everyone alive, not just the idiots.
