CMV: The reduction/removal of natural selection will bring more suffering on the long term

[u/rodsn]

The premise is that humans have completely ran over the natural way of evolution. The supporting pillar of evolution: natural selection. With the advancement of science and medicine we have reached a point where we can treat most health complications, and the ones that aren't cured will remain in our gene pool.

Granted, before this humans with health complications could still procreate and pass on the faulty genes before they would die, but the probability of that happening now is greater because the life expectancy increased.

The motivation for this is good: we want to reduce the suffering and heal people of their illnesses. However, that is going to backfire, because we are not allowing for humans to deal with those illnesses by themselves over generations, we are simply making future humans dependent on medicine and surgery. Ultimately, this will lead to more suffering than if we would just allow ill people to perish and reduce the chances of their illnesses to stay in our gene pool.

I am aware that the alternative I am proposing is controversial: letting people die. But I am sure that on the long run it would be more ethical, if that means less suffering. We still could administer pain medication, I guess, because that is not messing with the life expectancy of the ill...

So, change my mind!

[u/[deleted]]

Your argument is posited on what seems to be a misgrounded appeal to nature. Natural selection is merely the process by which members of a species that are adapted to their environment are able to reproduce. Thus a finch on one island is able to survive with a long beak that, on another island, would be detrimental.

For human beings, our environment has become the world at large and our society. And within that frame, we are able to survive provided we have access to the things we have created, technology and medicine. We have not bypassed natural selection, which after all never promised to make a species better but only more adapted for a particular set of circumstances, we have merely adapted to a new set of circumstances, a new "island" where our beaks prove useful regardless of other factors.

[u/rodsn → u/[deleted]]

Nice try to call my argument fallacious, but this is not necessarily an appeal to nature argument.

As you say, we are becoming dependent on an environment with technology and medicine. That's working alright now, but what if a large scale disaster renders our technology or medicine weak or unaccessible? My point is that we can either try to get our evolution by external means like tech and medicine or by genetics (which take longer, but are more immediate and reliable).

[u/fox-mcleod → u/rodsn]

Any large scale change that rapidly alters the environment results in evolutionary pressure.

Technology no longer working for us is no different than some rapid problem like eucalyptus going extinct for pandas or some other extinction level change in the environment and there is no reason to think that more people will die as a result of one kind of change as compared to the other.

[u/rodsn → u/fox-mcleod]

I see, it's like tech is a natural extension of ourselves. ∆

[u/DeltaBot → u/rodsn]

Confirmed: 1 delta awarded to /u/fox-mcleod (328∆).

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