this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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You're confused. 'Survival of the fittest' doesn't mean physical strength, it means those who fill their niche in the world and live to reproduce. A lion that kills a million deer but dies without reproducing is an evolutionary failure.
Our environmental niche is to invent and experiment. Back in the day, people thought that cities had reached their natural limit because you couldn't have too many horses in one place. They thought people would never have heart transplants or IVF.
Correct.
And the "back in the day" you're referring to was barely a hundred years ago, just to give people some reference.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1894
And I also don't think the earlier person realises that evolutionary pressures still apply despite medicine and tech removing some of things that limited us before.
That is to say that because we don't need to worry about certain things which used to be important, the pool of people now "competing" is larger, meaning that competition between needed traits is higher, making for "more fit" individuals.
In the sense that we don't need to worry about being physically strong anymore, so we can focus on cognition, and looking at history, the speed at which our intellect (or at least level of tech) has grown — as a species — is pretty fucking insane.
And we didn't even get into the fact that we're a few steps away from genetic manipulation on a wide scale.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/03/21/1239790816/first-pig-kidney-human-transplant
Pretty soon you will be able to grow an animal with transplantable kidneys, or hearts, or any organ.
That actually happens to be within my specific area of study, and you may be overstating things. We've only just scratched the surface of genetic manipulation, and nobody really knows how long it will take before we can design effective genetic code deliberately. So far we have determined the nucleotides which build the basic structure of DNA, and found correlation between certain blocks and traits exhibited, but it's not quite as simple as cutting and pasting those blocks like you're writing computer code. We have also found further layers of 'information storage' within DNA which relates to how those nucleotides are arranged, called epigenetics, which we barely know anything about at all. As things stand with our current level of knowledge, we have established an extremely extensive testing regime for any novel genetic product which takes decades to complete, and which nearly every product tested so far has failed to complete, often due to unexpectedly resulting in sterility and death. It's a very exciting science, and I have great hopes for what it can accomplish if we don't kill ourselves first, but it's a stretch to suggest that it's just around the corner.
I didn't mean that it was going to happen over night. But it only took them about 30 years to go from the Theory of Relativity to the A Bomb, and about 40 years to go from Goddard's first rocket to Man on the Moon.