[Osx-nutters] Denial

[David Cake]

At 4:45 PM -0700 16/8/07, mmalc crawford wrote:
>  > It's as if those Darwinian biologists came up with a forecast that in
>>  a thousand years we will become dumb mutants and so we must start
>>  instituting controlled breeding programmes to avert disaster, just
>>  because their models predict it.
>>
>Actually I think that implies an interesting question, although I 
>didn't have the courage to ask Dawkins when he was "here" (he gave a 
>talk in Menlo Park a couple of weeks ago) -- what are the selective 
>pressures that act on the human species now?  Because medicine seems 
>to be getting sufficiently good now that those who even fifty years 
>ago might have died before reproducing are now having families.  And 
>that is having what from some perspectives might be seen as 
>deleterious consequences for the gene pool.  But one of the main 
>reasons this will be a contentious issue is because of the spectre of 
>words like eugenics.  When it comes to domesticated animals, crops,
>flowers, and so on, we're typically reasonably happy to forecast...

	Really, I think the answer is evolution of the species as a 
whole is probably becoming irrelevant. As medicine advances, what 
constitutes 'fittest' is changing faster than significant selection 
can occur. Problems that are severe in one generation are gone by the 
next. Evolution of cultures is happening quicker than evolutions of 
the species by orders of magnitude, and becoming Lamarckian rather 
than Darwinian in the process.

	As an ardent fan of SF like Bruce Sterling, I am fairly 
convinced we'll continue to mess with our biology pretty wholesale. 
Essentially, we'll probably mess with our own natural selection even 
more than we have breeds of domesticated animal.

	Cheers
		David