All entries for Tuesday 23 August 2005

Natural selection?

As someone of the younger generation the problems of pensions and maintaining the elderly to an increasingly higher age are not threatening to affect me directly. However, the prospect of potentially having to work until I'm 70 or 75 is quite daunting. This is, however, an aside, and not really what I wanted to talk about.

Whilst the developments in medical science over the recent years have been fantastic and have saved many lives, are we not in fact sidestepping the very biological system that made us so advanced: natural selection. The purpose of selection is to weed out the weak to increase the chances of surviving for the strong. Whilst medical advances have been brilliant for many who are suffering from all kinds of medical conditions, we are in fact changing our own genetic pool for the worse. People who even 50 years ago would have died at an early age from their conditions are now living far longer and even reproducing to propagate their deleterious genes.

Would it not be ironic if the human race was wiped out by a phenomenon we would have otherwise survived had we not become so advanced and learnt how to manipulate our own gene pool?

P.s. This is merely a discussion of ideas. I am not condemning the fantastic advances of medical science, nor saying that the weak should not be allowed to take advantage of them (before anyone shouts at me for being controversial).

: 23 Aug 2005 10:12 |  Tags: Politics Science |  Comments (4) |  Close comments |  Report a problem