Darwinist
Out of context: Reply #357
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- KuzIII0
more from the economist:
The fact is, you can't stop evolution. Those who argue the opposite, pointing to the survival thanks to modern medicine of people who would previously have died, are guilty of more than just gross insensitivity. They have tumbled into an intellectual pitfall that has claimed many victims since Darwin first published his theory. Evolution is not about progress. It is about adaptation. Sometimes adaptation and progress are the same. Sometimes they are the opposite. (Ask a tapeworm, which has “degenerated” into a mere egg-laying machine by a very successful process of adaptation.) If a mutation provides a better adaptation, as Dr Cochran thinks these disease genes did in financiers, it will spread. Given the changes that humanity has created in its own habitat, it seems unlikely that natural selection has come to a halt. If Dr Deacon is right, it may even be accelerating as cultural change speeds up, although the current rapid growth in the human population will disguise that for a while, because selection works best in a static population.
The next big thingEvolution, then, has not stopped. Indeed, it might be about to get an artificial helping hand in the form of genetic engineering. For the fallacy of evolutionary progress has deep psychological roots, and those roots lie in Dr Miller's peacock-tail version of events. The ultimate driver of sexual selection is the need to produce offspring who will be better than the competition, and will thus be selected by desirable sexual partners. Parents know what traits are required. They include high intelligence and a handful of physical characteristics, some of which are universal and some of which vary according to race. That is why, once the idea of eliminating disease genes has been aired, every popular discussion on genetic engineering and cloning seems to get bogged down in intelligence, height and (in the West) fair hair and blue eyes.
This search for genetic perfection has an old and dishonourable history, of course, starting with the eugenic movement of the 19th century and ending in the Nazi concentration camps of the 20th, where millions of the confrères of Dr Cochran's subjects were sent to their deaths. With luck, the self-knowledge that understanding humanity's evolution brings will help avert such perversions in the future. And if genetic engineering can be done in a way that does not harm the recipient, it would not make sense to ban it in a liberal society. But the impulse behind it will not go away because, progressive or not, it is certainly adaptive. Theodosius Dobzhansky, one of the founders of genetics, once said that “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. And that is true even of humanity's desire to take control of the process itself.