Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either [email protected] or [email protected].
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email [email protected]. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
i always thought that it was the greater volume of humans, the greater the genetic diversity
There's barely any pressure to extinguish "bad" traits, though.
If you're the idiot who eats every berry you can find, cavemen can't save you and your genes disappear. Modern medicine can and will save you, so you can create offspring and the berryeaters keep their proud heritage alive.
Now, what is considered "good" or "bad" is of course highly debatable, but currently we have effectively no survival pressure, the only selection is how many children you get.
But that if that "idiot" does propagate, but so does everyone else, no skin off the species back. If the selective pressure returns, well then the others keep going.
Well, that's a type of pressure. Ogg the berry lover could well have passed on his genes.
For a long time we've largely been selecting for intelligence and social abilities.
OG Luci is right, though. There are far more people due to modern medicine. So if we suddenly lose it, there will be a lot of death. But there is more population and diversity to draw from the survivors. So I don't think it's a threat to the species.
Exactly, even if 7 billion people died, well there's still a billion people. If 99% of people died, well there are still millions.