Ask Lemmy

If genetic research gets to a point where we can beat any mutations, then probably not.

No. Human evolution is driven primarily by mate selection.

Sexual selection usually takes care of problems like this. People with antisocial tendencies find it extremely difficult to find partners.

I would say that the greater the population (in part thanks to medicine) the greater the chances of beneficial mutations occurring and entering the collective gene pool. I see medicine as a safety net. I'm sure it's more complicated than that, but that's my professional take on it, as a musician.

I don't think so.

For one, natural selection selects the "fittest", but what the "fittest" means, changes over time.

Also, there's lots of other factors that you may have overlooked, such as sexual selection probably playing a bigger factor.

Yes. Without the selection pressures to minimize disease, we observe more disease in the population over time. This reduces our fitness for any environment without the artificial benefit of modern medicine.

People don't want to understand because it is difficult and challenges their worldview. Is this an existential risk? Yes. Can we do anything about it? Yes.

I expect gene editing soon to become so cheap that everyone starts customising their children, resulting in a situation analogous to where dogs are now: extreme variability improving the chances for survival by making sure we have the needed people for any situation except gamma ray burst which requires backups far from Earth.

Natural selection led to our intelligence to be able to made medicine in the first place.

The more varied the sample of individuals you can afford to keep alive in your population, the more chances you have that a subset of them will be able to withstand random changes in the fitness function. If the environment changes abruptly, you will have a hard time adapting as a species if you only ever supported people "within the norm". What happens in those cases is called extinction.

There are already lots of great answers, I would like to point out that Natural Selection doesn't care about the individual at all, it cares about the population, e.g. internal gestation, do you think any individual enjoys carrying a baby inside them? Preventing them from doing anything during the gestation period, being an easier prey to predators, etc... Unfortunately for the individual, creatures that carry their unborn babies inside them are less likely to abandon them even temporarily while seeking food, they're also more easily kept warm, so for the species as a whole it's better that there be internal gestation.

In short more individuals = better, imagine you have two populations, one with only 10 strong individuals, and one with 100 individuals of which only 10 are strong, which do you think is more likely to survive? And that is even assuming a strong/weak deterministic position, which is not the case for anything.

Plenty of answers already.

I'd like to point out that it's not medicine alone, but empathy that changes natural selection. We have evidence of our ancestors caring for members of their tribe that would have been unable to survive otherwise.

But while in some edge cases (some diseases) you could make an argument that it's bad for future humanity for some reason, it's overall good, because it enables a larger population. And a larger population has a better chance of mutating to fit changing environments. Or to phrase it differently: diversification comes first, selection can wait.

Call me when evolution figures out how to deal with guns and automotive accidents, which likely represent the largest selection factors on modern humans.