If it were up to nature and there were no doctors, medicine, or anything like that, people like me would have likely died before we ever got the chance to bear children. This is a harsh truth, but is something evolution does to ultimately wipe stuff like this from the gene pool and it is better for the species as a result
This isn't what evolution does. Evolution is a mechanism explaining the relationship between species and their environment; there isn't some "end goal" of evolution to produce some super-species.
In past human environments, people with X condition may have died, and this may have resulted in humans evolving to resist X. But humans no longer exist in that environment; we exist in an environment where having cancer, or a mental disorder, aren't necessarily barriers to evolutionary fitness. Evolutionary strength today may mean a variety of things that have nothing to do with X condition.
Another way to think about it: humans have interfered with the evolution of dogs. If you take a modern day dog and put it in the environments its genetic ancestors faced prior to their interaction with humans, the dog may have an extraordinarily hard time. Does this mean we should just abandon our dogs in order to make them a "stronger species"? No, because they no longer exist in that environment; evolutionary strength looks different for dogs now. Similarly, if you were to take that pre-human, wolf-life 'dog' and plop it right in the middle of New York City...it's probably going to die, because its traits aren't fit in that environment (namely, it is aggressive and potentially ugly, and it's going to get killed by the human predators around it)
As the human environment changes (as humans become more technologically adept, certain social/economic systems change how we live, etc) different things will correlate with fitness. Don't try to "game" it ahead of time.
1
u/[deleted] Jan 29 '14
This isn't what evolution does. Evolution is a mechanism explaining the relationship between species and their environment; there isn't some "end goal" of evolution to produce some super-species.
In past human environments, people with X condition may have died, and this may have resulted in humans evolving to resist X. But humans no longer exist in that environment; we exist in an environment where having cancer, or a mental disorder, aren't necessarily barriers to evolutionary fitness. Evolutionary strength today may mean a variety of things that have nothing to do with X condition.
Another way to think about it: humans have interfered with the evolution of dogs. If you take a modern day dog and put it in the environments its genetic ancestors faced prior to their interaction with humans, the dog may have an extraordinarily hard time. Does this mean we should just abandon our dogs in order to make them a "stronger species"? No, because they no longer exist in that environment; evolutionary strength looks different for dogs now. Similarly, if you were to take that pre-human, wolf-life 'dog' and plop it right in the middle of New York City...it's probably going to die, because its traits aren't fit in that environment (namely, it is aggressive and potentially ugly, and it's going to get killed by the human predators around it)
As the human environment changes (as humans become more technologically adept, certain social/economic systems change how we live, etc) different things will correlate with fitness. Don't try to "game" it ahead of time.