1. 6 Billion Bits of Data About Me, Me, Me!

Comment #48896 by elastigirl on June 9, 2007 at 11:48 am

I think that the pace of natural evolution has progressively slowed down over the history of human civilization. You have to see that we've hit a point where much greater numbers of people actually survive through childhood and go on to reproduce because our medicine and our technology in general has gotten better.

Things that used to kill you don't kill you anymore, and people reproduce who never would have reproduced before. Death and attrition are the driving forces behind evolution, and so, having reached the point of near-universal ability to produce offspring, natural evolution seems to have slowed to a crawl. Not to say that modern medicine is a bad thing, though. Modern medicine levels the playing field and makes everyone fit for survival, and is in itself a force of evolution.

Anyhow, I think it would be foolish for us to go tinkering with our genetic code with the purpose of removing faulty code. We already have evidence, like the previously mentioned example of the cystic fibrosis gene granting immunity to typhoid, that indicates that some benefits are inextricably tied to drawbacks. And I think that this pattern is more prevalent than we currently know. If we set out with the purpose of eliminating defects, we will inadvertently eliminate strengths in the process.