Panel Discussion, continued...
SCOTT: Other questions?
Q: Just as I commented, I hope you realize that it's not all entirely bad. But last year one of my student came to me and said, would doctors saving more and more babies that would have died before with problems, isn't that part of changing the way humans are evolving. I just thought, ooh.
SCOTT: Well, the good news is that at least the student accepts evolution. In my line of work, that's good.
Q: Not only that, but she realized that we are doing kind of our own evolution. That's pretty neat.
SCOTT: It was pretty neat. In my earlier incarnation as an actual scientist, I taught physical anthropology and that's a question that we deal with a lot in physical anthropology. I think the way to answer a comment like that--and you get them just as college professors do--is you need to understand what natural selection really is. Natural selection is dependent upon environmental circumstance. The genetic variation is going to be there. But whether a particular set of genetic traits or a trait is advantageous or not depends on the environment. I probably have genes for weak eyes. Everybody in my family wears glasses. This is before we got old. It's quite likely that that the environment in which I grew up predisposed me to develop this weakness and so I've worn glasses from a very early age and everybody else in my family too. However, I live in an environment in which this can be corrected. So, whatever genes I might have for weak eyes are not especially disadvantageous in this environment.
That's a very simple example. You could make the same example though for juvenile diabetes. Genes for Juvenile diabetes in a non-modern Western medical environment are highly deleterious. Very few of these children live to reproduce and pass on their genes. So that it's virtually lethal. In an environment in which you can treat juvenile diabetes, that no longer makes that lethal. Now, if something happens, if they drop the big one and western society and medical care collapse and there's no longer an insulin, well, then indeed that gene will be lethal again. If those genes have increased in the human population over the last fifty years or so, then more individuals might die. But hey, if civilization collapses, we'll have a whole lot more problems anyway. So that's not a major worry.
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