The Humans are Dead.
According to an an article on the Discovery Channel's website, human evolution is speeding up at a rate far faster than expected. The article states "Rapid population growth has been coupled with vast changes in cultures and ecology, creating new opportunities for adaptation. The past 10,000 years have seen rapid skeletal and dental evolution in human populations, as well as the appearance of many new genetic responses to diet and disease." Not only do I find this fascinating, but I also find it surprising. Vast advances in dental evolution? Have these people seen Kirsten Dunst's teeth?
Kirsten Dunst in Spiderman 3
You see, I've long had a theory that we are actually fucking up the evolutionary process. Have you ever stopped to consider this fact: millions of people breed each and every year that would not have reached breeding age 50-100 years ago.
Take myself for instance. I never knew it until fairly recently, but I have Celiac Sprue disease. An auto-immune disease whose unfortunate by-product is an inability to process gluten. All in all if I had to pick an auto-immune disease I'd probably pick Celiac. But for not being able to drink a Harp or eat soup in a bread bowl, it's bearable and if you follow a strict gluten free diet you'll live and long happy life. (Weird aside, I'm watching the Celtics right now and as I typed that Tommy Heinsohn asked Mike Gorman if he was a Harp or Guiness guy, to which Mike replied "Harp, but a little Guiness now and then". Screw you and your perfect digestive system Mike Gorman. Now can I get a damned Tommy Point??)
But even 100 years ago my life would have been shortened considerably due to my disease. For a couple of reasons. One is it weakens your immune system. I've had two serious infections in my leg (never go in a hot tub in Vegas). If not for todays powerful antibiotics I would probably be dead. And if that didn't get me the disease itself would have eventually stopped my body from absorbing nutrients and I would have either starved to death, gone mad, or developed cancer by the age of 50.
My point is that I'm going to produce offspring that probably wouldn't have existed generations ago and that's just from Celiacs. What about peanut allergies? Bee stings? Genetic defects that get fixed in childhood? So many more people these days get to pass on genes that long ago would have been trimmed off the genetic vine. So how could we possibly be evolving in a positive way? Shouldn't we be de-volving?
Fortunately, it looks like I'm wrong and we can all go on spreading our soiled seed without fear of pissing in our collective gene pool.
Posts
1 comment:
Damn, I guess that means the pasta and cookie party I had planned should be canceled.
Stop looked through human-waste-soiled-glasses and pop in the rose lenses. So what you have this nasty genetic collection that leads to Celiac's? This does not encompass the entirety of your genetic contribution to the world.
First, you don't get the honor of passing along your genes unaltered, that would be cloning. You combine your genes with another's and create a completely new human gene-carrier. With this trick, our genes are striving to reduce the probability of unpleasant anomalies from remaining in the gene pool.
Second, from a genetic perspective, your body is simply a host that needs to live long enough to make babies who will live long enough to make babies, ad infinitum. You, nor the rest of us, need to live much past our teens to fulfill this genetic imperative. Reproducing when you know that you have a disease that lurked latent for most of your life is not de-volution, it's human.
Finally, our culture is evolving at a rate to match our genetic hardwiring. A disease which is a pain-in-the-ass to you is not killing you because we have the medical knowledge to treat and give you a good quality of life, and extend that life, beyond what it would be outside of our modern medical era. There is no reason to think that cultural evolution will slow or stop and allow our genetic evolution to self-destruct.
Research, research, research. It gives all of us fatally flawed genetic carriers some hope! Stem cells anyone?
Post a Comment