this post was submitted on 10 Sep 2023
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IRL? Climate change. No one around me seem's to GAF. Of course, I know places like here share in my belief.
However, kid me when I first learned about the concept of evolution and now worry about how the reliance on industrialization will negatively impact our evolution if we overly rely on technology to do everything for us. I worry about "inventing ourselves to extinction" basically and that's more or less my pet concern.
Most contemporary liberals expect some billionaire to invent something to solve climate change, so that entrenches that behavior.
Regarding the latter concern, I think a lot of this type of thinking comes from misconceptions about how evolution works, largely perpetuated by our culture to be fair.
But most people think evolution is an external pressure on the level of the individual. Which, it is, kinda-- that's one scope of evolution. But evolutionary pressure happens on all levels in different ways: one family against others, one tribe against others, one social group against others, one species against others, etc. And networks of cooperation are just as influential as networks of competition, all happening at the same time in a churning mass of energies.
So rather than thinking that individual humans are losing hardiness to evolution, think of it as our species gaining hardiness through specialization and technology, evolution taking place outside of our individual bodies. It's why we have language instead of tusks.
this is my pet concern as well and it's always struck me as being bit darwinist. i cope by telling myself that instead of environmental evolutionary pressures, it'll be social and cultural pressures instead. so long as those pressures are grounded in material reality and are able effectively act on the population at large, we won't evolutionarily overfit and get stuck in some local minimum. all the more reason to prefer socialism over liberalism.
The inherent (and problematic) implication in this concern is that there's a 'good' way to evolve and a 'bad' way. While technology and medicine massively relieves biological pressures, some genetics diseases can be entirely managed, and more people are surviving to procreate, what we'll see in the medium-long term is a major uptick in genetic diversity, some people will be massively reliant on technology, some won't.
As we hopefully know by now, genetic diversity is a Good Thing (tm). As it increases, so will we as a species have more disease resistance, be able to fill more niches, we'll have a wider scope of bodies and brain patterns to have new and cool thoughts etc. I do think cultural and social pressures on sexual selection could be problematic, rather than a good thing, but that'll entirely depend on how society goes.
Though honestly, I think it's overwhelmingly certain that we'll have the capability to alter human genetics on a large scale before any of modern evolutionary pressures become relevant. If you accept that, then the whole discussion becomes rather moot.