From: Peter C. McCluskey (pcm@rahul.net)
Date: Tue Jul 11 2000 - 11:41:56 MDT
rhanson@gmu.edu (Robin Hanson) writes:
>It seems very unfair to die young from a random unexpected accident. It seems unfair to suffer greatly from having one or two specific bad genes.
It seems to me that if fairness were really measuring fitness, one or two
really bad genes would be seen as fairly signalling an inferior potential
mate.
Isn't it more believable to hypothesize that genetic diseases that
significantly reduce the fitness of those who live to adulthood have,
for most of our evolutionary history, been a small and indistinguishable
fraction of diseases, so that our genes' notion of fairness has no selective
pressure to treat genetic diseases differently from other diseases that seem
accidentally acquired?
-- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Peter McCluskey | The US Idea Futures Exchange: speculate on http://www.rahul.net/pcm | political,financial issues at http://www.usifex.com
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