From: Michael S. Lorrey (retroman@turbont.net)
Date: Tue Jul 11 2000 - 13:27:21 MDT
"Peter C. McCluskey" wrote:
>
> 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?
Another reason to oppose health insurance. By its nature, it coddles those with
poor survival traits and punishes those with advantagous survival traits. Note
that since the advent of health insurance and scientifically based health care,
the percent of the population with poor eyesight has increased dramatically.
Such people would have previously died off early due to accident, predation, or
battle. This pattern tends to hold for all heritable medical maladies, as
treatment to cure or mitigate the effects of such a malady become available, the
percent of the population suffering from said malady increases. This trending
indicates that unless we do undertake systematic gengineering to weed out these
faulty recessives, our descendants are doomed to be rather ugly, stunted,
malformed, disease prone, blind, deaf, and dumb Morlocks.
Mike Lorrey
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