From: CurtAdams@aol.com
Date: Thu May 02 2002 - 21:45:41 MDT
In a message dated 5/2/02 19:42:59, ypprotection@yahoo.com writes:
>Only selection is no longer an arbitary
>random variable.
>Selection is hand-picked and contrived.
Selection by floods, famine, and male-male fighting is better than
by concious intent? What's bad about selection being intentional?
Surely you don't think random is superior. We're very fortunate
- being a human in modern society is relatively nice, even if there's
a lot of improvements to make. Being any of the other 30 million
or so species would be anywhere from bad to incredibly awful,
mostly the latter. (Fruit fly, anyone?)
>We would have removed what use to be a random factor.
Which is bad how? Randomness is usually detrimental.
>I argue that reducing variety will be detrimental
>to human evolution.
The degree of selection will reduce variety, eventually,
but it takes a long time. We will certainly be able to cook
up variety to replace it long before then. Heck, all you
need to do is dose up people with radioactivity - the
resulting randomness is exactly what would be getting
bred out.
In any case, genetic evolution is a brutal, uncaring,
amoral process. It needs and deserves no protection.
>To
>get those genes back we would have to wait for a few
>generations of mutations maybe more.
No, just save hair clippings from a few thousand individuals.
That will give you virtually every human gene in a storage
form that will last centuries. Given human variability and the
staggering size of the population, you won't lose any gene
for centuries unless it's really bad and should be gone.
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