this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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the_dunk_tank
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literally stone age hunter-gatherer societies took care of disabled, wounded, and sick members. we have evidence of successful brain surgeries (no, drilling holes in the skull was not just 'stupid caveman shit', it is a treatment for brain pressure/swelling), whose patients survived several decades, we have bodies missing limbs from early childhood surviving into elderly years, and basically anyone that ever got eaten by a tiger ends up buried with a tiger skull (because the group they belonged to hunted it down after it became a known threat).
like there's some valid worry over drug-resistant bacteria and viruses, but i'd rather maybe live to 90 with drug resistant threats to deal with than live to 30 knowing that the bacteria that killed me could have been easily treated lmfao.
yeah but have you consindered I have stopped reading at hunter-gatherer society and filled the rest in with my preconcieved notions about humanity
That's metal as fuck, do you know where I can read more about this?
i can't find where i first read it, but i think i'm confusing this with Dinofelis, which as far as i can tell probably went exinct due to climate change, but theres a bunch of claims i can't find sources for saying they were hunted by humans.
No worries, I'm sure it happened. It's very human. I just love reading about weird burial sites.
If a fellow hexbear is ever eaten by a tiger, I expect all of us to pick up stone axes and hunt it down
One of my favorite videos goes over a few specific cases of disability in prehistory by Trey the Explainer. Personally love the family that seemingly took too good care of their daughter and fed her too many sweets.
These are injuries and are generally not inherited by future offspring. A weakened immune system due to genetic factors offset by modern medicine will be.
This is a problem but not in the way eugenicists think it is. If there is no evolutionary pressure for something, it will inevitably be lost and become vestigial. The response to this is gene therapy which will hopefully be available before this becomes a major problem. There's no reason to let random people die since we'll be able to fix the negative effects before it becomes a problem.
Let's imagine the same scenario, you live to 90 but for every person treated today, 2 people die due to drug resistant bacteria in 40 years. Your scenario only works if drug resistant bacteria won't kill more people in the future than we could save today. The hopeful solution is that medical science will catch up and be able to deal with resistance. There's no reason to let people die today for a theoretical, but let's not stick our heads in the sand.
But you've just made up a very speculative hypothetical that seems quite doubtful?
If antibiotic resistance will arise so quickly that it's necessary to withdraw likely life-saving antibiotics from OP, then you run into the same problem in the third generation (except the two lives saved would result in four deaths)
We know incredibly (and concerningly) little about appropriate antibiotic practice and how resistance arises (e.g. advice to take the antibiotics for a week because that "seems about right"), let alone any actual development of phage therapy outside of Cuba
It's a good thing I mentioned in my original comment "But that's no reason to let people die because of speculation." The point is that the logic was inconsistent, not that their position is wrong.
You agree with me, you just haven't read my comment.
I'm not suggesting that you were proposing that antibiotics actually be withdrawn. I did read your comment but I disagree about the speculative example.
I've contributed to this becoming increasingly like a reddit debate about a hypothetical example that it seems we all agree wouldn't be used to inform anything - my bad.
I take your point on the logic too
Longtermist spotted, deploy the pig feces
Is climate activism also longtermist by your metrics? We're not talking about the sun exploding, we're talking about stuff you and I will live to see.
maybe, but it's good longtermism and not insane eugenics longtermism
well it's a good thing we let covid rip then, eh? keep those immune muscles well trained!
I'm literally on your side, I just acknowledge that there is a problem over a long term.
Anti-biotic resistance is from people pumping massive amounts of drugs into animals for food in factory farms, not people being saved from dying from a small infection and "stopping natural selection." It will probably become a huge issue. Fortunately, since drug companies have stopped researching anti-biotics for lack of profit incentive, if we achieve socialism we should be able to solve it.
I'm not sure about that. Mutation is a random process, and natural selection is pretty random as well. I don't think there's anything inevitable about evolution, and the circumstances that determine if a trait is negative or favorable (for rapid procreation) are constantly changing.
The problem is entropy. You keep modifying parts of a machine and eventually it'll break. It is infinitely harder to keeps things working based on random changes than for it to break. It's like picking a random car part from a store and shoving it in your car regardless of make or model. The chance that it won't work is the majority. Unless something is necessary for an organisms survival, it is at risk of breaking. After that, the chance it will be fixed by another mutation is nil.
No it is not. It's imperfect but if natural selection was random then evolution would be a farce.
i never implied otherwise. my point was that humans (and many other animals, like chimpanzees and beavers and dogs and ants) modify their environment to survive, which '''circumvents evolutionary presures''' according to vulgar eugenicists, and keep 'useless' disabled people alive and in their communities, all of which is contrary to 'eugenics' (the injured guy was '''clearly''' genetically inferior, a '''superior''' specimen would simply have avoided injury)