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Drug May Repair DNA at Earliest Stages of Alzheimer’s – And it’s Already Passed Safety Trials (www.goodnewsnetwork.org)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[+] -27 points 1 week ago* (8 children)

Natural selection is dying and our genetics are getting corrupted

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  • [–] 19 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Natural selection is dying at old age of 28 from a tooth infection or a broken foot.

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  • [+] -6 points 1 week ago* (3 children)

    Natural selection is driven by pressures that affect reproduction chances. Like a genetic mutation that makes you sicker

    In nature it's what cleans the genetics of a species of disease over time, preventing infinite accumulation of negative mutations

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  • [–] -1 points 6 days ago (1 child)

    Natural selection is driven by pressures that affect reproduction chances

    Oh, like dying of old age at 28 of a broken foot or a fucked up tooth?

    Like a genetic mutation that makes you sicker

    In nature it's what cleans the genetics of a species of disease over time, preventing infinite accumulation of negative mutations

    If you think that's all that natural selection is, you're woefully uneducated on the topic. Because natural selection does in fact include external pressures like predators, disease, and accidents, along with genetics. Genetics can absolutely make a difference in making it to reproduction, but environmental factors are just as big of a factor, if not bigger, in making it that long.

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  • [–] -1 points 6 days ago*

    If you think that's all that natural selection is

    Are you just arguing for the sake of it now? What's your point here? These replies are so incoherent and riddled with strawmen

    At no point did I claim this to the exclusion of all other factors and you gotta be willfully misinterpreting to come to that conclusion

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  • [–] 13 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    That's a little simplistic and forgets one thing: natural selection only cares until you're old enough to procreate, biologically, and there's nothing it will do for humanity after that age.

    So yeah, natural selection is totally cool with you dying of a splinter at 16.

    Sorry to bust your eugenics bubble.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    That's almost true. I said natural selection only impacts odds of reproduction but there's a few things that occur after reproduction age in a population that have been studied to be naturally selected tooo

    Behaviours of gays and the elderly are selected for to an extent because they help raise children in the tribe/community/group whilst not affecting reproductive pressures

    Improving survival odds through nurturing children/others leads to groups with those genes doing better, which selects for those genes via natural selection

    If the older members of the group are fitter and can help gather food/hunt then those genes are selected for too through increased survival of their offspring

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  • [–] 3 points 1 week ago* (1 child)

    That only matters if the children and the elders share the same genes right? I don't see how people from a different tribe (for example) taking care of children (of another tribe) would make their genes pass on.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 week ago*

    It's a little complex in reality with men being able to reproduce for pretty much their whole adult lives (raising children that support the tribe, allowing elders to live longer and then reproduce with younger women)

    But essentially yes

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  • [–] 11 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Have you considered that natural selection also applies to being smarter so we can invent better drugs?

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  • [–] 4 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    It does not — dumb people have the same access to the better drugs as smart people.

    A eugenics-driven society where dumb people are left to die and smart people get extra health care likely would be effective at breeding children who are better at passing the “smart people” test, but I would not like to live in a society like that.

    If you’re about to argue that having enough money to pay for health care correlates with intelligence… I would welcome some evidence. I used to think that was obvious but, having grown up and experienced the world some, the only thing I see that correlates with intelligence is depression.

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  • [–] -4 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    Failed there too, zoomers are the first generation dumber than their parents

    We're full steam into Idiocracy now

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    I heard that about boomers, gen X, and millenials.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Measured how? Seem much smarter to me.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 week ago (2 children)
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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago

    I Read it. Just seems like bad parenting and school adaptation. nothing to do with natural selection. Besides They used to say the same about kids in 90s like "they have bad memory" but almost every kids could name all 150 Pokémon just not every element. Not because they couldn't they just dont care. They metric is always seemed skewed to me..

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago

    You just linked to an article which says one guy told another newspaper genz is dumb. Then you go to the other newspaper and they link the piece of research which he presented not to a peer reviewed journal but rather to the Senate. The whole piece of research consists of 7 pages.

    I'm sorry man, I was underestimating how much smarter is genz than previous generations...

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  • [–] 7 points 1 week ago (2 children)

    It's not dying, we just reached the top of the food chain.

    Then we got all sciency and improved health and quality of life at advanced age. And improved survival rates at birth/youth.

    Now we practice capital darwinism in order to keep our numbers in check. We make sure the poor have worse access to healthcare and quality diets. We let generations of institutionalized racism decide who has to be poor.

    And then...we changed the world. If your great-great-grandma were transported to the modern dlay at age 25, she wouldn't survive. The world is completely foreign to everything humanity has ever known.

    No wonder we have obesity epidemics in a world where addictive calorie-dense and nuttitionally-void food is readily available and cheaper than anything that grows out of the ground.

    No wonder we have ADHD and Autism when there's an overabundance of stimuli constantly surrounding us.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Just because we don’t get eaten by leopards much anymore doesn’t mean selection isn’t happening.

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  • [–] -1 points 1 week ago (1 child)

    Apply some context... It's not going to be removing diseases from the gene pool at anywhere near the rate of before modern medicine

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  • [–] 1 point 1 week ago (1 child)

    What exactly are you advocating for here?

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  • [–] -1 points 1 week ago* (2 children)

    Nothing specific, we just need to acknowledge that if people reproduce with serious diseases the prevalence increases. Medicine is fantastic at saving lives, this is no anti-medicine rhetoric.

    Medicine is so good, and only getting better, that our genetic fitness as a species is going to be progressively eroded through the continued spread of negative mutations.

    Generations will progressively suffer more and be more dependent on medicine to live a normal life compared to now.

    There are two main ways to prevent genetic disease, either don't reproduce or control genetics. Each with their own stack of moral dilemmas. Inaction is also a choice with its own issues and moral concerns, like in the trolley problem, except over such a long period of time the cause and effect is not abundantly obvious

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  • [–] 2 points 6 days ago* (1 child)

    Natural selection was always the cruelest way to manage disease. It requires us to be struggling to survive. When a significant proportion of humankind have died from a disease, we may evolve a resistence to it, but that's a brutal price to pay. We're past that, and good riddance to it.

    But you chose a strange place to bring that up. A drug to prevent Alzheimers won't have much effect on natural selection, since a susceptibility to Alzheimers would very rarely prevent successful reproduction. Alzheimers is strongly tied to the ageing process, which is probably an evolved characteristic in itself. Natural selection was never a friend to the elderly.

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  • [–] -1 points 6 days ago (1 child)

    It's pretty straight forward to select away almost all cases of Alzheimer's by simply not procreating if you are positive for APOEε4, for example

    No suffering required

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  • [–] 1 point 6 days ago* (last edited 6 days ago) (1 child)

    That's not natural selection.

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  • [–] 0 points 6 days ago* (1 child)

    You are seriously missing the point..

    I said we no longer have natural selection removing diseases like it was

    I am not advocating for natural selection/genocide

    I'm saying without action we'll accumulate more, and there's very real things we can do about it either as individuals or as a society

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  • [–] 1 point 6 days ago (1 child)

    Sure. There's various ways to influence the gene pool and most are not great ideas on a large scale. Enforced non-procreation for people with "undesirable" genes is a dark road to go down. Especially if we have other ways to treat these problems.

    In the very long term the lack of natural selection could have a noticeable degrading effect on the human genome, but it's a slow process of drift. Since gene editing will probably be more common eventually I don't see it as a major concern. We left the brutal mechanisms of nature behind, and we already have the means to replace them. It's right that we approach the topic of genetic manipulation with caution, focusing on clear cases of extreme need. We're fine for the foreseeable future.

    Bridging the gap with eugenics or the like just isn't necessary, and is likely to cause societal problems far outweighing any advantage.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 days ago (1 child)

    Yes, you agree on all points? So what is the point of this?

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  • [–] 1 point 6 days ago (1 child)

    It’s pretty straight forward to select away almost all cases of Alzheimer’s by simply not procreating if you are positive for APOEε4, for example

    No suffering required

    I disagree with your assertion that you can deny procreation to swathes of the population without causing suffering.

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  • [–] -2 points 1 week ago* (3 children)

    That's not true, though. There's nothing to corrupt. The human genome is 41% fruit fly, 60% banana and 8% virus simultaneously. Hugh Mann Georg, whose genome is 131 billion percent human is an outlier adn should not have been counted.

    Plus natural selection isn't solely random by nature, nor is it independent of humans. It doesn't magically go away, even with sci-fi gene technology, since people would naturally select genes that they find attractive, make them superhuman, or won't give them some nasty disease. Humans deciding that they want a gene that gives them breasts all-year round because they find them attractive is no different to humans selecting for the trait over generations, for much the same reason.

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