I remember two stories that I read about in my language. Even though technically they were stories, however I believe they were inspired by actual events. Which means something similar probably actually happened in real life. Anyway, onto the stories. In the first story, there was a huge famine. People were starving. Now, there was a rich man who owned lots of land. He was able to produce food. So he stood by a gate to hand out food to people so they would not be hungry. Along came one person. The rich man saw him and said to him, "Hey, you, come eat". It's hard to describe, but basically he was addressing the person in a very disrespectful manner. So the person responded, saying, "I may be starving, however my pride will not let me be treated like this". And then he stood next to the food, not taking one bite, until he starved to death. The other story: there was a man who always kept his word. One day, he made a promise with someone to meet under a bridge. Suddenly, a flood came, threatening this man's life. But the person he was supposed to meet hadn't shown up yet. So he thought to himself, "I made a promise to him to meet him here; I will not go anywhere, not even if it means I will lose my life". Then the flood got really bad, the water level rose, and he drowned. Now, the takeaway of these stories isn't that if these two men had been more flexible, they would have lived. But rather, they showed that in hard times, people who are dignified or who have noble character, tend to die off easily. These people would not compromise on their noble qualities and in doing so, they tended to die, and their genes that encoded for these noble qualities became lost. There was an inflexibleness to them, making them much like the unyielding branch of a tree. Think of an unyielding branch of a tree. The more unyielding it is, the more easily it will snap off in a storm. Whereas people who easily compromise are like a pliable branch and as a result, it does not break easily. They just go with whatever. And as a result, they live and pass on their genes. So what does this tell us? It tells us that the more adversity a population faces, the more the noble people among them will die and their good genes will be lost.
In fact, consider the country China. The Chinese started out a very accomplished people. They made numerous contributions to science and literature....at the earlier periods. But, look at the state it is in today. Thievery, dishonesty, and corruption permeate all levels of their society. There are materialistic women everywhere who see nothing wrong with whoring out their bodies for money. Men rob, cheat, and steal, and then they become politicians. And this is because the Chinese people have gone through many many hard times throughout their history, and many good people and their good genes have been culled. Which brings me to another point. China has seen many wars, because of its central location. It is situated in a place where a lot of military forces would have to go through, in order to conquer other peoples. These wars are another form of hard times, except that their effects on the Chinese gene pool are even more devastating. People with noble-ness in their character, those who were unyieldingly good, were removed from the gene pool at an even faster rate during times of war. This is why today's China is a far cry from the nation it was ages ago. Now, look at places like Japan, and the more remote parts of Europe like the Scandinavia, and western Europe. These countries and places are situated on the edges of the world, they are not in a central location that warring forces of the olden days would have to go through. Therefore, they were not subjected to wars too much, and this is one reason why their genes haven't deteriorated much. As a result, they become the advanced, prosperous, peaceful nations that we know today. Now, consider the Middle East, which is in an even more central location than China. Look at the current state of various middle eastern countries. We see violent, harsh, war-like people everywhere. This is due to the fact the entire Middle East has seen far too many wars, which had a devastating effect on the gene pool of people located in this general area. Imagine the many warlords that had either arisen in or gone through this area and who had raped many women, leaving behind their war-like, raping genes in large quantities (Genghis Khan comes to mind). Another thing to note: once the gene pool of a people becomes bad it will be on a downward spiral. It will get worse and ever worse. This process is irreversible, until the advent of genetic engineering. This technology has the potential to remove evil, bad people in a gene pool, in theory. I say "in theory", because a people will actually need to have the ability to realize what is good and what is bad. When a people have gotten to a really bad place, genetically speaking, very often the people at the top, the policy makers, fail to understand which traits to get rid of and which to keep, because one would actually have to have pretty good genes in order to have the ability to make good judgment like that. So basically, you would have to be not too shitty genetically in order to be able to use genetic technology to improve the gene pool successfully. In fact, very often the people who are at the top are the very ones who need to go, but I don't think there is a good chance they will voluntarily edit their own shitty genes out of the gene pool.