Our environment selects against them though. This is evident with the death of the afflicted individual.

We're exacorbating the natural flow of things by applying treatments to these individuals that allows the gene to be passed sexually.

If we did not intervene, the individual would die before reproduction.

We do intervene and the individual survives long enough to reproduce, but later succumbs to the genetic fradulency.

what hes saying is medicine administration is part of our evolutionary process. just as other animals eat certain dirt or plants that are part of their evolutionary processes.

since medicine is a natural thing it cannot go against natural selection. even when we harm our gene pool with medicine its still evolution whether its good or bad.

our environment is what we make it and our current environment we created has its place for medicine.

i do however think we should sterilize people with severe genetic problems even if its treatable. if we are aware of something being bad for us then its stupid not to do something about it when we can.

I understood what he was saying, I just disagree that the bulk majority of modern medicine should be considered 'natural' seeing as it's created in a test tube.

You use the example of animals eating certain dirt or plants as a method of medicine, but that vastly differs from the recombination of chemical compounds in man made environments.

I see a distinct line between what is natural and what is artificial.

On one side of this line I see the defined aspects of Natural Selection and on the other I see the defined aspects of Artificial Selection.

And that last line is definitely not the message I am trying to convey

I disagree with the slaughter of people based on genetic disabilities.

firstly i meant sterilize as in they can't have children not as in killing them.

the thing is the word artificial and natural can be pretty damn close together. there is a line there in medicine but i really can't see it being a very clear one for the majority of medicines.

like implanting genes is definitely artificial but vaccinations for example have natural foundations. most of modern medicine hinges on natural foundations so why must it be one or the other?

good thing our brains that we use for medical evolution also gave us ethics. thats the balance of nature right there.

Oh, haha!

I thought for sure you meant sterilize in terms of... You know... Remove them

And as an opinion; if you have to manually alter the composition of a compound to meet or exceed a predescribed standard, then it can no longer be called natural. Even if the original componants were acquired from natural resources.

You could say it was made from 'all natural ingredients', but to call your creation natural would be stretching the truth beyond its capable boundries.

i know but it seems silly to claim it as one or the other when one needs to the other. either way you go you end up flawed.

I don't view the system as flawed. It's just societal shifts that bring us farther from the natural world. We then seek to justify the gap by stretching the definition of what is natural and what isn't.

I just think that people have forgotten what is natural and what isn't. Modern living has clouded the fundamentals of this through a pleathora of outlets.

They assume that a bag of dirt they bought at the store is natural, but it's far from it. It's chemically treated to increase yield.

They assume that those whole grain granola bars they purchased are natural (seeing as it says natural all over the box), but there are no "granola bar trees" in existence... Even though it would be pretty sweet.

well the way i see it is while things are natural then modified its fuzzy. like artificial flowers=perfectly obvious but when you mix two different flower species through their natural processes except you simply set them next to each other then its technically artificial but hardly any of the work was by man.

there's plenty out there that's obviously artificial but there's also plenty that's called artificial yet nature did almost all the work. it unfair it's either one or the other when there are so many cases where it's almost all natural but gets called artificial.

i'd prefer it if the word artificial went away altogether because whether its 1% or %100 artificial it all gets the same brand and the same negative connotation.

Sure is. Cancer and "chronic disease" rates in the US are going up while our healthcare budget is going up even higher. Not all of it is purely from accumulation of bed genes of course, but its one of the culprits

Shouldn't we be healthier by spending more money on health? Not according to natural selection and our current health care system.



Especially not in humans. We manipulate nearly all the rules of it, knowingly or not

This post was edited by EndlessSky on Jul 12 2012 08:54am

As a species, that makes us the fittest. Probably the reason Homo Sapiens won out over Homo Neanderthalis and other very close species way back when