You’re confused. ‘Survival of the fittest’ doesn’t mean physical strength, it means those who fill their niche in the world and live to reproduce. A lion that kills a million deer but dies without reproducing is an evolutionary failure.
Our environmental niche is to invent and experiment. Back in the day, people thought that cities had reached their natural limit because you couldn’t have too many horses in one place. They thought people would never have heart transplants or IVF.
And I also don’t think the earlier person realises that evolutionary pressures still apply despite medicine and tech removing some of things that limited us before.
That is to say that because we don’t need to worry about certain things which used to be important, the pool of people now “competing” is larger, meaning that competition between needed traits is higher, making for “more fit” individuals.
In the sense that we don’t need to worry about being physically strong anymore, so we can focus on cognition, and looking at history, the speed at which our intellect (or at least level of tech) has grown — as a species — is pretty fucking insane.
I didn’t mean that it was going to happen over night. But it only took them about 30 years to go from the Theory of Relativity to the A Bomb, and about 40 years to go from Goddard’s first rocket to Man on the Moon.
You’re confused. ‘Survival of the fittest’ doesn’t mean physical strength, it means those who fill their niche in the world and live to reproduce. A lion that kills a million deer but dies without reproducing is an evolutionary failure.
Our environmental niche is to invent and experiment. Back in the day, people thought that cities had reached their natural limit because you couldn’t have too many horses in one place. They thought people would never have heart transplants or IVF.
Correct.
And the “back in the day” you’re referring to was barely a hundred years ago, just to give people some reference.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_horse_manure_crisis_of_1894
And I also don’t think the earlier person realises that evolutionary pressures still apply despite medicine and tech removing some of things that limited us before.
That is to say that because we don’t need to worry about certain things which used to be important, the pool of people now “competing” is larger, meaning that competition between needed traits is higher, making for “more fit” individuals.
In the sense that we don’t need to worry about being physically strong anymore, so we can focus on cognition, and looking at history, the speed at which our intellect (or at least level of tech) has grown — as a species — is pretty fucking insane.
And we didn’t even get into the fact that we’re a few steps away from genetic manipulation on a wide scale.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/03/21/1239790816/first-pig-kidney-human-transplant
Pretty soon you will be able to grow an animal with transplantable kidneys, or hearts, or any organ.
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I didn’t mean that it was going to happen over night. But it only took them about 30 years to go from the Theory of Relativity to the A Bomb, and about 40 years to go from Goddard’s first rocket to Man on the Moon.