human life?

Question

do you think that humans have stoped human evolution through the survival of the fittest. because of hospitals ?

its a question not an opinoin so dont have a go

Answer 1

We were asking the same question in the lab yesterday....and to be honest even though it is my field, none of us could really come up with an answer.

Some of the things that drive evolution (via Natural Selection) have been removed from the evolutionary equation... it is true that, in western society at least, we're not necessarily lookingat survival of the fittest. Or are we? After all, in a high paced technological society, it may well be that those of us who succeed are the ones who are the most fit for the environment - most adaptive, able to deal with the stress, etc, etc.

We also have artificial selection for against certain diseases, for certain traits, etc

Even these foms of selection alter the frequencies of alleles in the gene pool from generation to generation, and this change in gene frequency affects variation in the species.... which also affects evolution.

I think we are still evolving, but in a manner that is vastly different to other species and even different to those of our own species a few centuries ago.

Evolution can also be driven by crisis events in a species, and I think our planet is rapidly approaching a crisis in terms of our environment. Who knows, we could also have a significant portion of our species killed off by a plague, drastically altering the gene pool.

One event that contributed to the evolutionary story of the cheetah was what is termed a "bottleneck" event. Recently, but before mankind got involved ("recently" in evolutionary terms tends to mean within the last few thousand years!), the worl'ds cheetah population was reduced to a very small number of individuals. We know this becuase of the very small variation in genetic diversity amongst all the world's cheetah populations, both within and between populations there is almost no variation so all the worlds cheetahs now present are descended from perhaps a handful of individuals. No-one knows why this happened, but the modern cheetah is genetically different from the cheetah's before that event because variation is now almost nil. Not enough for a new species, but their evolution is headed in that direction.

Answer 2

No, because most people in this world do not have adequate access to health-care, and so still die from preventable diseases, such as Malaria, infections, appendicitis, tuberculosis etc, all of which are pressures for natural selection and evolution. Also, evolution is measured over many many years. The period of time that some sections of society have had access to acceptable medicine is about 100 years - nothing compared to the hundreds of thousands of years to see an evolutionary change.

good question.

Answer 3

maybe one of the first attributes of human civilization, as early as primitive Neanderthals, was the support the group/society gives to the unfit.
human evolution is influenced by social factors, unlike leopards for instance, who is the fittest is considered socially.
modern medicine helps the survival of unfit humans, like retards for instance, for social reasons.
but modern medicine also provides us with a strong selective tool, directed at embryos, and that tool is slowly weeding out some of the genetic defects that accumulated in the human Genome through thousand of years of social support for the unfit.
it is almost certain that this process of negative selection of embryos will increase, to a level that could completely modify the human species.