Are we weakening the gene pool ?

Question

With medicine these days able to keep people alive no matter what sort of defect they have (if you have the money) are we making our species weaker ?

Answer 1

i actually agree with your premise. not necessarily medicine, but i think various other societal factors are at play. we have so many social programs that allow uneducated single mothers living in the ghettos to have scores of kids, while the educated parents usually limit themselves to their average of 2.5 kids per household. now ask yourself which kids are going to be contributing more to society and which ones are going to be a drain on the system? it may not necessarily weaken the gene pool, but it certainly is making us weaker as a species. evolution is a funny thing- it takes literally thousands of years to see its effects, so i don't think the gene pool is going to be weakened by medicine. i would conjecture that fairly soon, medicine will allow us to control our gene pool directly and we will in fact be able to strengthen our gene pool.

Answer 2

Yes, we are. Through the use of medicine, we let the "weaker" individuals survive when they should have been dead. By this, genes that account for bad immune systems and etc stay in the gene pool for humans. However, animals have a stronger gene pool due to the fact they follow this: "The strong survive and the weak perish." But thanks to the miracle of medicine, we can survive pretty most all diseases with a cure. Although if our technology was suddenly reverted to Stone Age level, we would lose a large percent of our population. Think of how many live thanks to medicine.

Answer 3

Not medicines but our mindset weakens us. White catholics marry only white catholics. Black protestants marry only black protestants. Same with Asians with caste, religion and other barriers.
In recent times infections disappeared almost as fatal diseases. Now fatal diseases are genetic and are caused by ageing mothers,engineered child births,variety in sexual behavior and unlimited freedom to use drugs alcohol and laziness .
Genes are weak.
Money and medicines are essential..

Answer 4

I don't have a medical education. I would say yes but not in all cases. Cancer is partly caused by our own bad diet, pollution and things like smoking. There is no cure for the common flu we just lesson the symptoms. It really depends on what sickness we talk about. In general i would say yes.

Answer 5

or unless your canadian...i don't think we're making are immune system weaker, we need all the medicines because of all the man made continaments...we might actually be stronger because people are living longer without getting a fatal disease

Answer 6

Not much. Luckily there's the phenomenon of "regression to the mean."

Answer 7

Your basic assumption is wrong.