Piscator wrote:SekoETC wrote: Although according to the laws of nature, the misfit individuals should die away
Why do people always think that nature
wants the weak to die? They just do. The fact that an apple falls to the ground doesn't mean that someone wants it to fall down.
That is true. The purpose (even though it does not have a purpose, since it was not designed) of evolution is to change the state of nature -- at one point in human evolution, we relied on physical traits for survival more than intelligence, but since our intelligence and thus the capability to cure illnesses, etc, came from natural selection, it would go against our very nature not to use it to survive. On the contrary, it is true that if people with non-fatal illnesses were just left to die, or even better, exposed at birth, then the number of people suffering from them in the next generations would be reduced significantly.
Of course, the mutations that caused those genes to be manifest in the first place could easily happen again since they happened before, and people could still be carrying reccessive genes which stay in generations for hundreds of years.
So in cases like this, I think it's best to do what our brains instinctively tell us to do, as the mind was created in the same process as the rest of the body (inb4 creationist shitstorm)...