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Originally Posted by Eclogite
Your reasoning is flawed because you have started from a faulty premise.
Fitness is not absolute, it is relative. As conditions change the characteristics that define fitness for the new environment change also.
It is irrelevant whether the environment is natural or man-made. Last time I checked man was a product of nature.
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Perhaps. . .
perhaps not
NATURAL selection is now no longer "
natural."
It is man made. That has only really happened in earnest in the 20C.
Beginning with the first technological war (WW1) and the fist pandemic ( Bird flu)that did not leave any resistance genes as did the plague.
Man might be a product of nature but he has taken that product and shapes it in ways no longer natural
The processes of 19C Darwin don't apply in the same way
now as that they did in 19C England.
As the devil said "You have to admit the 20th Century was mine."
My faulty thinking is that I think natural selection should
improve the species ability to survive.
Some of the things we do (War, technology,medical interventions) are difficult to explain in those terms.
Viruses that select for the fittest childbearing age humans (HIV/AIDS, bird flu) are also difficult to explain in darwinnian terms. Perhaps they are just bad luck?.
How are the survival genes are to be passed on?
Not by decrepit old buggers like me.
