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NATURAL selection is now no longer "natural."
It is man made.
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Are beavers' dams unnatural? How about hermit crabs' shells? Man is as much a part of nature as everything else. We are not above nature simply becaues we say so. It is in our nature to alter our surroundings to better suit our needs, we wouldn't survive otherwise. Thus, everything we do is inherently natural.
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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.
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Natural selection has improved our ability to survive. That's why there are now so many of us. I doubt that we are still evolving at the pace we once were, but that is because the rate at which a species evolves is dependant upon the evolutionary pressures applied. Less pressure means slower evolution. We are surviving well enough so we are not evolving. Look at sharks, millions of years without evolving because they don't need to. The viruses are good examples of Darwinism - those viruses which don't kill their host are much more successful, those which do don't tend to last as long.
