According to Darwinism, are people from third world countries superior?

Question

In third world countries you have much less police protection so people are killing each other more often, thus speeding up the process of survival of the fittest. According to Darwinism you will be getting a stronger population faster. So those Americans who are from the third world are superior than Americans who have been living here for generations. Do you agree or disagree? Are there any flaws in the argument?

Answer 1

Ooh, interesting!  I would tend to agree.  We let "everything: live here, babies with half a brain, retarded people, we even let some of them have rights of reproduction since they are all "equal." These people are then spreading their bad genes into future population pools.  In some other countries, retarded babies are left to die thus killing off that bad gene.  I am not sure about superior, not just yet.  We still have some things that make people stronger here.  Even though these countries you speak of do these things, we still have constant nutrition and health care from the time people are born.  A child's brain from a 3rd world country may never reach its potential because it stops growing synapses at a certain point due to lack of food. I think there is a possibility that if these countries with different policies on who gets to live were to improve the survival rate and nutrition of children, yes, there is a great chance of them becoming superior to us within a few generation.

Answer 2

According to Darwinism, people in third world countries might be under more strenuous or numerous selective pressures. In other words, there might be more ways for a population to lose members. This in itself in no way guarantees that the group as a whole is fitter. Your argument is like saying that the last member of an extinct species is more fit than the members of a species who did not go extinct. Selection can overwhelm a population and doom all of its members.

Additionally, selective pressures in one region might be totally different in another, meaning that adaptations that lead to success in one place have a different, or even opposite, effect in another place. Fish are under constant threat from sharks, fishermen, and other predators, but that doesn't make them more fit than humans (who are under a much reduced threat from predators) on the land.

Your example states that since people in third world countries have much less police protection, that the process of survival of the fittest is speeding up. I think you need to look at that in a practical way and evaluate it. What is the selective pressure you're talking about? Murder, essentially. So what is being selected for? Are machete-proof humans being born? Not likely. Killing is almost never a random act, there are almost always societal factors at work. In fact, that's true for most modes of death. Poor people can't get good health care, they can't keep big companies from dumping waste where they live, they can't afford to live in safe places. Mass killings might have a religious motive. Are you willing to suggest that people of a certain religions are being selected for?

Cultural factors account for most of what you're seeing in the  so-called Third World. To say that these people are under a simple accelerated survival of the fittest lifestyle is not accurate. A simple Darwinist explanation does not account for what is going on there.

No, I don't think your analysis of the Third World and the pressures the populations face there is complete. I think your view is missing a large part of the picture.

Answer 3

People whose cultures lie between 30 & 45 Degrees Latitude, both North and South, are superior...

This has proven to be the 'Golden Mean' for human populations, all things considered...i.e. Climate, Farming, Literacy, Technology, Industry, etc...!

Answer 4

The general scientific consensus is that modern medicine has caused human evolution to stop. In any event, beneficial mutations happen so rarely and take so many generations to be carried through the population that we probably would not notice even if it was going on. In any event, mutations are random events and are as likely to happen in the Third World as in a developed country.

Answer 5

Read "Guns, Germs and Steel" for an interesting perspective on this question.  The author takes the stance that tribespeople in Paupau New Guinea are indeed, in some ways, better than people in the developed world.  But he also takes into account the random factors of disease and disease resistance in isolated populations vs. populations that are mobile, and the latitudinal arguement that one of the other answerers brings up.

However, in general, Social Darwinism is a difficult concept to work with, because it can so easily lead to ethnocentric abuses.

Answer 6

We aren't evolving. We have developed the means of our own destruction. It's just a matter of time.

Answer 7

The flaw is Darwinism operates over long periods and on a species. We, as modern humans, have been around for 200,000 years.A century or two doesn't make much of a difference.

The planet's population is 6,000,000,000 and in the last 500 years there's been more human movement then any time previously. Third world nations are not isolated populations sealed off from the rest of humanity.

The phrase "survival of the fittest" isn't Darwinism. The tool to evolution is natural selection. Those that have traits that allow them to reproduce, tend to pass those traits  on to their offspring.

In fact, due to our huge world population evolution of the species has speeded up. It doesn't take killing.