Is this an arguable theory?

Question

I was just thinking last night about the human race and all... and about evolution. Well considering all of the new advancements in medicine, I thought maybe we are de-evolutionizing perhaps?

Heres why I say that, people who take medicine who would normally either suffer great difficulties in life or simply not survive are living longer to produce more children... such as people with diabetes, artharitis, heart condtions, mental illnesses (social phbias perhaps or anything else), being born with no legs, etc...

So is my logic vaild or am I just a complete moron?

Answer 1

clearly we are minimizing the impact that natural selection would have.

to what degree is questionable.  

Answer 2

In simple terms, the answer is no, because there isn't such a thing as de-evolutionizing. If you mean our fitness in respect to our environment, then that's a more interesting question. Concepts of fitness and niche become rather blurred when we apply them to humans, particularly if we consider cultural and symbolic inheritance to play parts in evolution.

In the opposite sense to your view, our impressive medical repetoire could be considered a facet of our evolutionary prowess; although this leads to some awkward species-selection style arguments. If instead we consider the availability of healthcare as a feature of the environment, then for these populations where this is available then their ecological standpoint is ultimately changed, diseases like the ones you have mentioned are less of a burden on the fitness of an individual than if they were untreated as in other populations.

Ultimately, i believe extensive cultural and symbolic inheritance in humans is likely to have corrupted our evolution in this sense far more than modern medicine (and not just because modern medicine has been around for such an extremely short time in terms of our species)..

Answer 3

No, we do our breeding before most of our health problems show up, except the most devastating ones for which there is no treatment anyway.  

Answer 4

There is no evolution among humans, only animals(and its called micro-evolution AKA adaption) not macro, which is false.

Answer 5

h**l yeah, we're turning into a bunch of retards. Watch the movie Idiocracy, that should clear things up for you.