Observations and inanities by a second-shift assistant supervisor in the Puppy-Grinding division of the Evil Atheist Conspiracy® (our motto: "Sure it's cruel, but think of the jobs!"), your host, Brent Rasmussen.
An Interesting Question That Cannot Be Discussed...
I've been reading a lot on evolution recently, as well as watching several really good television programs on it as well. One of the key theories regarding evolution is survival of the fittest. This is where species with traits that help them survive are able to live long enough to procreate and pass on those traits to the next generation. Over time, this strengthens a genetic line and creates a species that can exist and flourish in a given environment.
In addition, animals born with malformed DNA are typically sick or weak and killed off either naturally or by predators before they get a chance to procreate. This is yet another way that nature ensures that the strongest genetic codes carry on and that species can and will survive.
Humans and our ancestors have also played a part in this game. For hundreds of thousands of years we have evolved, taking our best genetics with us. This evolution has brought us to the level of society that we now know and enjoy today.
I want to bring up an unpleasant, if not taboo topic; has technology and advanced society negatively affected human evolution? Our species is no longer participating in survival of the fittest with regard to animal predators. Society insulates us from the harsh realities of nature. While it appears that our intelligence and natural abilities stem from evolutionary growth, we have come to a time where there is no longer any pressure on our species to maintain many of the skills we developed prior to the birth of civilization. Technology also allows people who would have died in years past to survive illnesses and genetic disorders, often at great personal and financial cost to those directly involved.
A couple of harsh questions:
1) What if our desire to prevent illnesses and disease, as well as our desire to insure that every pregnancy results in a living child (healthy or not), is weakening our genetics?
2) How can we handle our existing population problems given that we have minimized or eliminated most natural population controls for humans?
3) What if our propensity for violence against each other is due to the fact that we have no common external threat to defend against?
And the killer question which I want to address is:
3) Is it necessary for humans to willingly and knowingly execute a nonviolent form of survival of the fittest in order to ensure that our species survives on this planet?
Instantly this concept brings to mind horrible images of Hitler and his perfect solution, Stalin, Saddam Hussein, the Christian Crusades as well as Islamic wars. There are many men and groups who have attempted what is now known as ‘ethnic cleansing’, but this is not at all what I am referring to. Human attempts to exterminate each other are almost exclusively based upon greed, beliefs or physical appearance. The type of modern survival of the fittest and I am referring to can only occur in a laboratory and does not kill anyone.
The understanding of our genetics and our biology will make it possible for us to know in advance the health of a human child even before it becomes anything other than a collection of cells. We will also be able to know, with a good amount of certainty, if two people's DNA will result in a healthy or genetically malformed child.
The moral, medical, and legal implications of such technologies are staggering. If we were able to prevent such horrible diseases as cancer, leukemia and AIDS we would have billions of dollars at our disposal to use for other purposes that are now currently being spent to treat and cure those diseases. But how far will we go? Humans have typically played a reactionary role in nature, and we are just now attempting to control our environment. For examination we can look at both the U.S. and China, who have very different approaches to handling these issues.
China has very strict laws regarding the number of children that people can have, primarily for population control. The Chinese even go so far as forcing abortions upon women who exceed the childbirth limit or have children with known birth defects. While I completely disagree with the methods the Chinese government uses, they are addressing a serious problem; virtually all of the Chinese population is impoverished, and supporting those people is very expensive. The Chinese are looking to shrink the average family size, expand civilization out to desolate areas of China, and bring the entire population up to a reasonable level of income and health. The Chinese know they cannot do this without addressing their vast overpopulation problem. They have taken the approach of eliminating personal freedoms and allowing the state to decide what is best.
The United States has gone in the opposite direction; ignoring the problem completely because the religious right has moral objections. We have technologies available to us that are being suppressed because they offend the morals of the religious. To these moralists, the pain, suffering and death of millions of people from illness, starvation and preventable disease does not justify altering their belief system.
The moment you start asking such questions there is an immediate revulsion, especially among theists. However, the fact remains that this is an issue that must be looked at. We have a surging overpopulation problem in the world, and if we continue to damage our climate we will affect our ability to feed and house all these people. So what can we do? Society in the U.S. has so completely embraced the idea that every scrap of human life is sacred that even talk of simply trying to prevent pregnancies where there is a known disorder causes protests among the religious right.
I don’t have an answer here – I cannot be so presumptuous. But we as a species must have moral, scientific and ethical discussions on unpleasant topics such as this because they are not going away.
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Dysgenics ftl?
Natural selection is not SOTF, and other thoughts
The phrase "survival of the fittest" is a really bad description of Darwin's theory of natural selection and has the effect of rusty nails on a chalkboard to the ears of many biologists. Darwin's theory and subsequent revisions hold that on average through successive generations alleles that provide better performance in a particular environment increase in proportion to competing alleles in that same environment. It is not a requirement of the theory that the fittest individuals survive, only that alleles that make individuals relatively better performers increase. The most fit and virile individual may be hit and killed by a bolt of lightening, or sterilized by a friend in a hunting accident. Either way, his(her) genes are stuck in a body that is incapable of sharing them and will only enter the next generation piecemeal through relatives.
I expect every evolutionary biologist reflects upon the future of our species. I find two catchy statements useful:
1. Adaptations are local, not global.
2. Fitness is relative.
(IMO)These should be understood by anyone that tries to form policies or carry out practices based upon genetic screening and selection of embryos for implantation. What is marginally disadvantageous in one environment may be marginally advantageous in another. Some of the terrible diseases in the world illustrate this concept in brutally clear ways. Heterozygous advantage of sickle-cell alleles in places where malaria is prevalent is perhaps the most well-known example, but more examples appear now and then. Governments could eliminate sickle-cell anemia from this world using genetic screening and forced sterilization. As a consequence, many more people would die from malaria each year than now do from sickle cell anemia in places where malaria is prevalent. It is precisely because there are environments where this 'bad gene' provides an advantage over the 'good gene', not modern medical intervention, that preserves it in human populations. If we have a goal for longevity as a species, then getting rid of apparently deleterious alleles may be a very bad idea because those alleles may protect us in some environments. Of course a malaria vaccine might make the elimination of the sickle-cell allele more tempting.
Complicating matters further are alleles that only provide outstanding performance in conjunction with other alleles and those with multiple physiological roles. Want your kids to live near the equator and bask on the beaches but not get skin cancer? Better select embryos with alleles that confer high melanin production. But, be aware that those same alleles may also lead to high blood pressure and higher probability of strokes. Want to be sexually promiscuous, not use those annoying condoms, but not have to fear contracting HIV? Well there are alleles that appear to confer resistance to HIV infection, but they may lead to succeptibility to other diseases.
Then there is the effect of the environment in which an embryo devolops on the activation and expression of alleles. That opens a whole other can of worms that no one in their right mind would want to have to deal with on a case-by-case basis for selecting which genes to delete from humanity and which to preserve.
Ultimately, I believe that understanding the science of evolution leads to recognition that trying to force ideological constraints on reproduction and development a la eugenics is doomed to failure. As others have pointed out, the complexities involved are beyond our near-term abilities to fathom with sufficient competence to avoid the most serious mistakes, let alone all the little trivial ones. I also think that enforcing the golden rule as a guiding principle in law (would you want someone forcing you not to reproduce) is a way to prevent those with a flawed understanding of evolution and natural selection from carrying out such acts on others.
Good, bad and ugly
Although I am not a biologist I do not think that all good mutations come with trade off bad effects or vice versa. I think some adaptations are pretty much bad under all circumstances. A propensity for heart disease for instance, under what circumstance or place would that be advantageous? No, I think that what happens is that maladaptations which don't affect someone until after the breeding age don't get selected out and thence they get passed on. Under what circumstance or condition would a tendency for Alzheimers disease be a positive adaptation?
Certainly I acknowledge that the present state of the biological art does not allow people to fill out a checklist of traits that they want in their children, but I think that is exactly what we should be aiming for. Is that not the ultimate pro-choice position? Just imagine the complete elimination of inherited diseases from the genome. I do not believe this is impossible (remember that at one time spaceflight was unthinkable) and I certainly think it is desireable. After all who will stand up for their right to have an unhealthy child? What parent anywhere would want that? I know they generally accept it if they get one, but really, what parent doesn't want at least that?
Who really knows what might be possible if we could weed all the junk out of our DNA? Hell, we might even be able to design a person to live comfortably in the wasteland we are making of our planet.
Change is inevitable. We can let nature make these changes or we can take the changes into our own hands. Stasis is not an option.
good vs bad mutations
As Brent mentioned in his comment, "good" and "bad" are probably not sensible labels to attach to mutations. Heart disease is a broad category of disease states due to suites of factors, some hereditary, some developmental, some due to lifestyle. Most such diseases are combinations of all of the above. To give one specific example: a mutation that leads to hypercholesterolemia in Americans may be very beneficial to people living in nutrient-poor conditions, where absorbing every last dietary cholesterol molecule and reabsorbing those secreted by the liver into bile is very important. Exposed to a fat-rich diet, such individuals die early. A woman who who dies of a heart attack at 60-years old won't be taking care of her grandkids, resulting in a higher burden on her children and reduced care for the grandchildren, ultimately leading to lower reproductive success. Rarely are these trade-offs simple ones. A lot of factors come into play, and the environment in which genes exist is a big one that too often gets ignored - its not nature, its not nuture, its both.
Some parents
I read an article some years back about a couple who knew they had bad genetic dice -- they'd had three (five? I forget) sons who were born blind and retarded. But the woman resisted any hint that they maybe shouldn't have any more kids. I remember her saying "All my children are gifts from God. If God blesses us with another, I'll be thrilled."
Q: What parent doesn't want the best for their children?
A: The parent who is incapable of being rational.
To paraphrase The X Files: The Goof is out there.
...
As to genetic tinkering, I think it will happen no matter what anyone wants. If we have the technology, it will get used.
The times we live in
I have heard stories similar to the one you mention. I wish that they were rare, but I fear they are not.
The lines are fairly clearly drawn and becoming clearer all the time. Will reason prevail or unreason? The end is not terribly clear from this vantage, but time will tell. It remains up to us (or rather up to those of you who have children) to prove that intelligence was in fact an adaptive trait.
Idiocracy?
I take it someone recently watched Idiocracy?
--
Ponies are atheists, you know, technically.
Or...
Heh. Or has been reading the latest Darwin Awards.
Jim Downey
"Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering."
- R. Buckminster Fuller
What is to come
This is what our species must do:
Step One: We must absolutely understand the code (by which I mean DNA). It would be helpful to know not only ours, but the code of all other living things as well.
Step Two: We must decide what we value as a species, be it physical beauty, physical strength, endurance, resistance to disease, talent for music, talent for mathematics, 'intelligence' or whathaveyou.
Step Three: Re-write (or at least edit) the Code. Take out anything in there that is unnecessary (like male pattern baldness) and put in improvements.
We are developing the tools that enable us to direct our own evolution. I think it would be a collosal waste not to use them.
Controlling the genome
< humor >
And especially, make sure the children of conservative Christian Republicans actually grow brains.
< /humor >
Mistaken Labels
I think one of the biggest misconceptions about evolution is our almost pathological need to label everything as "good" or "stronger" or "weaker" or "bad" or "best genetics", etc.
The problem is that NONE of that applies to genetics. None. There is no such thing as "bad", "good", "better", "weaker", or "stronger" genetics. Applying those labels says more about how our brains work than they do about evolution and genetics.
The only criteria that applies to evolution is whether or not the species that the organism is a part of survives.
Period. The end. That's it.
So, all these things that we label either help us to survive as a species, or they don't. As I wrote about earlier, all of it is grist for the mill. We have such a mayfly-like existence - in the grand scheme of things - that we have no friggin' clue what works for us as far as long-term survival is concerned. Who knows - maybe the future of the human race is being assured by keeping, say, Down's Syndrome babies alive. Maybe big boobs will help the race continue longer than small boobs.
The point is that we don't know. Our species has only been concious and sapient for about 10,000 years. That's not enough time to even form a good opinion on the matter.
Now, we do know that there are some very, very successful species here on our planet. Sharks and cockroaches spring to mind.
The question is does our species have what it takes to last the next few million years - or will the Sharks and the cockroaches mindlessly inherit the Earth because they are just - heheheh - better at survival than we are?
My take on it:
Eric, some excellent questions.
It would take a looooong comment (longer than my usual ones, even) to answer the full package of questions you bring up, but I’ll take a quick shot at a couple of them.
I’d say civilization itself has definitely affected us. I’d read that women’s breasts were probably the result of unconscious selection pressures visited on them by males. I have no doubts that the rest of human form and nature has been subject to the same sort of preference pressures – including, as you say, the desire to save the less hardy among us.
I’ve joked in the past about dogs being retarded wolves. Think about it: they’re weaker, less hardy, less intelligent, and less able to take care of themselves. And they have that slobbering doofus likability they project at us humans. In short, Doggie Down’s syndrome. (Oh, no! He’s insulting Down’s syndrome children! He must be eeeevil! – Oh, shut up.)
The protective umbrella of civilization has had the same effect on us humans. I’d guess that we’re ALREADY genetically weaker than we originally were. The joke here is that we’re retarded chimpanzees (and yes I know we didn’t evolve from chimps). Not retarded in intelligence, but ... in physical abilities. Think about it: Just as an example, we’re a third to a fifth less strong than chimps. We get AIDS, chimps don’t. And though male chimps have a much smaller wang than we do, the true main feature of chimp reproductive success, the testicles, are about five times the size of ours.
Okay, I’m kidding about some of that. But not all of it.
And yet we seem to survive. Because at the same time we alter ourselves, we alter our environment to take care of us. But also because the ones most affected by the negative stuff still do feel the affects of their condition. Evolution happens slowly, but it never stops happening – hemophilia, for instance, has been around for ... well, millennia, probably, but it’s still rare, and hemophiliacs seem unlikely to ever become a majority. The price of hemophilia on individual survival and reproductive viability is noticeable.
By consciously having fewer children.
The biggest roadblock to this right now is that sadly unrare form of mental illness called religion. We live with it daily, and think it’s normal and not so bad, but the older I get the more I see it as raging irrationality that has cost us hugely, and will yet prove to be incredibly deadly.
Unfortunately ... we won’t “handle our population problems.” It’s already too late, in my estimation. And I think we’re not just a LITTLE bit over the limit of earth’s carrying capacity, I think we’re maybe ten times over the limit. Worse, I think the “correction” will happen in our lifetimes. The free ride is over, and the bill – in the form of a lot of death, both for us and for other critters on the planet – is already coming due.
Besides, evolutionary alterations happen in microorganisms faster than they do in us, and the microorganisms are doing just fine. Beavering away in private, developing resistance to all forms of antibiotics, festering incurably here and there in the world, they lack only some random spark to get loose and become a raging fire. Medicine – our ongoing attempt to interfere with “survival of the fittest” – won’t save all of us. I’ve read that epidemiologists worldwide are mostly surprised that we HAVEN’T had a deadly pandemic recently, and that they expect one any day.
As to our “propensity for violence,” it’s probably the other way around. Compared to other species, we’re extraordinarily peaceful. We notice the violence simply because it’s so newsworthy, but if you look at your own neighborhood, violent incidents are really rather rare.
Wolves and lions, for instance, can’t tolerate the least hint of alien others in their home territory. By comparison, I have strange neighborhood kids running through my back yard almost on a daily basis, and I completely fail (as far as anybody knows) to rip out their throats with my teeth.
There’s an easy-to-understand environmental mechanism at work – the violent hooligans get selected against in growing societies. Intertribal warfare is hardest on the feisty warrior-class hooligans themselves, and as you go up the scale to progressively larger societies, the peaceful nebbishes stay home and screw their brains out while the heroes go off to war, and heroically die. And eventually, you get cities filled with millions of nebbishy non-warriors who can live with each other with negligible friction (as well as serve to drive a healthy porn industry). Note that I’m directly linking reproduction with nebbishly peacefulness here.
Assuming we survive (which I worry is not a sure thing), I think whatever problems we have with the natural recombination of our flabby genes will eventually be superceded by artificial selection of genes. Even if we don’t develop the equivalent of some sort of genetic engineer’s shopping list for traits ...
(“Oh, honey, how about blue eyes? And these extra-strong weight-lifter genes, won’t those be nice? Artistic ability – I think that’s a given. And what if we throw in a good head for math, in case he wants to be an engineer or something? And a really big penis, so he’ll be popular with the ladies!”)
... just the ability to cheaply and readily identify the less healthy genomes soon after fertilization will have an effect. Few parents want their kids to be sick, or less advantaged, it seems to me, and once any sort of cumulative effect begins to make itself known, what parents in their right minds would carelessly choose to create a kid who will be short, fat, balding, stupid and myopic when they could as easily have a tall, athletic, bright kid?
Typically, the concept of “playing God” comes into the discussion. I like what Steve Martin said in “The Man With Two Brains” – when the mob of villagers burst into his laboratory with the shout “You are playing God!” he shouted back “Somebody has to!”
The false choice is that we pit our only-human intelligence and morality against that of a benevolent God.
The REAL choice is that we use our only-human intelligence and morality to help us reach toward something better, rather than simply letting random natural factors – the same blind forces that kill 9 out of 10 baby birds and squirrels, for instance – operate on our own human children.
The fact is, there is no choice. We have to interfere, and hope for the best. Because it’s our nature, and this is what we’re faced with.
...
Just FYI, my understanding is that there’s an enormous complexity to evolution that gets obscured when we use the phrase “survival of the fittest.” It makes it sound like the biggest and strongest are always the winners, and the weak nebbishes lose out in any competitive survival contest.
“No single characteristic, like brute strength or agility or even intelligence, is a savior, because the pressures on you can differ from moment to moment, from place to place, or even from one generation to the next. [...] What it is to be ‘fit’ depends on what you are, where you are, and when.” – The Top 10 Myths About Evolution.
The truth is, cooperation is probably an even stronger driving force than competition, for survival in human societies. African pygmies, for instance, seem to have done just fine for however many thousands of years they’ve existed, and the key was probably group cooperation rather than cutthroat individual competition. The fittest, on any one day, was probably the guy who could cooperate with the group in an elephant hunt, rather than the big, strong guy who insisted that this next elephant was HIS alone, and the other smaller ones should stay out of his way if they knew what was good for them.
...
Finally: Bear in mind that everything I’ve said here is coming from a non-biologist, a doofus (usually not slobbering) who reads a bit but can’t really pretend to any sort of expertise in the subject of evolution. These are mostly just my own thoughts.
And these were some really good thoughts of your own. Your post was a pleasure to read, and very thought-provoking.
correction
Yes, that is true. These ugly bulbous female appendages (as with the equally ugly male appendage) have been selected for sexually. Unconscious, maybe, but men prefer large breasts because it indicates that the woman can produce more milk and is more likely to rear a healthy child. One thing that non-biologists think when they hear "survival of the fittest" is that it necessarily means the strongest. Actually one of the things Darwin mentions is that one of the types of "fitness" that can be selected for is purely sexual in nature and may have a deleterious effect on an individual's ability to survive. The prime example of this is the male peafowl (peacock), which has a long, heavy tail that makes it especially susceptible to tiger attacks while it is in breeding plumage. In a study something like 3% of all the adult peacocks get chosen to breed by the peahens (they are chosen by the number of "eyes" on their tails, a peahen can tell at a glance how many eyes any given peacock has in comparison to any other in the leck), in terms of genetic diversity that's pretty bad. In humans blond hair and blue eyes, both of which are negative traits in terms of pure survivability, are selected for because humans find the striking difference to be desirable. This "attractive difference" reaction may even be beneficial, if someone is different but managed to survive to adulthood it's a pretty sure thing that either their genes have an advantage or at least no major disadvantages. In both of these instances the “prettier” individual has higher fitness, not because it is physically stronger, more intelligent or more adaptable than its rivals but because it reproduces more (ultimately the number of individuals that share an individual’s genome is the only criteria for measuring the fitness of that individual).
Another mistake you are making is assuming that "survival of the fittest" applies to species, when it really best applies on the level of individuals, as the individual requirements for survival change the species changes. Take intelligence, that thing that humans are oh so proud of, from what I understand of evolution and ethology an intelligent species is practically inevitable given a long enough period of environmental stability (we as a species have enjoyed one of the longest stable climate periods in earth's history). This is because although intelligence is a very expensive adaptation (neurons are several times as energetically expensive to produce as other tissues) it also increases a species overall adaptability. This is another thing, there is one thing that is pretty much the magic button for survival, adaptability, both in terms of the environments you can survive in and in terms of the foods you can eat. Does that mean any highly adaptable species will survive? No, but it drastically increases the chance of that species surviving if it survives whatever initial cataclysm caused the latest extinction. Look at raccoons, our cute little masked marauders, they are omnivores so they can make do with pretty much anything, they're intelligent as non-humans go and they've got the physical characteristics needed to survive an environmental shift. Intelligence is nice, but as we've seen in a quickly changing world high intelligence can be a negative, changes can happen too quickly and the brain can be overwhelmed, especially in older individuals.
Genes that have a survival benefit but are negative in the context of society could perhaps be weeded out. I'm not sure if this is true of humans but in quite a few animal species there is a "rapist" gene, which allows the little not at all impressive types to get a mate whether the mate likes it or not. If these could somehow be identified in humans it would be beneficial to remove them. Whether it would be right or wrong to remove genes, such as those that might encode for an increased likelihood to commit rape or infanticide, is another question. However some genes, such as those that code for susceptibility to diseases that plague older individuals, cannot be selected for naturally because by the time they become evident the individual has already reproduced and reared their offspring to adulthood.
There's a reason for that. Group living such as humans enjoy gets into the "selfish herd" theory, which is that while I and my neighbors are all living in relatively close proximity we do not fight because cooperating with a larger group but sharing resources is more beneficial than hogging the resources but living alone. In a prey animal (such as the ever popular gazelle) the reason for herd behavior is obvious, more animals means more eyes to keep watch for danger, and less chance that you individually will be caught even if the predator makes a successful kill. Predatory groups, like lions and wolves, band together to increase the chance of being able to catch a meal, with this type there is a critical size past which the individuals won't get enough food to justify staying as one large group (in wild animals the group will typically split in two, with one group staying on the ancestral territory and the other moving off). Now note the "critical size" part of the description, the reason wolves and lions are so territorial is because each group stakes out a territory that holds at least the minimum prey population they need for survival, if any "alien" groups appear they are treated as an imminent threat and attacked, because those strange individuals could, if allowed a foothold, out compete the "native" group for food. Humans do the same basic thing, except because our resources situation is different the rules are slightly different too. I've noticed a number of atheists that feel that if there were no religion there were no wars, how very naive, it's interesting to note that the early Christians felt the very same, "Oh, poor humanity, if only we were all one religion there would be no more wars, no pain or suffering because we would be like brothers." Needless to say, it hasn't worked. Wars between humans exist for the same reason that fights between prides of lions occur: too many individuals, not enough food/resources. Except that while lions draw the line based on family ties humans have often drawn the line based on homeland, religion or other ideologies. It's no accident that Hitler's Nazi party appeared where and when it did, Germany was hit hard by a combination of the Great Depression and the humiliating Treaty of Versailles, there was not enough resources and people were eager to blame someone for their problems. Some group, which happened to be the Jews and Gypsies (gee, haven't you ever found it odd that although both of these groups were mistreated only the Jews got some sort of reconciliation?), which they could freely dump all their problems on, then like a magic voodoo doll, make all their problems go away. Same thing is happening in Darfur now, sure it may be billed as "ethnic cleansing" but really it's the stronger pride tearing out the throats of the weaker one for the shrinking resources in the area (but since we're an intelligent species we can invent more efficient ways of dispatching our rivals). You, dear Hank, live in an area where the resources are not limited, so you and your neighbors benefit more from living together and cooperating than you would from killing each other. Add to this one other piece of unconscious human bio-engineering, in order to function as a more-or-less cohesive whole society must be safe, otherwise the herd members wouldn't be able to trust each other, so the sheep relentlessly seek out and destroy any "wolves" that they find among the flock. After a while, wolves become fewer in number. Not all are gone, obviously, just the stupid ones who couldn't wait for the opportune moment.
For your "genetic shopping list" the only thing you really need is "be left handed", since we lefties are more apt in using both hemispheres of our brains we process information markedly faster than the inferior right-handed morph. Handedness is, at least in part, an X-linked trait by the way, along with red-green color vision and at least part of the immune system. As for being tall, there's a tradeoff, sure you can see over everyone's heads and you look good, but tall people have more skeletal problems than short people in the long term. A risky one to add would be an active telomerase gene, risky because it is a gene that is never active in humans, but potentially beneficial because those species it is active in do not grow old (although to say it is completely inactive in humans is a lie, it is active in cancer cells).
Playing god? Don’t make me laugh, scientists don’t play god, we play devils. We research and find little tidbits of knowledge, and then we dangle it in front of the populace and see what happens (hoping for the best, often not getting it). Oh they can blame us, like you can blame Nobel for inventing dynamite, but it was the government and populace that turned it into weapons, not Nobel (he had only ever envisioned it used for peaceful purposes, like making mining easier, well no one said scientists can’t be naive). As a scientist one of the things you come to accept is that no matter how much you may care about how your research is used ultimately it’s the people/businesses/governments of the world that choose how to use it (he who pays for the research reaps the results, for good or ill). With genetic engineering, will we use it to make our lives better, or will we do like the movies claim and use it to make perfect soldiers who will then turn on us (or perfect children who will turn against their parents in an attempt to rid the world of the imperfect)?
Short and left-handed
Good gosh, you mean there are advantages to being left-handed and short?
I am left-handed! :D Early in my life, being a lefty was still considered a "handicap." Admittedly, it was a pisser trying to write with the fountain pens we were forced to use before ball-points got invented. Fountain pens dispense a line of slow-drying liquid ink, and as you write from left to right on the page, your left hand sweeps across the still-wet ink, not only smearing the page but leaving a semi-permanent blue blotch on the heel of your left hand. (In elementary school, we joked about forming a club and calling ourselves the Blue Heelers.) Later in life I did discover a couple of advantages -- I noticed I was more naturally adept at using both hands to do things than my strictly right-handed peers. Fortunately, also, I came along a bit AFTER the era where lefties were forced to use their right hands.
And I'm short. In a crowd situation, I always feel like I'm standing in a canyon. Fortunately, anytime this happens, I can always feel better by smirking quietly to myself, rubbing my hands together obsessively and thinking about how things will change when I Rule! The! World! (maniacal laughter).
tall and left handed/ambedextrous
I had that "blot" problem with pencils early on (part of why I switched to ball-points), I'd be writing and then notice that not only was some of the graphite rubbing off on my hand but that I was smudging my notes. Fortunately I remembered that when my art class started working with india ink.
One thing about left handed people is that we have a lot of the important brain functions in both hemispheres, so if we have a stroke in our left hemisphere (which holds the linguistic functions) we lefties can recover some if not most/all of our language skills, whereas a right-hander cannot and if they learn to speak/understand spoken/written words at all it will have to start from scratch (my grampa, a rightie, had a stroke in his right hemisphere last year so I learned a bit about this, he's doing well by the way).
I'm tall, I always thought this was a good thing because I could see over a crowd (somewhat), then high school came, and I discovered that being able to stick up over a crowd is not neccessarilly a good thing when you're trying to dodge bullies between classes. I also found out some disadvantages when I would sprain my ankle, because I'm tall I would put more weight on the injured joint than a short person would (it was my doctor that told me the tid-bit about tall people having more difficulty with that type of injury than short people).
But...
But dogs have a whole lot of other capabilities that wolves don't. Cooperating with humans in various forms, for instance. Even though they're more dependent on humans, they're also far more likely to survive.
I'm no expert myself, but I doubt there's much more complexity to "survival of the fittest". Remember, survival of the fittest says only that the fittest species in a given environment will survive in that environment. The requirements for "fitness" is different for every environment. In some environments, it will be advantegous to be big and strong, but not everywhere. In other environments, it might be better to be small and quick. Even though the principles of evolution are simple, the practical part might be much more complex.