The good of society

[tendomentis]

No, saving people today and preventing the species from developing natural resistances to diseases (for example) dooms so many more people at a later date.

That I would define as regression.

Take a moment to consider just how many people would die in the next year ALONE if a massive solar flare destroyed the technology that our species uses as a crutch. Our technological prowess has not made us evolve, it has in fact subverted our need to evolve.

Evolve to what end?? I couldn't answer that, as I doubt anyone really could with any degree of certainty. Is there a "finish line"? I doubt it. At one time, we just floated around in shallow pools of muck, and that was our universe. Over millenia we eventually climbed out of the pools and found another "universe" in the island that the shallow pools were on. Then, we evolved a little more and found out that there was a whole planet that the island sat on.

Then we looked up and wondered how we ever missed that whole universe outside of our own planet, a concept that we are truly just coming to grips with. What's outside of that I wonder?

By slowing or halting our own evolution, we are delaying greater discoveries and newer understandings. That's why I asked which is better, the good of the individual, or the good of society?

[AFPheonix]

Wait. What? Are you advocating against any technological advance? Because I can guarantee the first proto-human that used another animal's hide to keep warm instead of dying out in favor of another extremely hairy specimen thwarted natural selection.

Answer my question.

[tendomentis]

Answer my question.

Wow, polite much? Answer my question, PLEASE???

I didn't respond directly to that ONE point because I agree (and because the answer to your question would be a reiteration of pretty much every one of my posts thus far). The use of an animal hide to thwart the species natural evolution to being capabale of enduring colder climates would be as fundamentally flawed as using technological means to allow infertile couples the ability to reproduce.

[tendomentis]

Wait. What? Are you advocating against any technological advance? Because I can guarantee the first proto-human that used another animal's hide to keep warm instead of dying out in favor of another extremely hairy specimen thwarted natural selection.

The first farmer thwarted natural selection not only of the plants he started selecting as breeding stock (artificial selection) but that of generations after him who developed into agrarian societies from nomad hunter/gatherers.

As for birth control, would you prefer the inevitable die-off that would occur if we all exceeded our planet's ability to feed all of us? In case you missed it, there's food shortages already in several parts of the world. I don't know about you, but that would be one hell of a mess.

Again, thinking from the viewpoint of an individual and not the species as a whole. That's what this thread is about. Yes, the die-off would be "one hell of a mess", but then again the mass extinction of the dinosaurs was also rather ghastly, but if that hadn't happened our species probably wouldn't even be here today. Life and death is a cycle. Cheating that cycle can only go on for so long, and there are always long-term repercussions to cheating.

The rabbit population grows large, and the wolves move in to take advantage of the increased food source, and so the wolf population grows until there aren't enough rabbits to sustain the increased wolf population, so the wolves begin to die off and with the new lack of predators the rabbit population increases again....this is the cycle that doesn't end, some rabbits started living it not knowing what it was.

[Norton]

By slowing or halting our own evolution, we are delaying greater discoveries and newer understandings.

The majority of human evolution in the past several thousand years has been the evolution of the brain, rather than the body. The mind is what's leading us to these discoveries.

Stephen Hawking posesses one of the most brilliant scientific minds on Earth. His body is no longer functional, but his mind has more than made up for it. He didn't even really start to apply himself mentally until after his health started failing. If he had never gotten Motor Neurone Disease, he simply would have continued coasting through life effortlessly using his intelligence, not realizing his full mental potential.


I agree that by using medicine and technology, we are making our species as a whole physically weaker from birth. However, if our minds continue to evolve at the rate they are, I don't think it will matter eventually.

[tendomentis]

The majority of human evolution in the past several thousand years has been the evolution of the brain, rather than the body. The mind is what's leading us to these discoveries.

Stephen Hawking posesses one of the most brilliant scientific minds on Earth. His body is no longer functional, but his mind has more than made up for it. He didn't even really start to apply himself mentally until after his health started failing. If he had never gotten Motor Neurone Disease, he simply would have continued coasting through life effortlessly using his intelligence, not realizing his full mental potential.


I agree that by using medicine and technology, we are making our species as a whole physically weaker from birth. However, if our minds continue to evolve at the rate they are, I don't think it will matter eventually.

We haven't really evolved much mentally with the advent of technology. Take the USA for example, which (next to Japan) being one of the most technologically advanced nations/societies in human history, and yet we rate SO far from the top in scholastic performance. Our dependance on technology is subverting even our need to evolve mentally.

Technology isn't just hurting us physically by allowing those humans that should not survive to reproduce to do just that, but is also hurting our "mental" evolution (if you want to separate the two) by giving us an easier means to accomplish tasks that once had to be done mentally.

[DesignFox]

...this is the cycle that doesn't end, some rabbits started living it not knowing what it was.

*sings* And they'll continue living it forever just because...



Sorry, I had to do it.

[Boozy]

Stephen Hawking posesses one of the most brilliant scientific minds on Earth. His body is no longer functional, but his mind has more than made up for it.

And yet under tendomentis' plan for evolution, we should have allowed him to die. Who wants great insight into the fabric of our cosmos when we could be breeding a society of callous and robotic super-humans?

Life and death is a cycle. Cheating that cycle can only go on for so long, and there are always long-term repercussions to cheating.

The only difference I see between natural overpopulation control (starvation and disease) and unnatural (birth control) is that one is unspeakably cruel and the other is not. I fail to see how one is better for evolution than the other.

[rahmota]

I will still say that the individual must always outweight the society as a whole as society is nothign more than the collection of individuals.

Remember the analogy I spoke of in an earlier thread: A brick wall. The entire wall is society. Strengthen the individual bricks and you strengthen the wall. the same happens with society. But a balance must be maintained as if you allow the bricks to go flying off and each and everyone do their own thing you dont have a wall you have a pile of bricks. A nice healthy balance allows for some bricks(individuals) to be decorative or do thier own thign but the majority works together to produce society. But society must not be allowed to become so rigid and overwhleming that it dominates the individual. Dont loose the trees for the forest as it where.

I asked which is better, the good of the individual, or the good of society?

So to directly answer your question the good of the individual IS the good of society. Society must not be protected at the expense of the individual. Because to destroy the individual is to destroy society. It is a very tightly woven and circular logic but thats the way the world works. A balance.

The spice is the worm the worm is the spice.

[Norton]

Would society really improve if we were to let sick - yet treatable - people wither away and die? If a person has the will to live, and the medical technology to keep them alive exists, it would be cruel to deny them of that. I want no part of such a heartless society.

This subject touches me on a personal level. I would not be alive today if I had not been given large doses of antibiotics as a small child. Then again, I've resolved not to reproduce, so I guess it balances out.

[DesignFox]

I think the big question is how we decide what is good for society. Maybe those so-called "broken" individuals have something going for them that the rest of us "normal" people don't.

Taking an individual who can survive with a little bit of help might be doing the human species some good- maybe they have some trait that makes them "broken" in normal society, but it gives them some unseen advantage if say, the world exploded.

We just don't know. Maybe those people would die on their own. Maybe they wouldn't. Maybe they would die without the aid of drugs or therapy...but maybe their children wouldn't- maybe their children will inherit the "good trait" and suppress the trait that makes them "abnormal."

How do we decide who could survive and who couldn't? I mean, do we toss someone in the woods and see what happens?

Just curious.

I tend to think if you have a truly dibilitating genetic disorder, you should not breed. But, its not my place to make that choice for another person. If they want to inflict their crap on their kids, that's their choice. Society will deal with the consequences...it always has.

[Amethyst Hunter]

You who advocate for it primarily use yourselves as examples of why it's a good thing, and that was the point of the thread. Does the good it does for YOU outweigh the long-term negative effects on the species at large?

You betcha. I won't be around in 100 years or so to care, frankly.

Also, while some forms of birth control may reduce the risk of some types of ovarian cancer, they also increase the risk of breast cancer (and, in the interest of setting a good example, my backup).

http://www.cancer.org/docroot/NWS/co...ancer_Risk.asp

I still call bullshit on that one. It looks more like it's intended to scare people (kind of like how the media likes to harp on every single Scary Thing that crops up in everyday life). Let's look at the pertinent information:

Article date: 2002/12/04: An old study. Information may have changed since then, since the study was done in the 1990s. Hormonal contraceptives have improved since then.

The annual rate of breast cancer is increasing, according to the American Cancer Society (ACS). It will be diagnosed in 205,000 women in the US in 2002. This number is expected to increase.: Does this take into account all the other factors that can influence cancer? Diet's a big one right there, for instance. Blaming birth control is an easy way out.

Recent studies have found birth control pills also increase breast cancer risk, but the evidence hasn’t been as strong as that for hormone replacement therapy.: HRT carries a lot more risks than does BC.

The researcher compared the records of those women with women who didn’t develop cancer to see if birth control pills played a role. The most pronounced effect was in women who were still using or had been recently using the pill. Their breast cancer risk was increased by 60%. : I'd say the cancer risk was already there in the women who got it, and it was made worse by the pills; I doubt that the pills themselves were the sole cause of the cancer. This is why they tell you not to take the pill if you're diagnosed.

Most breast cancer occurs in older women. Over half the women who develop breast cancer are over 62 years old. : It also mentioned that for this study, only one in 100 women got cancer.

Hmm. Low risk odds versus Niagara Falls coming out of my vagina every goddamned month and necessitating 6 packages of the heaviest-duty pad (24 pads to a package; that ought to tell you how many I was going through pre-BC - I now use up only 1 1/2 - 2 packages). I think I'll take my chances.

An example: our species developed natural immune responses to a plethora of diseases over the course of our species' evolution without the need for a multi-billion dollar pharmeceutical industry.

IMO the problem is that people misuse the drugs - like the overzealous application of antibiotics and antibacterial hand-sterilizers (creams, lotions, etc.). They're necessary in certain situations, but then somewhere along the line everybody and their mother decided they had to Foam The World in sterilization; now we have kids developing allergies and illnesses a whole lot earlier because their parents have to sanitize every little thing that comes down the pike. It's not the drugs/etc. themselves that are the problem - it's the improper application that creates the dilemmas.

[tendomentis]

You betcha. I won't be around in 100 years or so to care, frankly.

Outstanding. You've just demonstrated the individualist mindset I was talking about. It's that kind of mindset that doesn't care if the poles melt for our abuse of fossil fuels too or what other harm one might bring to the human species as a whole through their actions now.

I still call bullshit on that one. It looks more like it's intended to scare people (kind of like how the media likes to harp on every single Scary Thing that crops up in everyday life).

Wow. You're calling bullshit on an article at cancer.org. The one "no bullshit" site on the internet to get up-to-date information on everything cancer. Run by the American Cancer Society, an organization that has funded 42 Nobel Prize winners in their research and contributed over $3 billion dollars towards cancer research since 1946. Yes, I know them well, and NO I'm not going to take your "expert" word over their research.

[tendomentis]

Would society really improve if we were to let sick - yet treatable - people wither away and die? If a person has the will to live, and the medical technology to keep them alive exists, it would be cruel to deny them of that. I want no part of such a heartless society.

This subject touches me on a personal level. I would not be alive today if I had not been given large doses of antibiotics as a small child. Then again, I've resolved not to reproduce, so I guess it balances out.

Norton, I'm actually more or less in agreement with you on this one. From my standpoint, it would seem cruel to just kill them cold-heartedly. I am also one of those people who wouldn't be alive today if not for modern medicine, but in realization of my own non-desirable physical faults (poor eyesight, learning disorder, etc) I made the decision about 6 years ago to not reproduce.

I'm one of the few that makes that decision voluntarily, while others go to extremes to reproduce when it's clear they have nothing but bad news to pass on to their children.

To me, that seems so much crueler.

To knowingly bring a child into the world that you know is going to have to endure the same physical faults that you struggle with just because you wanted a child (using the clinical you here, not speaking about anyone specifically, except maybe myself)...how can anyone do this and still claim to love their child?

Some people don't care about the long term consequences of their actions now, and as a great many of these posts demonstrate, many don't even care that they don't care.

[tendomentis]

The only difference I see between natural overpopulation control (starvation and disease) and unnatural (birth control) is that one is unspeakably cruel and the other is not. I fail to see how one is better for evolution than the other.

Because evolution doesn't CARE which way is cruel and which way isn't. You do. You think it's cruel to let them die now and let the human species evolve like every other species on the planet (if not the rest of the universe) does...and when I think about it from my standpoint I agree.

When I think about it from a species standpoint, artificially aiding the "back of the pack" (as it were) to help them along hurts our species' evolution in the long run and may allow for a natural disaster to kill even MORE people because of our halting our own evolution.

It all goes back to the Red Queen Principle. When a species stops evolving, it is killed off by the other systems that it WAS co-evolving with due to the other species gaining the evolutionary advantage (also known as the evolutionary arms race).

My backup: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/REDQUEEN.html http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Queen (follow the references at the bottom of the wiki article for more sources).