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by abortoTheClown 3780 days ago
But if we aborted every deviation from the norm, we'd probably slip into monoculture as a species, and risk falling prey to a mass extinction event, beyond our understanding.

Somehow, the cold statistics of DNA mutation would leave us behind, and we'd become creatures with no means of adapting, until one vast catastrophe forces the issue.

What might feel practical in the moment, for one, might be terrible for the collective.
2 comments
gherkin0 3780 days ago
> But if we aborted every deviation from the norm, we'd probably slip into monoculture as a species, and risk falling prey to a mass extinction event, beyond our understanding.

But he wasn't talking about that. A lot (most?) people with serious disorders will not have children, and from an evolutionary perspective that's practically the same as if they died young. There's already selection against those traits.

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inopinatus 3779 days ago
Human evolution is more complex than the survival of an individual, since many of our adaptations are transmitted as ideas not genes.

Following that line of thinking leads to notions about the presence & importance of second-order interactions (especially the impact of ideas on the survivability of a group); these make it hard to reject the hypothesis: production of outlier individuals is essential to our species.

Sadly outliers occur on all sides of the distribution, including the unhappy ones.

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hugs 3780 days ago
One of my parents has a serious mental illness. It first manifested and became obvious (requiring multiple hospitalizations over the years) in their late 20's after I was born. I don't have the data in front of me, but I understand a mid-to-late 20's onset and diagnosis of mental illness is not rare -- plenty of time to have kids beforehand.
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beparanoid 3780 days ago
That's not how genetics works in a sexually reproducing species. Most selection is via modifying allele frequencies.
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guardTheGuards 3779 days ago
The underlying point being there might not be much to learn from, if every problematic situation is swept under the carpet, so we can pretend it's not there.
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