| So this opinion is a fairly popular one but I'm not sure there's any factual basis for it. The idea is simple: there's little evolutionary pressure to adapt because technology and society can deal with issues that once would've been fatal. There are a bunch of issues that still affect survivability though: recklessness, propensity for violence, inability to survive in modern society, addiction issues, mental health issues, etc. We can expect all of these to improve but go away entirely? That's less certain. Even if you ignore mortality issues, the other side of natural selection is how many offspring you have and how many of them survive to have their own offspring. If a group with trait A has an average of 2 children each but trait B have an average of 3, it's not too many generations before B becomes dominant. Evolution is also relatively slow and not smooth. We only identified DNA ~50 years ago and mapped the human genome in the last 10-15. It's a bit early to refute observational evidence. Remember too that certain traits that were once advantageous can become a disadvantage or they only become a disadvantage in certain circumstances. Take the modern abundance of food. Some people have genes that predispose them to storing excess, others less so. 1000 years ago, that was probably an advantage. Now? Less so, both in terms of health effects related to, say, obesity, but also in terms of finding a mate and having offspring given changing societal standards for beauty (not universal of course). |