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by gte910h 5252 days ago
Right. So wisdom teeth, cancer and age-related poor vision are all AWESOME, let's leave those in too.

Evolution doesn't have a purpose. It's just stuff that happened to work out. The fact that really long lived humans don't exist now doesn't mean they shouldn't, it just means they didn't happen to exist in the past and show a particular advantage then that was bigger than the advantages other groups had. It doesn't mean they ever existed, so they may be far MORE optimal.

Evolution trends towards local fitness maximums for given solutions when there is competition for scarce resources. It doesn't find global solutions necessarily, nor does it even get to local maximumums even.

1 comments

> Right. So wisdom teeth, cancer and age-related poor vision are all AWESOME, let's leave those in too.

There is a difference between a malfunction and a trait. A malfunction happens to some people, but always a minority. All of the things you mention are malfunctions.

Aging happens to all of us. It is a trait. At this point, I'm sounding like a broken record, but there is a mountain of evidence that suggests our lifespan is highly selected for by evolution. Please look up the Red Queen.

Cancer happens in 44% of men.

Wisdom teeth happen in over 90% of people

Age-related farsightedness occurs in EVERYONE (it's caused by continual growth of the lens).

If you even read the blurb of the red queen book, it's "contraversial" aka "usually strung together by a popsci writer"

> Cancer happens in 44% of men.

First, that's still a minority. Second, for the overwhelming majority of that 44%, you can easily categorize it as age related.

> Wisdom teeth happen in over 90% of people

The routine removal of wisdom teeth is unnecessary. It is only a necessity in a very small minority of people.

> Age-related farsightedness occurs in EVERYONE (it's caused by continual growth of the lens).

Uhmm, age related by definition. You do remember what we started to talk about originally, right?

> If you even read the blurb of the red queen book

No need to read a blurb when you read the book itself.

> it's "contraversial" aka "usually strung together by a popsci writer"

Do you frequently judge books without reading them? Oh well.

Yes, these are all age related. And they're all things we leave in. We also prevent tooth decay, which killed a large group of them. Etc.

I DO judge a book by the blurb the writer puts on the cover, yes. If they want to call out a controversial theory (by their own words), I'll wait until real scientists who are in that area look at the idea, not a pop-sci treatment of an idea that isn't actually being tested, especially a book advocating the death of billions.